Day Trip to Møns Klint

Danish Countryside

The Cliff of Møns (pronounced like a shortened version of 'moon')


Two days before my first exam I went for a Student Association-organised day trip to Møns Klint which is a really amazing geological formation about 2.5 hours south of Copenhagen. I got to see some lovely Danish countryside which can be summed up in two words: green and flat. 


We had a charming Danish guide who spoke well-good engrish who was able to explain some of the more stand-out stuff we were seeing. Along the way we passed through a village that was having a market day. There was one stall, one stall owner, and one customer... Well, it was a small village so that could have been a record turnout for all we know.


The area that you pass through on the way to the Cliff is described as the 'rotten banana' due to the fact that people can't make a living in that area, so everyone is selling up (or trying to) and moving into Copenhagen or Odense which is one of the other main cities about 2 hours West of Copenhagen. Perhaps, then, that market day was a runaway success...

The Cliff itself was absolutely amazing! It is made of limestone and about 100m high. If you dig through the bits that have crumbled off you can find fossils (or fossiles as our tour guide pronounced it). I got part of a fossilised octopus tentacle out of it.


Around the Cliff is one of the first National Parks in Denmark, which was created in the last 10 years or so. National Parks are something of recent arrival in Denmark, but then as I learned in one of my law classes, Denmark has had fairly robust environmental legislation since 1849 so the Danes likely didn't need them. (Just a little factoid to prove that I didn't sleep during my classes.... much)


Within the park is a really beautiful beech forest and apparently we were lucky to go when we did, because the sunlight filters wonderfully through the leaves, and only for two weeks a year. After that the trees bush up and under the canopy becomes dark and gloomy.

Liselund

Liselund 


Stop Two on our tour was a 'garden' that was more a park than anything. It was done in the romantic style apparently but I wasn't that overly wowed. 


The History of it is that there was a summer palace there and in the 1800s a Danish King decided to make a park/garden for his beloved wife Louise. 


By this time I was hanging out with this Canadian girl from Toronto who took verbal diarrhea to a whole new level. As unfortunate as this sounds, she would have to be the first Canadian that I didn't really like. We got a wee bit lost while she unleashed the verbal floodwaters which turned out to be quite a nice detour as I got a really good photo out of it. 


Elmelunde


Stop Three was one of the first Churches ever built in Denmark, built in the 1200s. It had some amazing paintings on the roof that told the Bible stories. I will now embark on what I think is a super interesting history about it. If you don't want to read it then scroll down to the next chapter.


This Church was originally Catholic and fairly simple in design, until a couple of hundred years later when some rich locals built internal walls for it. The area where this Church is located is littered with Churches every few kilometres, which is a sign of the wealth of the area in Medieval Denmark. The locals would have had to have been wealthy to support that many Churches. (Contrast that to the modern-day 'rotten banana' that this area has become)


Because the area around the Church was agricultural, it is likely the locals were illiterate so the roof was painted with Bible Stories to show the faithful what the priest was telling them.


After Denmark converted to the Lutheran faith in the mid-1500s, the church was painted white inside and out and the roof art was painted over. This is because one of the fundamental points about early Lutheranism was that it was a marked departure from the excesses of the Catholic Church with its paintings, gold filigree everywhere, corrupt priests etc. The whole idea of Lutheranism was to focus your mind on the word of God and not be distracted by visual frippery.


In recent times, there has been a move to uncover Denmark's history and as a part of that, the roof in this Church has been painstakingly stripped back to show what was hidden.

Bottom panel shows Fall

It was quite entertaining to see actually. For example in a scene depicting the Fall, Eve is much larger than Adam so as to remove doubt as to who was responsible. The Snake (representing the Devil) had a woman's head and was making eye contact with Eve, thereby implying that the two were in cahoots (and that women are to blame for all the stuff wrong in the world I'm guessing).


A scene of Adam toiling outside the Garden shows him with a plow. This was a hugely expensive piece of farm equipment in the day, so this picture gives a clue as to the health of the local economy. Other pictures showed 'poor' people wearing rather nice clothes indicating the aforementioned point again.


At some point however, a rather elaborate altar and pulpit were installed that, to me anyway, jarred rather alarmingly with the rest of the Church.


The other thing I learned was that every Danish Church has a model ship hanging from the roof. These ships symbolise the Ship of Hope which I am guessing serves as a metaphor for community, the importance of helping each other and the fact that everyone is striving together to find the 'Promised Land'.


So there you go children, you just got EDUCATED!!!


Jaettestue


This ancient, Stone-age Burial Mound was stop number 4. Jaettestue means 'Giant's Living Room' in Danish, and this name is given because people thought that only Giants could have moved the huge and heavy stones to the location and built it.


It was quite a remarkable feat of engineering, as the design takes account of the flow of water and so on, so that the crypt didn't flood every time it rained. Apparently, there were 200 people buried in there. Someone asked where they were buried. Reply: You're standing on them.


It was quite a cramped space, but we fit 50 people in there easy enough.