'It would set us up for life'

Nationally there might be a feeling that the £100,000 museum of the year prize - by some distance the richest in UK arts - has yet to generate the buzz of the Turner or Booker prize. Locally, however, the unfurling of the giant pink Art Fund banners at each of the contenders has become a very big deal indeed.

The three most remote museums on the list have much in common; a streak of eccentricity, deep roots in passionately local communities - and rooms lit up by light dazzling from the water outside their windows. All a very long way indeed from London - where the longlist was drawn up. Topsham, Stromness and Lerwick are probably more remote now in 21st century Britain, than when they first greeted mariners and traders from around the world mooring at their doorsteps. All three were stunned to make it on to the longlist, up against some very big expensive beasts like the gleaming new Wellcome Collection, or the £22 million rebuild of the Transport Museum in Covent Garden.

The museum in Topsham is in a boat builder's old sail loft opposite what is now a very small town in Devon, but was once one of the busiest ports in the country after a medieval wideboy blockaded the river to prevent merchants sailing on to Exeter.

In Stromness, on Orkney, the Pier includes a small stone warehouse, once the office of the Hudson Bay company, where thousands of islanders signed up to abandon their wind-scoured smallholdings and embark on a new life in the wilds of Canada.

Half an hour by air or a day at sea further north, the imposing new Shetland Museum and Archives incorporates a boatyard where craftsmen are completing a new sixareen, a traditional local boat visibly inspired by its ancestors, the Viking ships from Scandinavia.

It would probably have been easier for the judges, led by the formidable Sue MacGregor, to make their visits by boat. Reaching the two Scottish sites from London took a total of five plane journeys and the judges arrived in Topsham so late that the kitchen staff had to pack up their uneaten lunch into doggy bags for the long trek home.

Getting this far has generated torrents of local publicity, and visitors have followed the pink banners in droves. Currently Shetland, whose scattered residents tend to regard the Orcadians as effete southerners, leads the popular vote for all 10 contenders on the 24 Hour Museum website.

"We're so proud that we and Shetland are the only ones to make the list in Scotland," said Sandra Knight in Stromness. "Mind you, if Shetland was contemporary art instead of local history, we'd beat them easily, obviously."

In Topsham, Charles Potter heard the news hunched over his computer, waiting for the longlist to pop up on the Art Fund's website. The museum is entirely staffed by volunteers, paying nobody except a cleaner for four hours a week, but a surprising variety of skills have washed in on the tide. The team already includes lawyers, architects, teachers, a chemical engineer now in charge of the maintenance crew, and Potter, a former pubs estate manager and yachtsman, who is their IT whiz.

As he waited, the local paper rang to say they'd made it: "I very nearly fell off my chair", he recalled. Rachel Nichols (solicitor and quilter, in charge of historic textiles and the period rooms) added wistfully: "I'm sure all the museums have splendid things they could do with the money, but it would set us up for life."

Topsham was founded by Dorothy Holman, who left the building, its contents and the collections to the town. Like Shetland it is primarily a local history collection, with a few surprises such as the room of Vivien Leigh memorabilia - she was briefly Holman's sister-in-law - and a boat shaped like a cygnet which older residents remember being rowed up the river.

Lerwick's vast collection, in a spectacular building incorporating timber salvaged from old warehouses - in such a windblasted landscape that a waist-high shrub counts as a tree - includes equally beloved icons of local history such as wild costumes from the rollicking Up Helly Aa Viking festival, spinning wheels and Fair Isle sweaters, sealskin shoes and charms against witchcraft. It also holds a major archaeology collection, although to local chagrin many of the most important pieces are in Edinburgh.

The odd man out is Stromness, which apart from an ambitious temporary exhibition programme - which local artist and trustee Laura Drever says was a major factor in drawing her back to live and work on Orkney - has a collection which has left some visitors rubbing their eyes in bewilderment: a nationally important assemblage of the St Ives school, from wonky Alfred Wallis ships pulling past slightly crooked lighthouses, to Barbara Hepworth sculptures perched on window sills, and a Ben Nicholson of which the artist exclaimed, seeing it again after 30 years, "that's really very good!".

It was the bequest of another formidable woman, along with the gallery converted by Patrick Heron's daughter Katharine. Margaret Gardiner, a Hampstead liberal, first came to Orkney in 1956 with her son. She always insisted she wasn't a collector - she bought, she said, "piecemeal and without deliberation", and often to help out artist friends financially. By the time she had acquired several hundred works of art, her son said he would never want to share a house with a collection that had become a serious insurance liability. "Oh well, I'll give it to Orkney," she said - and did.

The three free-entry museums, and their regular visitors are bursting with pride at having got this far. In Stromness, Knight spoke for all three: "Even if it goes no further, we think this is great - it just shows how much is happening so far from London."

· The shortlist for the 2008 Art Fund prize for museums and galleries will be announced on April 18.

The 10 longlisted institutions are:

· British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol, for Breaking the Chains, a bicentenary anti-slavery exhibition. · The British Library, London, for Sacred, an exhibition of ancient Jewish, Christian and Islamic texts.· International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, new museum in Liverpool's docklands. · Lightbox, Woking: new build contemporary art and local history gallery and museum. · London Transport Museum: £22m redisplay. · National Army Museum, London - for Helmand, exhibition created by serving soldiers in Afghanistan. · The Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney. · Shetland Museum and Archives. · Topsham Museum, Exeter. · Wellcome Collection, London: new home for collections and exhibitions on art and medical history.