Sunday the day of rest, as i demonstrated by sleeping in until almost midday! though i hadn't intended too and didn't realise it until i woke up.
Quick brunch and then we were off on a car trip, we went to the Lejre research center, which is a place dedicated to maintaining and studying the "medieval" danish way of life. It apparently started out as a tiny group of 4 people, but has steadily grown to over 50 members in the present day. Some schools pay for their students to attend and live there for a week, as do certain university students of various subjects, along with the volunteers who live there most of the time.
The village environment that has been constructed is an accurate portrayal of danish life in the period 200BC to 200AD with family long houses and many smaller buildings grouped together, rather than large singular communal buildings (of upto 50 metres in length) which had been the norm earlier.
The building trend changed due to changes in the climate, as the land got colder over the years, larger houses were harder to keep warm and thus individual families moved to their own houses, taking the goats they personally owned and living with them. This also explains the small doors, people weren't tiny, just smaller doorways reduced heat loss. Also all the doors in the houses openned inward, to help people dig themselves out from being snowed in, which was a possibility when they only had a 3ft tall door.
Round the back of the village was the bog, where a man had been found so well preserved that he still had the rope round his neck on which he had been hung 2000 years ago. Research shows that slaves who washed their masters in the clean water near the bog (and thus saw them naked) were sacrificed here, along with people who "defiled their bodies" which was the roman term for being a homosexual.
Maria had stayed here for a week as something her school deemed compulsory and she informed me that they were quite strict. If you came to stay you wore the period clothing, including the difficult to wear leather shoes. No thermals no mater what the weather, and you put up with the conditions, which while sitting inside the houses i saw cobwebs the thickness of modern day curtains.
Not something for my mother then, who has problems with simple camping
