Aarhus - Moesgaard Muuseum: Friday 28 September

This morning we took a bus from the city centre to the Moesgaard Museum in the suburb of Hojbjerg.

The museum has interesting sections on Prehistory (the Danish Stone Age and Iron Age), the Viking Age, the Middle Ages and ‘The Life of the Dead’. They are housed in a beautiful, very modern building which has a spectacular sloping grass-covered roof that appears to grow out of the landscape.

The most famous and dramatic exhibit is the Grauballe Man. He was an Iron Age man (2,000 years old!) whose well-preserved body was found in a bog in 1952 at the village of Grauballe, west of Aarhus. It appears that he died from a throat wound and that perhaps he may have been killed as a religious sacrifice. His body was preserved so well in a peat bog that even his hair and fingernails are still intact!

Grauballe Man

An amazingly lifelike model of a Neanderthal man

The Gundestrup Cauldron, another interesting item

We enjoyed a delicious lunch in the museum cafe – pearl barley risotto with asparagus, sun-dried tomato and chorizo sausage for Ian and a pickled herring salad for me.

We also couldn't resist these icecreams!

Outside the museum we followed a walking trail across fields, past farms and through beech woods. It was a pleasant walk but after nearly an hour we decided to turn back before we reached the trail end at the beach.