Scan Magazine | Activity of the Month | Denmark
From The Iron Age Village.
Activity of the Month, Denmark
Travel through thousands of years in twenty-two miles A journey through Vejle River Valley is a journey through time. Extending 22 miles into Jutland from Vejle Fjord, the valley presents an extraordinary combination of scenic landscape and historic attractions. Visitors can, among other things, experience the remains of Denmark’s greatest bridge from the Viking Age, a reconstructed Iron Age village, and a mummified bog body from 200BC. By Signe Hansen | Photos: VejleMuseerne
Spread across the town of Vejle and Vejle River Valley, VejleMuseerne (The Vejle Museums) comprise ten historic and cultural experiences unique to the area, which contains historic remnants from all epochs of Danish history but is especially known for its Viking and Iron Age attractions. “You can travel through time in Vejle River Valley. Since humans first began to settle in Denmark, people have been living here and you’ll find remnants from all of the significant stages of Danish history – the Stone Age, the 100 | Issue 100 | May 2017
Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Viking Age. It’s quite extraordinary,” says Rikke Hedman from VejleMuseerne. “The whole area is a bit of a secret gem.”
Mysterious ladies from the past One way of exploring the river valley is on foot or bicycle via Bindeballestien, a 22-mile-long trail starting behind the culture museum Spinderihallerne in Vejle. One of the main attractions of the museum is a more than 2,000-year-old mummified bog body. The body was so
well preserved that, when it was first discovered in 1835, some historians initially misidentified it as the body of Viking Queen Gunhild, who lived more than a thousand years later. Archaeologist and museum curator Charlotta Lindblom explains: “The bog bodies are quite astonishing, a bit scary but also curiously fascinating to most people – I think because of the fact that you can look right into the face of someone from the Iron Age.” The woman was around 40 years old when she was put in the bog. Though she is believed to have been an ordinary woman, analysis of the strontium level in her hair shows that she had travelled to central Europe shortly before she died. But she is not the only woman from the area to have puzzled historians. In 1921, a local farmer discovered the burial site