Copenhagen Day Tour - part 2

Copenhagen 3/5
Second stop was the Viking Ship Museum where they have five ships which had been scuttled in the channel, by filling them with stones, to protect the town from attack – stop enemies getting to it. The displays detailed how they were found, then the process of raising them, preserving them piece by piece. I’ve copied this:

The five ships displayed in the Viking Ship Museum were sunk around the year 1070. They were originally built between 1024 and 1040. This has been established by studying the rings of the wood from the ships. It has also been established that the ships were built in Ireland, Norway and Denmark. This underlines the size of the Viking empire. The largest of the five ships is a Viking war ship that could carry 60 warriors on the famous Viking raids where we conquered England, Paris, Normandy and many other regions and towns across Western Europe. The other ships were cargo and fishing ships. The ships were raised from the seabed in 1962. The local fishermen had known about the ship wrecks for a long time before that. One additional ship actually got lost because the fishermen caught part of it in their nets and used it as fire wood during the second world war.

As you can see in the photos they are well set out, and there’s a replica ship built to scale by the looks of it where kids can dress up and pretend to be Vikings, sit on the boards to row the ship etc. Ellie loved it.

They had gaming pieces found in the area, copies of tapestries depicting Vikings, and a good photo description of how the replica, now in the marina next to the museum, was built. There were some other ships outside, one with school kids all squished onto the rowing benches, and a small ship with its sail up out in the channel. Also there are workshops where they show how things were done. Another worthwhile place to see, and not enough time to see it all unfortunately.

Benjie made a fair point about keeping to time – the tour takes roughly nine hours, they need to be on time for the pickup (we weren’t, had to wait several minutes for the last person to join us at the main departure place) and at each departure point because it’s timed for traffic, opening hours etc. We did have our time at Roskilde cut short a bit, and the last place was a rush because there’d been a traffic jam at one point. However, in the long run it was well worth doing the tour.

Keep reading for parts 3 and 4Read more