Down House
⭐ Highligts
Darwin’s Study
Where ‘Origin’ took shapeA low armchair, a board on castors and neat piles of notes—efficiency before ergonomics.
📍 Ground floor, front room
The Sandwalk
Ideas paced into beingDarwin looped this path daily, moving flints with his foot to count completed laps.
📍 Garden perimeter path, ‘thinking walk’
Greenhouse Experiments
Small tests, big patternsClimbers, insect-eating plants and cross-pollination trials turned curiosity into data.
📍 Kitchen garden & glasshouse
Voyage & Notebooks
From Beagle to theoryMaps, specimens and tiny field notes compress five years at sea into arm’s-length pages.
📍 Upstairs exhibition rooms
Opening Hours
🤓 Fun Facts
To test whether earthworms ‘hear’, Darwin had his son play the bassoon near them—no reaction; vibrations in the soil, however, made them dive. Result: worms sense vibration, not airborne sound.
He timed his own thinking: the Sandwalk’s flints doubled as a lap counter—nudge one per circuit to avoid losing the thread.
Darwin built a swivel board on wheels so he could glide between desk, specimens and proofs without standing—Victorian productivity hack.
At Down, he proved sundews digest animal matter and that climbing plants ‘search’ by subtle movements—quiet greenhouse dramas that fed the big theory.
