Those who want to hike are usually drawn to the Alps, Nepal, the Way of St. James or at least to a famous long-distance hiking trail such as the Kungsleden, which leads to the North Cape. But the real adventures await elsewhere, where there are no hordes of hikers. Where the landscape is unknown and the hiking trail is often not even signposted.
Denmark is not a classic hiking country, but the Danish Baltic Sea island of Møn is famous for its chalk cliffs - and a wonderful hiking destination for the curious. The Baltic Sea island now also has a hiking route that has been awarded top marks. The Camønoen is a 175-kilometer circular trail around the island of Møn, but it also leads over the islands of Bogø and Nyord and has the lovely title of "friendliest hiking trail in the Danish kingdom".
A pilgrims road
Anyone who wants to walk the 430 kilometers on the Munkevejen from Rødbyhavn to Roskilde in Denmark as a pilgrim on foot or by bike will not only get to know another European country, but will also find a magical, idyllic and - still - lonely natural landscape that touches, relaxes and makes you happy.
The Munkevejen is actually a cycle path that stretches for over 430 kilometers from Rødbyhavn to Roskilde. But suddenly it appears here on Mon: in the middle of a magical, idyllic and lonely natural landscape that we walk through on the way to the west coast.
The hike suddenly becomes a pilgrimage in a time when individual trips with luggage are the norm in favor of group hikes with group pressure and luggage transport. Not that the Monk's Path suddenly reveals a spiritual component. No, it doesn't. But you get a sense of times gone by when Christianization was slowly progressing in northern Europe.
The oldest church
Elmelunde Church, for example, is the oldest stone church on Møn. It dates from around 1075. The church has an impressive location with a wonderful view, and the Bronze Age mound indicates that the place has always been a center of worship.
Towards the end of the 13th century, the "Elmelundeværkstedet" ("the workshop of Elmelunde") created the first paintings in this church, giving the famous fresco painters their name. They are crazy pictures, line drawings full of creativity that cannot be seen anywhere else. The legions of hymn books on the shelves testify to the locals' faith, which is so modern.
But along the way there are also impressive documents from much earlier religious schools. A long mound bears witness to an earlier society without kings, and would not be particularly noticeable if it were not for a sign pointing to it. According to the old legend of King Green and his wife Fane, it was also known as Grøn Jægers Høj (Green Hunter's Hill) or Fanesalen (Fane Hall).
Huge stones
However, these names come from much later times and should explain this old monument, of which no one knew who built it and why. And how! The stones are huge, and there are no such rocks anywhere.
The people of that time must have transported the huge boulders from far away, in the Stone Age, when society was made up of scattered villages whose inhabitants only laid claim to their own cultivated land. There was no supra-regional ruler of the individual families at that time, nor was there a King Green, who was only invented by later generations to explain where it all came from.
This made the ties of kinship within the families all the more important. Family ties could be the reason for the large and centralized cult sites that existed in the Stone Age, and for the grave goods in the burial mounds and passage graves. Shared sacrificial rites strengthened ancestral ties.
The Sømarke dolmen
Møn is full of such buildings. The Sømarke dolmen, for example, which was named after the nearby village, is a dismantled round dolmen from the Stone Age around 3,400 BC. The burial chamber, built of stones, was originally embedded in an earth mound; however, this was dismantled before 1880, when the Danish National Museum first registered the burial site, so that the stones could be reused.
The curbstones that enclosed the mound were lost at that time, and the large capstones above the burial chamber were chipped off. As a result, the burial site remains in ruins. What an outrage.
But what remains is still admirable. A narrow entrance led from the south-eastern grave foot to the chamber and on the large capstone above the chamber entrance you can see 445 worked bowls from the subsequent Bronze Age (1700 -500 BC). 10 bowls can also be seen at the upper end of one of the supporting stones supporting the chamber. The upper end of the large capstone has 3 bowls.
Back to Bronze Age
In the Bronze Age, the bowls were the most common rock carvings and are known as symbols of infamy. These stones must therefore have been visible in the Bronze Age. The number of original megalithic graves in Denmark is estimated at 25,000. Ten percent of these are now known and protected by law. They are listed as historical monuments.
Similarly, the Mosasaurus, which can grow up to 15 meters long, lived in the Late Cretaceous period 70 million years ago and was the most dangerous predator in the sea of that period. A Mosasaurus was able to attack any animal, including other mosasaurs; this is why it was called 'the tyrannosaur of the sea'.
A monumental monster
Its teeth were cone-like, only slightly curved and designed to tear flesh and bone, as in the case of this monster, found in a phosphate mine in the Negev desert in Israel in 1993, can be seen in Hjeml Church, the white sister of Elmelunde Church. The animal was about 12 meters long and weighed seven tons. Why here? Well, three teeth of the Mosasaurus species were found in the chalk cliffs of Møn - the monster was Danish.
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