The Rotunda is one of the oldest purpose-built museums in the country, a Georgian drum designed at the suggestion of William Smith, the father of English geology, whose survey of the rocks between Scarborough and Whitby laid the foundations of the science. Inside, the restored circular gallery shows fossils from the Yorkshire Jurassic coast, dinosaur footprints, and the Bronze Age Gristhorpe Man, buried in a hollowed oak trunk on the cliffs south of Scarborough.
It is a compact, family-friendly museum and a good primer before fossil-hunting on the beaches at Saltwick, Robin Hood's Bay or Ravenscar. A single £5 annual pass covers the Rotunda and Scarborough Art Gallery.
Getting there
Vernon Road, Scarborough YO11 2PS, five minutes from South Bay beach and the railway station.
🏰 History & heritage
🏰 History & heritage
🏰 History & heritage