The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Our biking Viking trip was a historic success
Today the Danish city of Roskilde hosts a stage of the Tour de France, but for Chris Leadbeater and his son it proved to be a wonderland of longships, axes and warrior kings
At the end of the jetty, a log canoe is tied to one of the posts. In truth, it is as much a log as it is a canoe, hollowed out with blunt tools, and bereft of any modern comforts. Including, it seems, much in the way of stability or buoyancy. It wobbles noticeably as Hal climbs in; even more so when I push us out into the suspiciously murky pond, using a wooden oar so fat and clumsy it resembles a prop from a Flintstones cartoon. Even at the impressionable age of seven, my son is unconvinced that this is the Viking experience he has been promised. A nervous pause, then a worried question: “Are we going to drown?”
It was always going to be mildly tricky to sell one so young on the idea of historical authenticity; to explain that this defiantly hard-to-steer chunk of flotsam is exactly what the average resident of this region might have used to get about in the 6th century.
But then, Lejre Land of Legends is all about authenticity. There it sits, as it has since 1964, almost at the heart of Denmark’s largest island, Zealand – an open-air museum that attempts to recreate life in the Viking age. This means mini-villages of thatched dwellings where, should you choose, you can stay in summer. It means a vast “King’s Hall” – 1,000 tons of carefully sculpted oak – as an elaborate centrepiece. And yes, it means canoes that feel like they will definitely capsize if anybody on board makes a silly sudden movement.
Happily, it does also mean classic Viking weaponry. Having escaped our barely floating former tree, we wander over to a carpentry station, where a young woman is crafting bows from long, sturdy branches. She hands us an axe. Hal stares at it in gleeful disbelief.
It is not, of course, to be used for attacking a beach, or a Yorkshire village. It is also, with proper supervision, entirely safe. She points us towards a pile of logs, in need of chopping. “This is a traditional Iron Age axe,” she advises. “It has a long handle, so the head falls naturally away from the body. You don’t have to force it.” So it proves. We spend a happy 15 minutes taking turns, letting gravity do the work, the blade dropping in a graceful arc. Before long, we have enough fragments of wood to build a campfire. Content with our work, we warm our hands as smoke tendrils swirl.
If this is a slow form of tourism – there are also sandpits pretending to be archaeological dig sites, to be probed for “artefacts”, and rudimentary games of skittles, with wooden balls, to be played – it is also in keeping with a surrounding area, which is marketed as “Fjordlandet”. Not just in ambience (though we are just 25 miles west of Copenhagen, rural Zealand could not feel further removed from Denmark’s main city), but in historical relevance too. Lejre is thought to have been a Viking capital between the 6th and 10th centuries. When its importance faded, its place was taken by Roskilde, seven miles away.
This is where Harald Bluetooth arrived on the scene. More than a millennium later, in 1997, he would enter the lexicon when his name was given to the new form of wireless technology that has since become a core part of our lives. This seemingly odd choice was a tribute to Denmark’s first Christian king, and the manner in which he united the tribes around him – a parallel, if you really squint, to this thenfresh form of communication and its capacity to make devices talk to each other. Too obtuse? Perhaps. Either way, long before this, in 960, Bluetooth had founded Roskilde as a new Danish capital. Twenty-six years on, in 986, he would be buried in the church he had constructed on its highest point.
He is still there, purportedly, in the bowels of the 11th-century cathedral that now adorns the hilltop. Even if this yarn is apocryphal, this twin-towered red-brick enormity has deep royal connections. It is Denmark’s Westminster Abbey, and its chorus line of entombed monarchs is long – Margrete I (reigned 1387-1412) behind the altar; Christian IV (1588-1648) reborn as a giant bronze statue, surveying his own marble coffin; Frederick IX (1947-1972) by the front steps outside. There is good reason for the latter placing. A keen sailor, the current queen’s father wanted to spent eternity looking at Roskilde Fjord.
It is not difficult to understand the gist of his thinking. Roskilde slopes down from the cathedral doors, through a haze of cobbled streets, coffee shops, restaurants and parks, to a shoreline that still dreams of Vikings. Roskilde Fjord is a branch of the Isefjord – the wider channel that burrows firmly into Zealand’s torso. This, in turn, bleeds into the Kattegat, the stretch of sea that separates Denmark from Sweden. These have been significant waters for centuries. Proof of this came in 1962, when five Viking vessels, all constructed in the 11th century, were found preserved in the mud of the fjord floor. Sixty years on, the Skuldelev ships (named after the nearest village to the discovery site, 12 miles to the north) are the stars of the city’s excellent Viking Ship Museum. Grand swathes of their hulls remain intact: salutes, in solid oak, to the ingenuity of a civilisation that conquered the Atlantic and reached the Americas (at L’Anse aux Meadows, on Newfoundland) some half a millennium before Columbus (maybe in 1021).
This slab of history is a little too heavy for a seven-year-old. However, the same point is made splendidly outside, where reconstructions of each of the five vessels are moored at the dockside. These include Ottar, a full-scale replica of Skuldelev 1 – which, as a former oceangoing trader, is the biggest of the wrecks. Other models take visitors out on short voyages into the past. So it is that we clamber into one of them, and attempt to power it out of the harbour: 20 parents rowing, children watching from the benches in the middle.
“That was good,” our captain announces, as we finally reach open water. “It will be even better when you learn how to row in time.” It takes a few more minutes, defined by the clashing of oars and a pan-European sprinkling of “sorry”, “pardon” and “entschuldigung”, before we manage any sort of rhythm. The repeated pull and push is tough on the hands, but by the time we slip back into port, we are all, mariners old and young, more aware of the effort that was required to be a Viking.
In some senses, little has changed. The city still revolves around the fjord. Roskilde Camping, at its south-east corner, enjoys the water from a different angle. There are kayaks to be paddled, swimming platforms to be leapt off and small, cosy cabins where you can tune out for a few days. We settle in, amid a further burble of European voices – many of the cars and caravans on the site have come up from Belgium and Holland – and find that our pace of life decelerates quickly. Perhaps this it as it should be, on the fringes of the 11th century.
We do, though, summon the energy for another burst of activity. Several cycle trails forge out along the edge of the fjord, offering even further angles on its beauty. We collect bikes from the campsite front office, and pedal out to explore. In doing so, we are pre-empting the riders of the Tour de France. Pandemics notwithstanding, the planet’s foremost cycling race tends to commence its journey on foreign terrain, and is beginning its 2022 edition in Copenhagen. Indeed, the second stage departs from Roskilde today.
We are not intending to be quite as fast as the professionals, or as direct. Instead, we pick up Panoramarute 430, which clings largely to the inlet’s south bank, meandering through the protected salt meadows of Skjoldungernes Land National Park. We slip past cornfields swaying in the breeze, and sweat and toil up gentle gradients towards the village of Herslev. But we are most agog where we cut through a dense patch of forest near Kattinge, only to halt in our tracks where the treeline parts suddenly, revealing the fjord again, all a-sparkle. The only sails in sight belong to yachts flirting with the afternoon, not longships heading off to war – but as the material billows, and the ropes snap to attention, the effect is much the same.
There are kayaks, swimming platforms and cosy cabins where you can tune out