Museums & Exhibitions

The museum will be closed from 26^th August for approximately 2 months while we upgrade our lighting, heating and air conditioning systems.

This important work will help us carefully control the museum environment, protecting the prehistoric animal bones and stone tools left behind by our ancestors, while helping us showcase our amazing Ice Age collection. Cave tour bookings will receive a voucher for a complimentary Creswell Crags guide book and can return to visit the museum for free once it re-opens later in the year.

The rest of the site and visitor centre including the café, will be open as normal.

Creswell Heritage Trust has been awarded Museum Estate and Development (MEND round 4) funding to undertake the improvements as part of a larger capital project. The Department of Culture Media and Sport funds MEND, which is administered by Arts Council England. The Project is also made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players and by The Headley Trust.

Home of our Ice Age Ancestors

Our Museum displays a number of objects unearthed at Creswell Crags. This nationally important collection includes stone and bone tools as well as the remains of several surprising species, which you might not have known inhabited Britain.

Artefacts have been sourced and brought together from major British collections to illustrate this most influential period of human prehistory. Let this nationally important exhibition guide you through the story of life in the Ice Age.

Explore Our Collections

Visit our Collections Page

Fixing our Broken Planet - Bridging Past and Future Sustainability at Creswell Crags

Work alongside Dr Angharad Jones (curator and palaeontologist) and Dr Theresa Nelson (archaeologist and sustainability expert) to explore more about past environmental challenges during the Ice Age and look towards a sustainable future in this exciting new project. Join us for a series of workshops about ecology, litter through time, mining in the stone age and today, and how we have been shaped by the food we eat since we were hunter-gatherers.

This project is part of the Fixing Our Broken Planet programme in partnership with the Natural History Museum, London.

Learn More

Special Exhibitions

We hold a number of special exhibitions each year, on a wide variety of themes including archaeology, history, art, nature and wildlife. We work with many different groups and individuals on these exhibitions, and best of all, our temporary exhibitions are FREE!

Teeth by Lucy Stevens

From 1.30pm on Saturday 11 October to 28 June 2026

Temporary Exhbition Room (next to the museum reception)

A vibrant new exhibition of colourful mixed media paintings inspired by the mammal teeth collection at Creswell Crags.

Artist Lucy Stevens' new work is an interpretation of the mammal teeth collection housed at Creswell Crags, including teeth found on-site at Pin Hole and Robin Hood Cave. Lucy has selected some well-known mammals from the collection of nearly 38,000 objects including reindeer, wolf, horse, bear, hyaena, vole along with extinct mammals like the woolly rhino and woolly mammoth.

This collection of new paintings uses mixed media to explore colour coding techniques to identify and interpret mammal teeth by looking at the number of different teeth each species has.

In some of the paintings, the shape of teeth are used to showcase groups of mammals feeding, hunting or migrating, or stacked to form totems or boundaries between symbolic imagery of eyes and moons, representing the idea of protection, magic, change and the cycle of life.

Visitors are encouraged to explore the paintings and develop their own interpretations of each piece. The exhibition also includes photographs and a video documentary showcasing the journey of the project.