Short stopover at Roskilde, Denmark — July 2010 — Part 1
I had spent a long weekend at the end of June at the home of Matthijs, yet another acquaintance from my time at Amsterdam. He lives near Nakskov on the island of Lolland in Denmark. I’ll tell you about my stay there another time.
On the following Wednesday I drove the 100 miles nor’-nor’-east to Roskilde (“Rosskeeleh”; silent ‘d’), which is on the neighbouring and larger island of Sjaelland or Zealand.
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The crossing was via the Farø bridges, a pair of handsome structures opened in 1985. Their architect was Erik Villefrance, who was Danish, despite his surname.
(Jenny held the steering wheel while I took this picture, so it was perfectly safe.)
Farø south bridge
My immediate destination was Roskilde Camping. This is a 300-place campsite that ranges over grassed slopes down to the sandy shore of Roskilde Fjord. Facilities were good and included a convenience store and canoes and kayaks for hire.
Kayaks for rent, Roskilde Camping
There was also a pancake trailer, whose owner was conveniently staying at the campsite. I had a beef one, which was filling and tasty.
Freddy’s pancake bar
On my way in, at the southern outskirts of the city, I had passed the site for the annual pop music festival. It’s one of the largest in Europe and the crowds were already assembling. Fortunately, the festival grounds are well out of earshot of the campsite.
I was in the area for Roskilde’s other two major attractions – the Viking ship museum and the cathedral. I will talk about the cathedral in part 2 of this post.
Viking ships at Roskilde
At its southern end, where the city lies, Roskilde Fjord provides a broad and shallow natural harbour. The waterway narrows abruptly as it goes north for over 20 miles, leading eventually to the Kattegat and, thence, the North Sea. It was an ideal place for Viking raiders and traders to set out from and to seek shelter in. Roskilde was consequently an important trading centre (and was Denmark’s capital).
These advantages also made the city vulnerable to forays from elsewhere in Scandinavia. The Vikings usually voyaged not as a unified force but as independent small groups, often raiding each others’ settlements. To impede attacking fleets, in the late 11th century (about the time of the Battle of Hastings) the local people sank a group of five ships in the fjord. This was near Skuldelev, about 12 miles north of Roskilde.
These days known as the Skuldelev ships, their remains were excavated from 1957 onwards. Here are some details from Åge Skjelborg, one of the archaeologists. (There is no Skuldelev 4. That designation was given to remains that turned out to be part of Skuldelev 2.)
The ship museum
The Skuldelev ships formed the basis of the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde. It was built in 1969 and is now Denmark’s national maritime museum for the mediaeval and older periods. There’s a list of activities here, with an expansible map.
Main building. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde
In a plot twist you would deride in a novel, the remains of further nine Viking ships came to light when the museum was being extended in 1997. One vessel, at nearly 120 feet (36 metres), was the longest Viking warship ever discovered. It has been designated the Roskilde 6 ship.
Where the ‘new’ ships were found is now Museum Island, containing workshops, classrooms and a cafeteria.
Workshops and classrooms. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde
My visit
At 10 o’clock the next morning, I drove the three miles to the museum. This was not laziness; it was what I always do with places that don’t accept dogs. Jenny’s used to staying in the van and soon curls up for some Zs on the passenger seat. Dogs are expert sleepers but never miss a chance for more practice.
There was plenty of parking, all free, so in I wandered, cameras to hand. The entrance is on Museum Island and I looked around there first. It holds a collection of wooden buildings, each containing something neb*-worthy.
*An English and Scottish slang word from around Viking times, meaning to pry into the affairs of others. Shame it’s dropped out of general use. I do lots of nebbing while on my travels (but without, I hope, being nebbish). A neb is a beak or nose.
One of the workshops contained this minty-crisp replica of a 1908 eel-fishing boat, being built for a private customer. Wonderful work. There’s more about it (in Danish) here, including a video, and here.
Workshop with eel drifter, Viking Ship Museum
Elsewhere, outdoors, were two rows of wooden plant boxes, each containing a young tree of a kind used in building Viking ships. Attached to each box was a label explaining in Danish and English the characteristics of that species and how it was used in a ship. (The labelling was exemplary throughout the museum.) So simple but such an effective method for giving people information in a way that will stick in their minds.
How and why oak is used
Much of the instruction is practical, especially for children. They can even write their name in runic (mine’s below). School parties are regular visitors and anyone under 18 gets in free. I had a quick look at some of the activities but didn’t linger, as I wanted to get to the main building, the Viking Ship Hall.
“Roger” in runic
The Viking Ship Hall
This large modernist building is a showroom for the five Skuldelev ships. Its architect was the Dane, Erik Christian Sørensen, who followed the principles of New Brutalism in creating the hall. Here, in an example of New Trivialisation, is a Lego model of it.
The virtues of Sørensen’s design show themselves when you enter the hall. All five ships sit lengthways along it, illuminated mainly by light from the fjord. The floor is on two levels and a gallery runs around the landward side, giving clear views from above.
Main hall. Viking ship museum, Roskilde
None of the ships was recovered whole, so the remains of each are arranged over a metal armature that approximates the vessel’s original size and shape. You can see a typical result in this picture of Skuldelev 1, an ocean-going trader from Norway.
Remains of an ocean-going trader
In other parts of the main hall are models of boats, more children’s activities, and information panels about the Vikings and their remarkable achievements. There’s a well-stocked shop on the gallery.
It was a privilege to learn about the cleverness and craftsmanship involved in creating these vessels, designed nearly 1,000 years ago. I could imagine them surging across the waves under the power of sail or oar. It seemed a shame, then, that the last service they should give in Viking times was to lie, submerged and sullen, in the path of other craft. On the other hand, if they hadn’t been so treated we might not be able to see them today at Roskilde, where they perform a more cerebral duty.
Replica boats
To aid our, and its, understanding, the museum has built working full-sized replicas of all five Skuldelev boats. Its copy of Skuldelev 1 is called Ottar.
Using plans from the Roskilde museum, the Norwegian explorer Ragnar Thorset also built a replica of Skuldelev 1. He called it Saga Siglar (“Saga Sailor”) and sailed it to Greenland, then Newfoundland and then around the world. There are details here.
I knew the Vikings had settlements throughout the British Isles but I was still surprised to learn that Skuldelev 2, the largest of the original set of sunken ships, came from Dublin. (It’s the one nearest the camera in the long view above.)
The museum named this replica Havhingsten fra Glendalough (“Sea Stallion of Glendalough”). With a 65-man crew, it sailed to Dublin in June 2007 and back the next year. When I visited, it was taking a breather on the lawn near the car park.
Sea Stallion of Glendalough, Roskilde
Adjoining Museum Island is a small harbour filled with boats from all ages remade in the workshops, with the occasional ‘guest’ boat. There’s a list here. You can take trips on most of them. This enthusiast’s site shows more pictures.
The example below is Helge Ask (“Helge Ash”, as in tree), a replica of Skuldelev 5. The colour scheme imitates those shown in the Bayeux Tapestry. (Scroll to the right; halfway along you’ll see them being built, apparently by giants.) There are at least two other modern versions of Skuldelev 5.
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This was the last in a quartet of outstanding museums I went to in Denmark, the others being at Trapholt, Moesgård and Egeskov Castle. I couldn’t pick a favourite.
Next time, I talk about Roskilde’s cathedral.
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More reading
My electronic library of shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls continues to grow. It’s nearly a year since my “Not so close readings” post. In that time, I have added at least 40 books to my Kindle reader.
Amazon is encouraging the process with its Kindle Daily Deal. This offers a different popular book each day at 99p, a charity shop price. I’m also still raiding campsite libraries for secondhand real books for that or less. Here are some of my discoveries — electronic and paper.
Nordic invasion
Scandinavian writers are becoming more popular, partly as a result of television adaptations and partly because of Stieg Larrson. I read his Millennium trilogy straight through and found the stories exciting but vicious. I’ve since forgotten the plot(s) and most of the characters. It’s Chinese restaurant writing.
More memorable are the Martin Beck books by Maj Sjöwall and the late Per Wahlöö. These are ‘police procedurals’, modelled on Ed McBain’s novels (see my previous article). Although written mostly in the 1960s and 70s, they describe some of the problems affecting Sweden (and other Scandinavian) countries today – immigration, racism, unfettered capitalism, destruction of heritage.
That might make these books sound gloomy but the social criticism is the background to a drolly entertaining series of stories. There’s a recent article about them and their authors here, in The Guardian.
Other Scandinavian writers worth reading (which means they have been sympathetically translated) include Jo Nesbø from Norway, Karin Fossum (ditto) and Håkan Nesser from Sweden.
The English, the English, the English are best!
So chorused Flanders and Swann, as wittily as always. (Words here; spot the typo.) That doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to modern thriller writers. I thought I’d try some of the popular English detectives whenever I saw them secondhand. The experiment didn’t go well.
First was P.D. James’s The Private Patient, one of her Adam Dalgleish stories. I ran out of adjectives – it was tedious, predictable, stereotyped, over-long, stagey, stodgy, smug, censorious, snobbish and patronising. I couldn’t stand it any more and stopped a quarter of the way through. This woman would be the perfect ‘writer in residence’ at The Daily Telegraph.
Next was one of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse tales (or, as we used to call the television character, Inspector Morose). Very dull; I can’t even remember the title. Soon back on the site’s shelves.
After that came Inspector Wexford, in Ruth Rendell’s Road Rage. Better written than the previous two but also plodding. Same destination.
I then read, on Kindle, Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning. What a contrast! Sharp, comic, angry, irreverent and anti-establishment – every page worth reading.
Brookmyre’s cynical hero, Jack Parlabane, is an investigative journalist* with a talent for breaking and entering. Much of the dialogue is in pungent lowland Scots — think Ian Rankin with the brakes off.
*The first of those two words should be redundant but seldom is in these days of press release masseurs and politicians’ messenger boys.
Are the Scottish best, perhaps?
Possibly, except for the late Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series – English author; Italian hero. Zen is an occasionally venal Venetian policeman, who finds himself pitted against corrupt superiors as often as against criminals. Sometimes the two are in cahoots.
Each book in the series puts Zen in a different area of Italy, which Dibdin describes atmospherically. Part of the pleasure of these stylishly written and often funny books is keeping track of Zen’s moves in his game within the game. He doesn’t always win.
A trio of colonials
Finally, three American authors. C.J. Box has written a successful and continuing series about Joe Pickett. His is an unusual hero, in being a wildlife ranger (in Wyoming) and in being a faithful, sober and conscientious employee.
Box is obsessed with branding, but not of cattle. He goes into tedious detail about makes of clothing, cars and weaponry. It’s non-visual product placement. Nevertheless, the plots are ingenious and Box is good on wide-open spaces and the ethics of the (still wild) West.
I recently picked up an unconsidered trifle in the shape of Mute Witness. It’s the book from which the 1968 cult film, Bullitt, was made. The author is Robert L. Pike, a pen-name of Robert L. Fish. (Working hard on the disguise, as you see.)
There are many differences from the film in locale, action and characters. Even the car chase is missing. Despite all these, the essentials of the plot remain and are told well. It’s good short detective yarn, well worth the 50p I spent on it.
By the way, if you watched the film, did you see how often in the car chase Bullitt’s rampaging, bellowing, tyre-smoking Ford Mustang – also not in the book – overtook a slow-moving green VW Beetle? I made it at least three times. There’s more about the film’s continuity errors here.
Finally, there is Greg Iles’s Dead Sleep. It’s pacy, gripping and preposterous. Good fun, in other words. I’ll try more of his work.
That’s it!
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Grafham, Cambs — November 2011
The Camping and Caravanning Club has a quiet little campsite at Grafham, near Huntingdon, where I spent a week. It’s close to the village and half a mile from the reservoir at Grafham Water. Footpaths and bridle paths criss-cross the area.
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There’s nothing much in the village – no shop, pub or garage, just some houses, a church and an Indian restaurant (in what was the Montagu Arms pub). The reservoir is the star of the show.
Before taking its present name, Grafham Water was first called Diddington Reservoir (after the brook whose valley it flooded in 1966) then Grafham Reservoir. It’s a mature lake now, covering 1,500 acres (600 hectares) and with a well-vegetated shore.
Willows at Grafham
Buildings dot the perimeter. They include a visitor centre, bike hire depot, pet food shop, restaurant and sailing club. A large aeration tower, shown in all three photos, stands in the water near the northern shore.
A popular local activity is birdwatching, the lake being both a nature reserve and a Site of Special Scientific Interest (or SSSI).
On a couple of evenings, while walking Jenny, I stopped to listen to an early evening recital from a Song Thrush that was serenading the neighbourhood. (A friend, John. identified it for me from a recording I made with my mobile phone.) The thrush’s song is wonderful at any time but in the dark and that late in the year, it was entrancing.
Like many of our wild birds, its numbers have declined, falling to half what they were 40 years ago. See here for more data on it and other species.
Fishing is another favourite pastime at Grafham, the water containing Trout and some Pike and Zander. The fishing I saw was either from a boat or on foot.
Goin’ fishin’, Grafham Water
Are they biting today?
I saw no coarse fishermen by the waterside. You know the type – slouched motionless on a folding seat, surrounded by a cartload of paraphernalia and looking depressed.
Angling is reckoned to be the most popular participant sport in Britain, with over a million people engaging in it regularly. That means big business for owners of water rights and suppliers of equipment and bait.
The equipment makers have persuaded many fishermen that they can’t follow their hobby properly unless they have the latest gear and newest gadgets. It’s the same as with golf, hiking, photography, cycling and, of course, caravanning. Marketing works.
Bletchley Manor
I recently remade contact with Peter, whom I’d worked with about 10 years ago but had lost touch with. We agreed to meet, Peter suggesting we do so at Bletchley Park, the wartime code-breaking centre near Milton Keynes.
Formally known as the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), Bletchley Park employed over 9,000 people at its busiest, yet its existence was a closely held secret. With the aid of the first computers in the world, cryptographers were able to decode up to 4,000 messages a day from all branches of the German, Japanese and Italian military.
The centre’s contribution to the Allied war effort was immense, yet the world did not know about it until the 1970s. Wikipedia (for once) provides a good and detailed account.
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I knew a little about the place, having read Robert Harris’s book, Enigma, and watched the film based on it. They’re fine entertainment but you can’t rely on works of fiction for guidance. (U-571, anyone?)
Peter came with his wife, Karen. They live not far away and had been several times before but this was my first visit. We met on a sunny Sunday morning in the booking hall, which was thronging with visitors.
Our first stop was in the same building, to see a copy of a Bombe decoding machine being demonstrated. Bombe is a nonce name, supposedly deriving from the Polish name of a different sort of decoding device and in turn jokingly based on the name of an ice-cream (think bombe surprise).
The Bombe was the brainchild of that ill-starred genius, Alan Turing. Once its design was stabilised, it went into production. British Tabulating Machines, a forerunner of ICL (now, ironically, part of Fujitsu), built over 200 Bombes at its factory at Letchworth. Most were destroyed after the war.
Bombe_ardier (one of the demonstrators)
Back of a Bombe
The Bombe was whirring and rattling away, working its magic on a piece of text from a German Enigma code machine. It reminded me of this much earlier device, which you can see at Coldharbour Mill at Uffculme, in Devon. (Worth a visit if you’re down that way.)
Spinning machine. Coldharbour Mill
Both machines were noisy, smelly, dirty and dangerous to use, and required constant fettling, usually over long hours, by young people with nimble fingers. At Bletchley Park (and its five outstations), Wrens did the work. At the mill, and at others like it throughout the country, it was mainly children.
Where the devices also differ, apart from in their purpose, is that the spinning machine is wholly mechanical (and was driven by steam-powered belts). The Bombe is electro-mechanical, reliant on electrical switches and relays to spin its own sort of yarn.
Some other devices in the museum, such as the Colossus computer, used valves. These were faster but also expensive and fragile and gave out heat, sometimes in bothersome quantities. Valves are hard to get hold of today but the museum gets regular donations from attic clearers.
(The transistor did not exist until after the war. It revolutionised computing, telecommunications and many other aspects of modern life. Everything from power stations to wristwatches now relies on these tiny devices.)
In the same wing as the Bombe was a collection of German coding machines, including several Enigmas in glass cases. The Bombes and other devices at Bletchley were there to reveal the riddles wrapped in a mystery that the Enigmas produced. (Churchill was a firm supporter of the activities at Bletchley and visited often)
Upstairs in the same block was a charming museum of wartime toys and household furniture and fittings from the time. I remembered much of it, which makes me feel ancient.
Wartime kitchen
Peter jokingly remarked that the housewife pictured is an untidy worker. She has also left the fridge door open. (Yes, I know it’s for show.)
One of the exhibits in the toy museum was a pre-war kit for making lead casts. On the box was this warning: “Please ask your mother which saucepan you can use before melting the lead.” I can’t see that being allowed to go on sale today!
Elsewhere in the museum
We next went to the manor house, stopping for a light lunch in Hut 4, next to it. Today, the mansion is a conference and wedding centre as well as housing some Churchill memorabilia. Pictures and photographs hang on the wood-panelled walls.
Inside Bletchley Manor
I thought the house unattractive. It had been built in a hotchpotch of over-ornate styles and was gloomy inside. None of that matters, really, since it was its historical significance we were there to absorb, not its architectural qualities.
The wartime buildings cluster around the Victorian manor house and meander off to the north east. Some of the code-breakers worked in simple wooden huts. Others were in low concrete structures made in the usual spartan War Department style. The contrast with the mansion is stark.
Huts at Bletchley Park
Our next, and final, stop was at the Colossus display. This is another rebuilding project undertaken by enthusiasts. Here is a BBC video about the project that also gives you an idea of the context within which Colossus operated.
A different charity runs the Colossus section; it’s only £1 extra for oldies. Before you get to the computer, there is this long room full of other equipment.
Cryptogubbins
There were demonstrations in progress here as well, but my attention was wandering by then (and the Colossus demonstrator had an unfortunate speaking style).
I liked it
The technicalities of the machines on display would have gripped me when I was younger but not these days. Besides, I know I can always read about that sort of stuff afterwards.
The key was seeing the machines working and doing so in situ. It gave me what I went there for – a fuller appreciation of the remarkable achievements of the people who worked at Bletchley.
In that, the museum succeeds brilliantly. The state of the buildings, the homeliness of some of the displays and the low-key enthusiasm everywhere lend the place an authenticity that a more professional operation could only fake. Everyone gave visitors a friendly welcome, even the chap at the gate.
I of course also enjoyed meeting Peter and Karen and going round with them. We had a relaxing afternoon and managed to fit in a lot of catching up.
There’s some lottery money possibly coming the museum’s way and some from Google, which is sort of good news. I hope the place doesn’t become too smoothly polished. It’s its makeshift and amateurish air that is a large part of its charm.
The museum wouldn’t exist if it were not for the work of those amateurs (in both senses). They correctly saw that this is a national asset and we have much to be grateful to them for.
Successive Governments had suppressed information about the work at Bletchley and destroyed many of the machines and their designs. They left most of the buildings to rot or be sold off to developers. The people working there were even required to keep their activities secret until 30 years after the war. It was a poor way to thank them for helping to save the nation.
You can’t cram in everything at Bletchley with one visit, that’s clear from this list, but if you’re anywhere near you should go at least once. You’ll feel differently afterwards about some aspects of the Second World War and you’ll see what geniuses, and ordinary people, can achieve under pressure.
Prices are reasonable and the guidebook is worth the money.
When I got back to Grafham, I bought the Kindle version of Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park…. It’s light on technology and concentrates on the people and what it was like living and working there. I’m already halfway through it and have enjoyed what I’ve read.