Hyrax Hill Museum
Hyrax Hill is a narrow spur of lava on the eastern edge of Nakuru carrying a settlement record that runs from prehistoric herders to the Iron Age, with a small museum in an old farmhouse at the foot of it. It is the shortest and most human of the Rift Valley’s archaeological sites, the one about people living somewhere rather than about stone tools.
What Is on the Hill
The National Museums of Kenya describes a site of 59 hectares in Nakuru County rising to about 1,900 metres, with habitation hollows attributed to the Sirikwa, and features ranging in date from possibly 5,000 years ago to only about 200 years ago. Three phases are represented: a Pastoral Neolithic occupation, a Sirikwa phase, and a late Iron Age phase. That span is what makes the place interesting: not one moment preserved but a hill people kept coming back to.
Three areas are open on the hill and a walk between them takes an hour or so. What is visible on the ground is stone: rough enclosure walls, the circular depressions of Sirikwa houses, burial mounds and cairns, and pits. Pottery, grinding stones, stone bowls, obsidian blades and iron tools have come out of them, marking the shift from foraging to herding.
The detail that stays with most visitors is the smallest. Bao boards, the rows of playing cups used for the game across eastern Africa, are cut into the bedrock, and need no explanation. From the top the hill looks out over Lake Nakuru, which is why people settled it and is now why the walk is worth doing even for someone indifferent to archaeology.
Who Dug It and What They Found
The site came to attention in the 1920s when a farmer on the land turned up ancient burials with stone bowls, which Louis Leakey examined and assigned to an early pastoralist community.
Mary Leakey did the first substantial work. In 1937 she excavated the first of the areas, finding late Iron Age occupation in the form of rough stone enclosures and burials, and beneath it a much older layer of Late Stone Age date. She excavated a second area in 1938, and later workers revised her reading of how those layers related. Ron Clarke worked on the second area and the southern burials in 1965, J. C. Onyango Abuje excavated nearby in the early 1970s, and John Sutton reinvestigated in 1986 and exposed three Sirikwa houses.
The hill was gazetted as a national monument on 26 November 1945 and opened to the public in 1965, when a small museum was established in the farmhouse, ceded that year by its owner, the late A. Selfe, on whose land the burials had first appeared.
The hill’s position explains itself once one thing is known. There are beach sands at its foot, left by a freshwater lake that the National Museums of Kenya says covered the valley from Nakuru to Lake Elementaita about 8,500 years ago, turning Hyrax Hill into a peninsula or an island. The hill is what is left of that shoreline.
The Museum Itself
The museum is small and is arranged in three parts. The archaeology room holds stone tools, casts of early human material and models of the settlements on the hill. A material culture section displays objects from the peoples of the Rift Valley, and a natural history section covers regional fauna. In the grounds there is a tortoise pit holding bell hinged and leopard tortoises, and helmeted guinea fowl around the hill. The museum also has charge of the Lanet site four kilometres to the south east, at the foot of Lion Hill overlooking Lake Nakuru, an open prehistoric site used for camping and walking rather than display.
Take the resident guide. The interpretation on the hill is sparse, and the difference between a guided and an unguided visit is the difference between a field of stones and a settlement anyone can picture.
Visiting Hyrax Hill
The National Museums of Kenya gives the site as 4 kilometres from the Nakuru central business district and 152 kilometres from Nairobi, on the Nairobi to Nakuru highway, which puts it a few minutes from a bed in the city and directly on the route to the Lake Nakuru National Park gates. It opens daily including weekends and public holidays, 8.30am to 5.30pm on the museums service’s own notice, though the site’s brochure gives 6pm.
Hyrax Hill is the one National Museums of Kenya site in the Rift Valley whose admission did not go up in 2026. When the service revised its heritage admission fees under Legal Notice No. 79 of 2025, with effect from 7 May 2026, Hyrax Hill was named as remaining the same until further notice across all three visitor categories. Those rates, checked on 21 September 2026, are in shillings in every column: KSh 100 for a Kenyan or East African citizen adult and KSh 50 for a child, KSh 400 and KSh 200 for a resident or visitor from elsewhere in Africa, and KSh 500 and KSh 250 for a visitor from outside Africa, with reduced rates for school and college groups. Ticketing is through the government eCitizen platform and the museums service does not take cash at the gate.
Allow an hour, or ninety minutes with the walk up the hill. It pairs with Menengai Crater across the city and belongs to the same sequence as Kariandusi down the highway. Archaeological tours in Kenya sets out how the sites relate.
Questions Visitors Ask About Hyrax Hill
How long does a visit take?
About an hour for the museum and the nearest excavations, or ninety minutes to walk the hill properly. It is a short stop rather than a day, and it fits easily either side of a Lake Nakuru game drive.
What is there to actually see?
Stone enclosure walls, the circular hollows of Sirikwa houses, burial mounds, pits and bao boards cut into the bedrock, plus a three room museum. The view over Lake Nakuru is part of the point.
What does it cost to get in?
Hyrax Hill was left out of the National Museums of Kenya fee revision that took effect on 7 May 2026, with its rates stated as unchanged. They are KSh 100 for a Kenyan or East African citizen adult, KSh 400 for a visitor from elsewhere in Africa and KSh 500 from outside Africa, with half those figures for children. All three are in shillings. Pay through eCitizen; there is no cash at the gate.
Does it suit children?
Better than most archaeological sites. It is short, there is a hill to climb, there are tortoises and guinea fowl in the grounds, and the bao boards cut into the rock are understood immediately.
2 Places to Visit in This Area
Other sites in Nakuru, each with its own guide.
Safaris That Visit Nakuru
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