Cambridge is a small city, around 150,000 people, on the River Cam about fifty miles north of London. People have lived on the spot since the Bronze Age, and it was a trading center under the Romans and the Vikings. But its name has meant one thing for eight hundred years: The University.

One of the museums we visited told the story of how that began. In 1209, in Oxford, a woman was killed. The town authorities could not seize the scholar thought responsible, so they arrested two or three of his associates and hanged them. Many of Oxford scholars left soon after. Some walked east, to the edge of the fens, to a prosperous little trading town called Cambridge. That flight is the founding of Cambridge. No charter, no founder, no ceremony. The university began as a group of academics with nowhere else to go, and it grew, over eight centuries, into the fourth-oldest surviving university in the world. The rivalry between the two places, still played out every year in the boat race, goes back to that killing.

The oldest of the thirty-one colleges, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284. Medieval courts and chapels stand next to Victorian museums and plain modern laboratories, all in the same few streets. King’s College Chapel, begun in 1446, is one of the finest buildings in Britain. A short walk away are the ordinary-looking labs where the electron, the nucleus of the atom, and the structure of DNA were worked out. The place holds its centuries side by side.

Cambridge has long been one of the addresses where the modern understanding of the world was built. Newton was at Trinity, and his notebooks are still in the library there. Darwin studied here and sent the specimens from his voyage back to his Cambridge teachers. Maxwell built the Cavendish Laboratory, Thomson found the electron in it, and Rutherford split the atom. Crick and Watson found the shape of DNA. Stephen Hawking was a fellow at Gonville and Caius for fifty-two years. The people connected to the university have won well over a hundred Nobel Prizes. For a small city, it has done a great deal of the world’s thinking.

We left Carioca at the edge of town and took the bus in, about thirty minutes to the center. It was a drizzly afternoon, so we made it a museum day and stayed under cover. We reached the middle of Cambridge around two, which left time only for three of the smaller museums. Small but extremely important.

The university keeps three small museums on and around Downing Street, modest departmental collections that are easy to overlook against the great collections of the world. They are not large. But they hold objects that changed how we understand things, and that is a different measure than size. You go to them the way you go on a pilgrimage, not for the scale of the place, but for what happened there and that is how we came. I needed to visit this place.

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences

The Sedgwick belongs to the University of Cambridge, part of its Department of Earth Sciences. It is small, but it is the oldest geological museum in the world, founded in 1728, and named after Adam Sedgwick, the Cambridge geologist who taught the young Darwin.

For us this was the heart of the day. The museum holds the rocks Darwin collected on the voyage of the Beagle between 1831 and 1836, around two thousand of them, with his own documents. I have wanted to see these since I was a boy reading his book “The Voyage of the Beagle“. To stand in front of the actual specimens, the stones he collected and labelled during the voyage, was something I had carried for a long time.

Darwin went out on the Beagle as much a geologist as a naturalist.

One display connects the ages and eras of the earth to real points in the British landscape, and it grows out of William Smith’s geological map of 1815, which is on permanent display. This is the map Simon Winchester wrote about in “The Map That Changed the World” which I read many years ago. Smith worked out that layers of rock can be identified by the fossils in them and traced across a whole country, and that idea is the beginning of modern geology. People have called it the Magna Carta of geology. It turned rock into time, and without it there is no framework for Darwin, or for much of what came after.

So three small rooms hold Smith’s map, Sedgwick’s name over the door, and Darwin’s rocks. Three people, and a large part of how we learned to read the age of the earth. Unbelievably heavy in meaning.

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

A short walk away, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, founded in 1884, is again a university museum, again not large, but it holds objects of the first rank.

The one that stops you is the totem pole. It is a Haida pole from Haida Gwaii, the islands off the west coast of Canada, and it rises through all three floors of the building. We have been to Haida Gwaii (K’uuna Llnagaay Village, Haida Gwaii Museum, Old Massett Village and North Beach and Return to Skidegate) , and standing in front of this one brought that back. In the islands the tradition is to let a pole weather and return to the earth, not to preserve it. We saw poles left to decay where they stood at the old village sites, others kept in the island’s own museum, and new poles raised in recent years, the carving still alive. A pole kept whole and upright in Cambridge is a particular kind of object, and worth understanding before you look at it.

The museum also holds some of the oldest human tools on earth, stone choppers from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, close to two million years old. Deep in the peopling story as we are at the moment, that was a quiet thrill. And it keeps things brought back from Captain Cook’s Pacific voyages in the 1770s, among the earliest such artefacts anywhere. Alongside all of it is the archaeology of the Cambridge region itself, the ground under the town, from the deep past up through the Romans and the Saxons.

The University Museum of Zoology

The last of the three, small like the others, but its collection is rated of outstanding international importance, and Cambridge was a centre of the birth of modern biology. You walk in underneath the skeleton of a finback whale, hung the length of the entrance through the gift shop.

What makes this room remarkable is quiet, and easy to walk past. It holds the zoological specimens Darwin brought back from the Beagle, including some of the Galápagos finches. There is an honest story attached to those finches. They were not all collected by Darwin himself, and it was the ornithologist John Gould, working on them back in England, who saw what they meant. Darwin had not fully understood them at sea. It took another mind to show him.

It also holds Darwin’s beetle box, the beetles he collected as a student here, some of which can still be found in the wetlands around the city. And it holds specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, who reached the theory of natural selection at the same time as Darwin, and on his own. Under one modest roof are the traces of both men who found the single biggest idea in biology.

The day

Three small museums, and each holds more than its size suggests. They are not the largest collections of the world, but they hold some of its most important objects, in the place where the ideas were worked out. We came to them as pilgrimages, and that is what they are. The rain kept us inside. Inside was the age of the earth, the beginnings of life’s study, and the oldest human tools we have. That was enough for one drizzly afternoon in Cambridge.