Møns mossies and Møns Klint

Despite our best efforts we still had not managed to settle down for a few days. Due to Rødvig's 'Ibiza moment' I felt less than perky this morning. Luckily our destination on the island of Møns was no more than a half hour's drive. The only place of any size on the island is Stege. We parked in its supermarket car park on the outskirts - Aldi and Super Brugsen shared the space so we visited both, provisions from the former, a few bottles of the much celebrated Møns craft beer from the latter.

We arrived at Camping Ulshavestrand about oneish. Reception was closed, opening for two hours in the morning and the late afternoon. Middle of the day arrivals were instructed to take a photo of a campsite plan taped to reception door , then take a walk to choose a spot, ticking your choice on the plan, then you were free to pitch-up and return to reception when it re-opened at four. From the impressive efficiency of the booking system and the fact the place was closed during 'quiet time' we should have been able to predict that the site was run by Germans.

It is in a beautiful location, with grassy pitches, a few trees dotted about, the whole site set behind a stretch of low dunes with paths directly to Ulshaves' white sand beach.

Time to stop, wind out the awning, unpack the outside kitchen, the weather is forecast to be warm and sunny, potentially a perfect spot. However, places are rarely perfect, even as we sung its praises relaxing in the sunshine a small but irritating downside wafted by. As well as ancient woodlands and beautiful beaches this part of Møns is famous as a birdwatching paradise. The salt flats are dotted with hides. Salt flats are full of stagnant pools; in addition to  rare waders they also attract mosquitoes by the million. I do get bitten, but my skin does not flare-up. Gill however comes out in big red blotches which are maddeningly itchy. It can make lovely places miserable for her. Potentially Møns was one such place.

Getting out and about does help, a moving target is trickier than a recumbent one. Next morning we unloaded the bikes and explored the nearby minor roads and country lanes in this part of Møns and the smaller island of Nyord connected to Ulshaves by a bridge.

Through the forest...

across the salt flats

through a field!

to Nyord's car free village. 

The town of Stege was about 6kms to the south of us, a roadside cycle track took us most of the way. It's a pleasant place, somewhat less significant than it used to be. 

A big brick gateway and the extensive remains of ramparts testify to the place's former status. In the late Middle Ages it was one of the most important ports in southern Denmark.

Ramparts

Much hyped heatwave

Cooler to cycle than walk.

Immediately to the north of the campsite there is an area of ancient woodland famous for wild orchids. We did not spot any, perhaps they flower in early spring. 

Traditional thatched cottages were scattered among the trees, some were timber-built looking like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.

Despite the mosquito problem has been good to be on a campsite over the past few days. Further south Europe was suffering a record breaking heatwave, Central France breaking the 45° barrier for the first time. Denmark was very much on the fringes of it, we had one sticky night where the temperature did not dip below 20° and the following day hovered around 30° It felt oppressive, but not truly scorching. The only negative effect we experienced was an increasingly blustery wind, probably the result of being on the cusp of the warmth to the south and cooler Arctic air north of us.

Costa del Baltic - Sitting outside was only possible with additional shading

The holiday season is definitely upon us. By the end of the second day the site was busier. It is definitely a phased invasion, at the moment mainly middle aged couples and younger people with toddlers in tow. Families with older kids will join us next week I suppose as schools in Germany and Scandinavia break for summer. Most of the new arrivals were German, in fact German new arrivals were definitely order of the day, as it seemed that most of the young German women on site were about to give birth to their second child at any moment. Demographically the population of Germany is in decline, apart from here where there is a kinder-boom.

The island's most famous site, Møns Klimt, was about 20kms from us, a little too far to cycle. We decided to visit it on the day we left the campsite and spend that night at Klimtholmhvn, a small harbour side stellpläts near the famous cliffs. This 'klimt' is taller than the one we visited a few days ago at Stevns. Because they are so spectacular the site is more developed. It boasts a big visitor centre complete with interactive display and fossil museum (114DK each), cafe, gift shop (lots of toy dinosaurs), wooden walkways through the woods and two dizzying staircases leading to the beach at the foot of the cliffs.

The centre is an impressive contemporary building. Maybe a smaller structure would have sufficed and some of the savings spent on asphalt for the 2.5km. 'forest road' that leads to the place. In wet weather I can imagine it could be tricky for a larger vehicle. The track is unmetalled, aggressively cambered, with sharp bends and short steep slopes.

We decided to skip the visitor centre, £30 to play with some animatronic dinosaurs and be told geological facts that we knew did not seem like good value. 

We walked to one of the viewpoints. You could barely see the famous cliffs through the foliage, judicious pruning would not come amiss. Though the wooden walkway makes the viewpoint wheelchair accessible, all you would see from a sitting position would be shrubs.

If you suffer from vertigo any cliff top walk is going to be a trial no matter how significant the geology. Gill did well, but even the relatively flat path on the clifftop posed some challenges for her. The 479 steps down to the beach was not an option. I volunteered to go myself, take as many pictures as I could and return with an interesting pebble or two.

Descending the steep staircase definitely would have presented an impossible barrier for Gill. It was no problem for me. The climb back was a different proposition. On the whole I don't really feel my age as my mid-sixties loom; I am not particularly fit, but in truth I never have been. By step number 300 I felt like an 80 year old. How did I know I had reached no. 300? Because some wag had picked up a piece of chalk from the beach and scrawled mischievous messages on the steps. For example, '250! you have passed halfway!' A few steps further up, 'Only joking! 180!' I was too crestfallen to photograph that, I did snap these messages though:

Time to go, after a brief tussle with the automatic exit barrier camera which became confused by our UK number plate, it was only a 15 minute drive to Klintholmhavn down a narrow side road from Mageby. Given how busy Møns Klint had been, we were concerned that the harbour parking might be full as we had no 'plan B'. In fact when we got there only two other motorhomes had parked-up, an enormous all terrain monster and a small camper. We parked in between the two; it made pleasing arithmetical sense.

Klintholmhavn seems more a small fishing port than a marina and the quayside had a pleasing jumble of tackle in various states of disrepair.

Though tiny, the village has a mini-Brugsen supermarket and a fresh fish shop on the quayside next to where the fishing boats dock. It was closed when we arrived but would open at 11am. tomorrow. We decided to stay here until then and buy something fresh off the boat for lunch.

It was another idyllic little harbour - more sunset pictures through a mesh of masts and rigging. Beyond the harbour the road ended at a long white beach, beautiful next morning in bright sunlight.

The only other place we have found similar fishing villages with motorhome parking was in Greece. In this respect Denmark has come as a complete surprise, a fully fledged prosperous Northern European country that retains a commitment to localism yet extends a wholehearted welcome to visitors. We will return I am sure.

From tomorrow we will definitely be heading homewards. We have changed our planned route. The Rödbyhavn to Puttgarden ferry was expensive at around £110. It also proved a tad difficult to find a crossing with space. I suspect we have timed our journey homes to coincide with the moment Germany and Scandinavian schools break-up. The toll across the Storebælt Bridge from Sjælland to Fyn is hardly cheap at £73, but at least it won't be fully booked. We decided to head back into Germany through Schleswig-Holstein, the way we entered Denmark a little over a month ago.

We woke to a beautiful day in Klintholmhavn. We made use of the marina shower block - the keypad code comes printed on the car park ticket - I had the men's place to myself, a good powerful shower with no time limited hot water, a rare thing in Scandinavia. 

A relaxed breakfast and a spot of blogging, then suddenly it was time to check out the fish shop. We could have bought some freshly filleted fish, but the fishmonger had only just cooked some fishcakes - it was a simpler alternative for lunch.

They were delicious, with a more solid 'cake-like' texture than the Yotam Ottelenghi recipe that Gill generally uses. She reckoned that potato flour had been used to give them extra body. I have a feeling she might experiment with that next time she makes them.

Time to go, it's always a poignant moment when you know you are heading home. It will have been a 62 day trip by the time we get back. A little less than average but it has felt longer and more intense because of the number of single night stopovers we have had. Also, new countries though exciting, are more demanding. It is time to head home, especially as in a week's time the summer season here will be in full swing and soon all those soulful, peaceful harbours I have written about will not be quite so tranquil.

There was one final thing I felt I must do before we left Møns, that was visit one of its celebrated painted churches. The Reformation ensured that most church decoration in Northwestern Europe was destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts who considered Biblical imagery idolatrous. By pure luck a clutch of late 15th Century fresco paintings survive almost intact in a number of churches on Møns. This is not because the island was unaffected by the Reformation. However when Protestant zealots decided to whitewash the vaults of the churches hereabouts the old painted ceilings were encrusted with a layer of dust and grime. Early last century, when scholars removed the 17th century whitewash, the late medieval frescoes beneath had been preserved perfectly, protected by a layer of ancient grime. Conservators from Denmark's national museum carefully cleaned the paintings which were revealed in all their medieval glory.

By chance our route off the island took us through Elmelunde. The church in the village has the most celebrated of the murals, the reason why the anonymous craftsman who created them across the island is known as the Elmelundemeister.

There was a small patch of rough ground to the side the church. I pulled over to take a photo. The building is typical of village churches on Møns, impeccably white, apparently much too big for the small settlement it dominates. The medieval population of Møns could well have been greater than it is now and being devout was not optional. Gill sees them as ghosts in the landscape; in a sense they are.

Elmelunde church occupies a small hill, it shares the space with a perfectly preserved Bronze Age burial mound. This exact spot has been revered by people for 3500 years. It is a special place.

The painted vaults strike you as amazing the moment you enter the nave, they are beautiful and unsettling in equal measure. At first glance they appear folksy and naive, more like an illustrated manuscript from the twelfth century than images produced a decade or two after the van Eyks' Ghent Altarpiece or the same time as the young Leonardo was apprenticed to Verocchio.

Their cartoon-like narrative style recalls early Gothic illustration; the iconography feels even older, a hellfire and damnation message reminiscent of a terrifying Romanesque sculpted tympanum designed to assert faith through fear.

Nevertheless the charm of the works are not entirely subsumed by their ideological intent. The white ground dotted with lithe linear figures looks embroidered rather than sketched, but homespun doesn't necessarily signal the innocuous.

Furthermore, on closer scrutiny the figures are not so anachronistic as they first appear. In the scene of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden their naked bodies have a hint of voluptuousness about them, it takes skill to do that in what is a simple line drawing. You get some sense that the Elmelundemeister was not entirely ignorant of developments in naturalism happening to the south.

The church is surrounded by a graveyard, simple at the front, but at the rear set in a beautiful flower garden, each plot surrounded by a low, carefully clipped hedge. A gardener was working in it weeding and pruning. Perhaps the church employs someone to tend the plots. The care lavished on the graveyard is touching, all the more because of the nearby Bronze Age mound. People are have regarded this place as sacred for 150 generations, the power of that is inescapable.

However, the monument is not simply 'awesome' as a visiting American might say, it is questionable too. I found myself mulling over a question as I wandered around the garden. Which of mankind's big ideas have had the most malign effects? The supremacy of European culture! That's a humdinger, spawning colonialism, the slave trade, Fascism, global capitalism, Jacob Reese-Mogg, all kinds evil stuff. 

The question that the Elmelunder murals raises concerns the notion of original sin. The sequence traces human history from 'The Fall' through Christ's redemptive sacrifice and  ending with the Last Judgement. It's difficult to envisage a more psychologically crippling set of myths, their main point being that humans are fundamentally flawed and require supernatural beings to intervene to sort them out. This is a keystone supporting two thousand years of imposed doctrine; the idea of Original Sin  has had a malign, de-humanising effect generally, but it has been catastrophic for women, providing a scriptural basis for their historically subservient position in Western culture.

Two young women entered the church as we were leaving. I wonder what they made of it? Did they simply admire the beautiful work, or did they find the imagery unsettling? I hope they did, because for all the place's beauty it promulgates a myth we need to refute.

Beautiful things are sometimes the most contradictory. If we come back here, and I hope we do, I might seek out some of the Elmelundemeister's other work. I may reject the message but I think he is a great draftsman and illustrator. Excellent too that the works remain in situ with not much fuss around them. You stumble upon them half by accident; it's what travel is about, not a must see bucket list but astonishing moments that come from nowhere.

The fish layer, Keats and Cold War relics...just one of those days.

It is less than 100 miles from where we are staying in the Copenhagen suburb of Brøndbyoster to the Rødbyhavn ferry to Puttgarden in Germany. We were in no hurry, our planned return date still well over two weeks hence, time to relax. We need to relax, by our standards at least it's been an intensive trip. Yesterday was day 45, during that time we have stopped in 29 different spots; twenty of those were one-nighters. We found a campsite site near Stege, on the island of Møns, with an Acsi discount it was about £20 per night, inexpensive by Scandinavian standards, we decided to head there and rest for a few days.

On the way we stopped for lunch at Stevns Klint, this part of Denmark has a world renowned chalk landscape, the sea cliffs in particular have a unique dark stripe running through the pure white rock face. This marks the 'fish layer' created by billions of fossilised sea creatures from a moment of rapid climate change around 65 million years ago caused by a large meteorite striking the earth. The mass extinction that followed wiped out the dinosaurs and most other animal life. It created the space that mammals filled. It seemed like a must see place.

At first sight it seemed the car park at Stevns Klint was full, then we spotted a grassy overspill area behind it. We headed there. The car park was busy for a sad reason, a large crowd had gathered outside the little church by the cliffs. Parked outside the church gate was a row of gleaming motorcycles, Harleys, big Hondas and trikes. A biker's funeral. I reflected gloomily that avid bikers probably attend more funerals than most people, apart from priests and undertakers.

We had lunch and then followed the way marked paths along the cliffs. From the viewpoints the thin dark stripe running through the chalk face is plain to see. It is only visible because of glaciation and the changes in sea level that followed. We live on a very dynamic planet and the predominance of our species is a mere moment in its long history. I don't think we can cope too well with that stark fact, denial of it is writ large through much of our mythology.

The 'fish layer' is the dark line below the overhang

The top soil is a mixture of chalk and clays, it results in a more densely wooded landscape than you find on the downs and wolds of England. Even the cliff tops had scraps of woodland nestling in the more sheltered spots.

Coastal footpaths run north and south from Stevns Klint. We opted to walk north towards Tommestrup, we could see the tip of its lighthouse peeping above a low ridge. We like lighthouses.

The path ran between cornfields and the cliff edge. Wild flowers edged the fields, long houses and barns among the copses that dotted the landscape looked so familiar, the resemblance to Suffolk is uncanny.

As we meandered through a thicket of woodland we heard a nightingale. Nightingales on a shadowy afternoon in early summer, it was exactly this which prompted Keats' famous poem as he sat in a friend's garden in Hampstead exactly 200 years ago. His nightingale....

" In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease."

So did ours.

Would it be taught in a GCSE English class these days? I doubt it, the focus is on poems that are relevant, but poetry is not journalism, relevance is not the point, it should be absorbing, unsettling, immersive, enriching - something that stays with you for life.

We reached the lighthouse. Information boards explain in detail why this remote spot was significant. The straights are narrow. Sweden is nearby, so close that the Oresun bridge is plain to see and Gill's phone locked into a new network 'Welcome to Sweden' it texted as we stood under a Danish flag.

A couple of local volunteers act as guides. We learnt how the first lighthouses were staffed by young women who were felt to be more reliable than men at tending the lights. Later when the place was taken over by the military the light was automated, a diesel generator from the 1950s (British built!) is still in working order - we were able to press the starter button and the thing clattered into life - an ear splitting din.

As well as the lighthouse there is a small radar mast on the headland. It is an insignificant spot with a significant history, as the plaque explained.

I like the idea that the first person to realise that nuclear catastrophe had been averted may not have been a CIA analyst or Pentagon chief, but some lowly Danish soldier sitting in a draughty wooden cabin staring at blips on a snowy radar screen.

How long were we at Stevns Klint? Two hours at most. It had been absorbing, far more interesting than we could have ever imagined, which is why we travel I think, to stumble across the extraordinary that is hidden amongst the mundane.

It was now too late to reach the camp site at Stege. Another harbourside parking beckoned, this one a few kilometres south of Stevns Klimt at Rødvig.

These places are delightful, this one had all the usual facilities, but a marina book exchange into the bargain. The harbour bar looked tempting, but we cracked open a couple of craft beers we'd bought in Copenhagen.

As well as being interesting to drink many have quirky designer labels, including one that was distinctly Dionysian, or Sapphic perhaps.

This morning we had been in Copenhagen, it had been an eventful, interesting day. We were in bed by 10.30, soon after the music from the local bar came to an abrupt halt. All was quiet, just the lapping of waves, barely audible. A little earlier we had wondered, it is beautifully peaceful here, but what do young people do, there seems little in the way of youth culture in rural Denmark.

The DJ session at the nearby hotel began a few minutes before midnight. It continued until around three, I remember thinking at some point, half asleep, perhaps that is what is meant, technically speaking, as a big fat baseline.