Natural history Museum at Tring

This is the legacy of the somewhat eccentric Walter Rothchild, later second Baron Rothschild (1868-1937), who showed a passion for exotic animals at an early age. 

At seven he started stuffing them and building a collection, most of which you can see today. The museum is a short walk from the centre  of the pretty market town of Tring, where the Rothschilds lived, about an hour’s drive from London. By the age of 10, Walter had amassed a collection of specimens including beetles, butterflies, birds, fish and mammals. At 18 he moved to Cambridge to study natural sciences accompanied by his kiwis, which he couldn’t bear to leave behind. 

In  1889, Walter’s father, Lord Rothschild, “Nat” erected a building to house a mind-boggling collection of his son’s  hundreds, possibly thousands of species. And in 1892, Walter, now 24 years old,  opened his museum to the public. It remains one of the largest private natural history collections ever assembled.

To begin with, Walter’s exotic animals, which included kangaroos, wallabies, 144 giant  tortoises, zebras, cassowaries, kiwis and wolves, wandered around Tring Park, the Rothschild’s home, until his father’s horse got chased by a cassowary.    

There are several zebras in the collection, including Burchell's zebra, named after English explorer William John Burchell, and Grevy's zebra, named after the then-president of France. Walter trained zebras to pull a carriage, using a pony at the front for them to follow, on one ocassion visiting Princess Alexandra at Buckingham Palace. 

Another highlight of the museum is the “dressed flees” which were bought in Mexico around 1905. They were handmade by women as a form of folk art and sold to tourists as souvenirs. 

Walters' taxidermy collection continued to grow and he contributed largely to the 4,900 specimens on display at the museum. This little-known collection is well worth a detour   especially to see extinct animals such as the dodo, british wolf, quagga and great auk and a zebroid foal (a zebra crossed with a horse) which make up the collection. 

The six galleries are grouped by animal and each is as exciting as another, even if  natural history is not your thing. The first gallery includes birds, large carnivores and primates; the second is used for temporary exhibits, the third crocodilians, crustaceans, fishes, insects, large mammals and marine invertebrates; the fourth accommodates kangaroos and odd-toed ungulates; the fifth holds bovids, hippopotamuses, pigs and marine mammals; and the sixth gallery contains amphibians, bats, various British mammals, domestic dogs, reptiles and small mammals.

Download self-guided tours for free from their website. These tours take you around the galleries based on either climate or categorisation: Arctic and Antarctic, Ice Age, Rainforest, Savannah, Endangered, Extinct or Walter’s Animals. 

Following Walter's death in 1937, the building and collection were left  to the nation and became part of the Natural History Museum.