Saturday 1st July 2017 – Odense, Denmark

After a few days with a high temperature, this morning I am feeling much improved and ….. the sun is shining! This means that we have a chance to take a closer look at the farm and the garden that is open to us. The immaculate grass is being mown by a robot lawnmower that, seemingly randomly, turns and pirouettes but it is doing a great job. There is a pond, a decking area with a high-quality table and chairs and, next to the lawnmower’s hutch, a designed barbeque (“firewood is over by the outbuildings”). What a lovely place to have a barbeque with views to the farm buildings and over the fields. If only the weather had been better!

We are off across the sea today to the island of Fyn (aka Funen), the island between the mainland, Jutland and Zealand where Copenhagen is located. Fyn is the greenest of Denmark’s main islands and the population density is low. We took a ‘green’ (picturesque) route to the motorway to cross the bridge that took us to Fyn. Driving in Denmark is very relaxed and we have never found the roads busy. Even this motorway, the main arterial route from Norway, Sweden and Copenhagen to the rest of Europe, is not busy.

Once on Fyn we headed off on more green roads to the minor site of Glavendrup, set in the midst of farmland. There are many beautiful farmhouses around here, many thatched with distinctive pieces of wood over the apex of the thatch, obviously designed to protect the thatch from high winds. I hope to get some photographs of this later but today, every time that we saw one, there was nowhere to stop or it was pouring with rain.

The Glavendrup site consists of a large (50m) Viking stone ship (no burial has been found) that is very close to two much earlier Bronze Age barrows. This indicates that the site was of great importance for many hundreds of years. 200 years ago the site was in danger of being destroyed by gravel quarrying but it was saved and in 1892 it was scheduled. In the very early 20^th century, a local group took an interest in the site and decided to look after it and have done ever since. The site was completely open but the group planted trees all around and that makes it a pretty and intimate area. What makes the site extra special is the rune stone at the prow of the ship. The runes state that the monument was erected for Alle by his wife Ragnhild and his sons. Alle was a Thane (clan chief) and had religious standing as a Gothi (pagan priest). The runes were carved by the stonemason Sote who consecrated them to Thor, the god of thunder. The inscription says ‘woe-betide he who damages the stone or drags it away’. This is what put me off taking it back home, and the max gross weight limit on the van. As there was no grave found, one theory is that Alle died on a faraway raid.

Lovely minor roads took us to the O2 ring road of Odense and we were soon at Odense City Camping.

Photos: Two views of the garden of Kolleruplund camping site – how I would have enjoyed using that barbeque! Note the mower hutch to the left of the barbeque; The closest that we have come to a Danish traffic jam – waiting for a train to cross; The two Bronze Age mounds at Glavendrup – the stones are modern, erected by the conservation group to commemorate anniversaries of important events in Danish history e.g. the liberation from Nazi rule at the end of the Second World War; The Glavendrup rune stone with the stone boat outline in the background.