Take Pride in Your Fossils

Traveling on the top of a bus through Lewisham, south London, I heard a noisy parliament of schoolboys discussing what to do on their holidays. At first the hot favorite seemed to be a day's bilking: traveling as far as you could on the railway without paying your fare. A minority, though, proposed what they thought was an even more exciting alternative. They wanted to go to the Science Museum.

What a vindication for all those who have argued for years that museums ought not to be dull, drab, reverent places built around showcases full of prehistoric artefacts, but temples of interaction, enticing the young from the street. Maybe in this climate the kind of small-town museum where you start by looking at fossils and end up admiring photographs of the town fire-brigade circa 1902 is heading for fossil status itself. But I hope not.

On the Isle of Portland, once so distinct and remote but hugely accessible nowadays by the road that runs out of Weymouth across Chesil Beach, there's a small museum funded by the Weymouth and Portland council, at whose door modernization has yet to come knocking. The birth control pioneer Marie Stopes, who had a summer home in a nearby lighthouse, created it in the 1930s in a couple of cottages, one of which is commemorated by Thomas Hardy in his novel of Portland life, The Well-Beloved.

Run on a shoestring, the museum is closed from October until Easter, and is shut on some days even during the summer. There's a newer and airier extension now, but the cottages are dark and cluttered, and aside from a device where you touch the screen to get your next instalment of history, it hardly offers any interaction at all.

Instead, it is full of the local mementos that used to be the staple of such museums: a case of septarian nodules about 150 to 160 million years old, alongside an early player organ which used to be housed in the now redundant church of St George, Reforne; and copies of late 18th-century drawings by the artist Samuel Hieronymus Grimm.

Above all, though, it's full of a sense of that fierce independence which was, and perhaps still is, the spirit of Portland. You can see it in a document, kept under wraps to preserve it but transcribed in a typescript, in which the people of Portland petition King George III for a bridge to the mainland in place of the ferry which has pitched too many of them into the sea. All very respectfully argued, with hopes for the King's good health and thanks for the mild and equitable government to which they are subjected, but insistent even so that enough is enough and they want, and expect, some action.

You can see that independence, too, in the broadsheet issued by "a well-wisher of Portland", denouncing 39 local worthies who had sought to dispute the island's right to self-government under the local government act. "Brother Portlanders," it says, "now is the time to arise and show your determination and strength; if not, you will remain crushed and fallen."

You can also see that spirit in the great buildings built from stone hewn out of this island, leaving tracts of it bleak and cratered - Buckingham Palace, St Paul's Cathedral, the BBC's original HQ, Waterloo Bridge, Tate Britain - all created in Portland stone. And they got their own bridge in 1839.

In the garden of the museum, alongside two piles found when that bridge was replaced in the 1980s, is a text that records that this bridge "fundamentally changed Portland for ever", eroding the isolation that sustained its distinct community customs, lifestyle and attitudes, and opening it up to mainland influence.

These traditions are the business of Hardy's novel: the rule that prevailed on the island, for instance, that a couple would not wed until the woman was pregnant, thus providing proof that children would be born of the marriage. If the man then refused to marry, the women would gather and stone him away to the mainland.

Those born off the island - kimberlins - were the objects of suspicion and often of open hostility. As late as the 1930s there were people on Portland who would say, perhaps with pride, that they'd never been to England. Nowadays perhaps half the population is kimberlin.

And yet in the ravaged landscape, the wide treeless village streets and the proliferation of pubs (encouraged no doubt by air made dusty by quarrying), the differentness of Portland survives, and is lovingly honored in Stopes' museum. Long live the kind of 21st-century museum which is even more thrilling than bilking. But long live, too, definitively local and shamelessly nostalgic collections like this one.

· Portland Museum, Wakeham, Isle of Portland, 01305 821804: ring first to check opening times.