Groenhøj

Groenhøj chambered tomb, near Horsens, is a perfect pincushion of a monument, not unlike the Great Cairn on Porth Hellick Down, Scilly, but bigger.

It has a continuous ring of handsome kerbstones and a good high grassy mound. Like so many of the monuments in Denmark, the stones are lovely sparkly pink and grey. It has a very narrow corridor which I probably could have wriggled through to reach the chamber but as it was wet underhoof and I was wearing my only clean pair of jeans so I didn’t bother. At its 1940 excavation, thousands of pottery sherds were unearthed here, the breaking of which was some kind of ritual associated with the use of the mound.

Today, under blue skies with big fluffy clouds and chaffinches darting around in the trees Groenhøj looked very ‘hygge’ (Danish for cosy).

Featured in The Megalithic European (TME) page 163, as an inset.

Access: A short walk of about 500m at the most, gently uphill over a grassy track.

Near Horsens & junction 56 of E45. I’ll echo Julian’s instructions, as we got there fine using them! From junction 56 head east on the 52 taking care to stay on the 52 at a strange crossroads where the 52 ‘veers right’ (as Julian puts it). Then he says to go 2.1km along that road, turning right at sign for Rugballe 1.

Follow that lane until you reach a T junction & turn right, the another 0.8km & turn right into trees. Look out for a clearing on the right where the monument is & a clearing on the left where you can park.

It seems from the map that you could actually get there a slightly simpler way by turning off the 52 a little earlier, but there may be something I don’t know about that route!

Visited 4 April 2006
The Great Tomb on Porth Hellick Down in the Isles of Scilly immediately sprang to mind on seeing this, both on TME & in the ‘flesh’. But that’s a good thing, giving 2 of my favourite features in a tomb – a chamber you can get into and a nice set of kerbstones!

Really narrow passage & a comparatively small, low chamber with a beautifully quartz-striped stone as one of its largest orthostats. There is a valley to the north which I think may have offered a pretty cool view, but it’s masked by the trees mentioned in the directions.

Excavators found burials & associated materials in the chamber from the middle and late neolithic. A huge number (7,000!) potshards were found just outside the kerbstones, in front of the passage, and more on top of some of the kerbstones.