AARHUS – Denmark (Sat 15 Aug)

We left Strandby today and headed down to Aarhus, not a long drive and this was a good thing considering the weather. It rained most of the day. It was much like what we would expect fro weather at home in mid August, but it is meant to be mid summer here.

We stopped at a little place called Aalberg on the way and visited the Viking graveyard. This is a very cool place. The oldest and largest Viking graveyard, in this part of the world. The first impression as you drive up and walk into the field, is that this field is just littered with stones. But these stones are organized into circles, ovals and triangles. Quite a few are arranged in the outline of a Viking ship with a large stone at the bow and stern. There are over 700 graves in the field dating back to well over 1000 years and these stones have been undisturbed. Incredible. The custom in the day was to arrange the stones into a boat shape, build up a pyre of wood and sticks, place the body on top and cremate it. So it was within these stones that the remains lay until as it says ‘dust to dust’.

Once in Aarhus (or rather our B&B 17 kms out of Aahus) we drove into town. We walked around town for a bit, but our prime objective was to visit ‘Den Gamie By’. This is promoted as an outdoor museum. It is a collection of old houses from around the area, of different ages and styles that have been demolished and reconstructed on this site, to form a village. Most of the houses are of a half-timbered nature as is characteristic of the area, and they date back to the 1500s. They range from small apartments of craftsmen’s cottages, to large mansions and factories. These are more of the half timbered ‘chocolate box’ houses with wonky timbers and odd angles. All very very cool. One of the things that is admirable, is that this museum was first started in about 1902. Someone had the foresight to start reconstructing these houses in the mid 1920s, through to the late 1940s, and even now as we speak they are still reconstructing demolished houses on one end of the site, so this is an ongoing preservation project. Another thing that is very cool is that as we have walked around Aarhus and others here in Denmark, we have seen houses of exactly the same construction as the ones in this museum. Of course this is a museum and so you need to pay to see them, or so you would think, but just to maintain a habit, we managed to see it for free. If you come during the day you will pay 100kn each, but if you turn up after 6pm you can wander around the streets for free. We preferred the later. We didn’t get to see much inside the houses, but it was the houses themselves that we were most interested in anyway.