Jane

Bang! Start with a good ‘un if you can. D53 has nine capstones all up thanks to a post-war restoration and is the second biggest hunebed in the Netherlands. Amid sandy, heathery heathland away from the village this is a beast! With picnic tables and seats aplenty it’s clearly THE local beauty spot, though today we had it more or less to ourselves. The rain made the stones glisten and they looked so gorgeous I was immediately frustrated that I wouldn’t be able to sketch it with the drizzle coming down. D53 also has a capstoned portal, which is quite unusual. I felt so happy here! So happy that I ran the 50 metres or so up to D54, clearly visible on the rising dune further up the road. Another lovely site, this one with six capstones, all up. What a beautiful pair!

Julian calls this one Fokkinger Slag in TME, which is actually the name of the nearby road.

8 April 2006

It was raining hard and looked set in for the day as we approached Jelling, Denmark’s spiritual home.

Moth and had I been musing on the difference between British jam and American jelly, wondering about the (il)logic of American musicians jamming rather than jelling, when, quite randomly, Bob Marley’s ‘Jammin’’ started playing on the MP3 player.

Jelling was virtually deserted when we arrived. Ours was the only car in the car park and everything was closed, even the museum. And it was very, very cold.

Jelling is a small town centred on series of monuments from a number of different ages. First a bronze age barrow, then a Viking stone long ship, then runestones, then two gigantic mounds, then a church. Peel back the layers here and you begin to understand Denmark’s history and sense of national identity.

It is only 1,000 years since Christianity was adopted by Danish kings over the old religion and Jelling marks the place where this happened. Outside the church that now stands between the two mounds a Viking runestone is carved with the earliest known image of the crucified Jesus in Scandinavia.

Each monument has been acknowledged and built into the next phase of Jelling. I like that continuity even if it does mean the land close to the mounds around the church and the runestones is now filled with neat and tidy modern graves.

We wandered around trying to make sense of it but the place lacked atmosphere without any people around. Unusually this is set of monuments that needs people to make it live. A visit to the museum would help us understand but it wasn’t open for an hour and a half, so we drove around in the rain in a fruitless search for the carved tree on the Jelling pages of TME (page 167) before returning to Jelling Kro for some coffee and a plate of chips.

The museum is situated directly opposite the mounds, runestones and church. As you go round reading the excellent displays in Danish and English you can glance out of huge glass windows and actually see the monuments in front of you.

There is a feel of Avebury about this place – the monuments and history still being occupied, enjoyed, revered and used, even if the reasons ‘why here especially?’ are not addressed.

It is pretty remarkable that only a few years or so before William of Normandy invaded England, the Danes were still following their native ‘pagan’ religion.

Ristinge Klint sits on top of a tiny, narrow peninsula, jutting out the west of Langeland. The rain, hail and sleet had passed and the beach was bathed in warm sunshine, the first time I’d not been cold whilst outside all week. We walked along the path up through the dunes and along the sandy cliffs above the deserted and beautiful beach until we reached this glorious erection.

It was much bigger than we dared hope from the tiny line drawing in the pamphlet we had. We were all delighted with it. This is a textbook dolmen.

Between Hobro and Mariager on route 555 at Katbjerg, you find one of the most imposing Danish long barrows.

Moth couldn’t find any printed information about the monuments at Katbjerg at all which is almost criminal, because the long barrow is the finest long barrow we had ever seen. Yes, seriously!

This monument was untrashed and probably not much restored. It was long – perhaps 25 metres and rectangular with a continuous line of big kerbstones. And tall, too some up to 3ms high! The mound billowed upwards along the entire length of the monument, completely undenuded. Down one side are two low passageways, each leading to a large intact chamberof grand proportions, one of them has uprights of more than 2m high!

No fancy horned forecourts here though; instead just really whopping stones at each end. Oooh! Oooh! OOOOH! This place blew our minds.

It was partly excavated in 1960. The finds, fine pottery from the middle Neolithic period and flintstone knives, are in the National Museum.

At the north east tip of Fyn is a little promentary on which can be found Marhøj (TME page 158), a particularly thrilling giant barrow. In a landscape shared by other fat, high, humpy høj, Marhøj is Queen.

Wading through the dark earth of the field littered with flints, we reached the monument and found the entrance to the passageway leading in is half way up the mound, rather than at ground level. Stooping very low (if you’re tall this is almost a hands-and-knees-job) I squeezed down the 5 metre passage flanked with big flat stones to reach the main chamber which runs perpendicular to it.

The main passage was darker than dark. I got out the torch but it was unable to penetrate the blackness at all. I found a bit of candle and lit it. Then I found a tealight and lit that. And another and another and another until the whole chamber, 10ms long was illuminated by 26 tealights. It looked very hygge.

I sat down on the damp earth to inspect the chamber, smoke a cig and have a cuppa. It was vast: seven massive capstones formed the roof, all glistening in with wet in the candlelight making it as cosy as a fairy grotto. Moth scampered around with the tripod taking pictures and collecting more than 25 used tealights. It was cold in there – my breath was condensing – but it was out of the rain and the icy wind. It was fab.

Spanskhøj stands tall and proud at the other side of the field from Snibhøj.

Don’t be misled by what Julian calls Spanskhøj on page 159 of TME. What he calls Spanskhøj is in fact Snibhøj.

After spending quite some time investigating Snibhøj, we drove round to see if we could get into Spanskhøj. We couldn’t. It was quite tousled with vegetation and had no clear path to it. It certainly had two passages but there was no way we could get in. Shame.

What Julian calls Spanskhøj on page 159 of TME is in fact this lovely chambered mound: Snibhøj.

After reaching Hannerup we saw the sign to drive into a farm courtyard. Before we had even turned the engine off, a kind woman had scurried out with a huge torch for us to view inside the mound.

We dropped our 6kr kroner each in the honesty box, took an informative homemade leaflet and set off through the thick smell of pig poo to the field with the mounds. Spanskhøj, Snibhøj and one other flattened double-entranced mound stand in the same field, and the leaflet makes it clear which is which.

Snibhøj is very special. I’d never seen a monument like it! Two passageways, two FABULOUS chambers which you can get into and investigate, one of which housed a tiny, sleepy bat.

Immediately next to Snibhøj a flattened version of it. We couldn’t find its name.

Spanskhøj stands tall and proud at the other side of the field from Snibhøj.

As you drive north out of St Just, directly opposite a crazymadbonkers Christian grotto (which I had fun leaping around on rather disrespectfully) we spotted these three very tall, slender standing stones on the same side of the road as the cemetery.

The first row you reach heading west is the northern row. It’s a long row of white, quartzy, sugar lumps.

Saint-Just, a very ordinary and comfortably pleasant French village, is the guardian to a wild and wacky ribbon of monuments which will have me scratching my head quizzically for the rest of my life. Nothing here makes any sense at all as the path to the west of the village leads you on a megalithic mystery tour.

Each monument on its own is intriguing … beguiling … but together, so close together they become a megalithic headf*ck.

We parked to the west of the village and followed the ample and informative signs which led us under the pines towards the Cojoux heathland glowing golden with gorse and ringing with birdsong. Apart from us, there was no one else around at all. The monuments – and the birds – just kept on coming.

Following the path west out of St Just as it snakes its way through the dense, tall gorse forest for a few hundred metres we reached the stones of Les Demoiselles Piquées – the ‘worm-eaten women’. Not a very nice name, but you can see why they are called this. These are big stones, too. I stood next to one and felt like a midget. A novel feeling for me.