Bornholm

We spent the week before last in Bornholm. For those of you unacquainted, it's a small island in the middle of the Baltic Sea, famous for its round churches, handblown glass, local produce, and of course smoked herring! You get to it by driving to Sweden, taking a short boat trip, and then technically arriving back in Denmark again... Along with Skagen, it's a place you should visit should you be in Denmark for an extended length of time...

I started contemplating this post on the veranda of the summer house we were staying in, whilst overlooking the sea on a warm and sunny evening. It was supposedly our last day on earth, and I remember thinking there must be worse places to spend our last remaining hours! Pleasantly surprised(!) to find ourselves still very much on earth the following morning, we set about exploring this mellow rock.


We started off with The Hammershus (apparently the largest castle ruin in Northern Europe), which is in a pretty stunning location. It has quite a gruesome history though, and I like to think that life may have been made slightly more tolerable by the amount of beer they had rationed to drink each day! If you aren't fussed about castle ruins, then I would recommend a walk around the base instead, which is spectacular (although the walk is quite demanding in parts - this may have been thanks to keeping track of two small people however!). When we visited, the ground was covered in carpets of beautiful white flowered wild garlic (or Ramsløg as it's called here). If you come across it and fancy making something with it, there's a great recipe here from the brilliant Amatar Vegetar.

Should you you be lucky enough, you might also hear Bornholm's exclusive Laughing Frogs here (see, they not only have the "happiest" people in Europe, they also have the most cheerful amphibians!!)! There are tree-frogs too, but we didn't see any of those in the wild unfortunately, only at the excellent Natur Bornholm Museum which is well worth a visit.


Smoke-houses are the main point of refreshment, and traditionally smoked herring is the order of the day. Being near Gudshejm, we had to try Sol-over-Gudshejm, a local smorrebrød of smoked herring on rugbrød, served with radish, onion and topped with a raw egg yolk, quite appetising compared to the surrounding school trip's lunch, which consisted of a whole smoked herring, accompanied by rugbrød, pork fat and salt, but they were all tucking in! Gudshejm itself reminded me very much of Cornwall, in fact a lot of Bornholm did (which isn't a bad thing obviously!). The only slight irritant were the coach loads of visiting cruise ship passengers (hailing from the Land of Pillar-Box Red Hair Dye by the looks of things), but they were only there for an hour or so before they were ferried off to their next destination...

Svaneke was probably our favourite town on Bornholm, and is also famous for it's chicken pooping contests (where a grid is drawn on the ground and bets are taken on which number the chicken will poop in first!), which we didn't see unfortunately! Its winding roads are full of beautiful half-timbered houses, that are home to interesting shops, and a couple of very decent restaurants in keeping with it's passion for local produce, not to mention excellent icecream parlours, and a very good brewery (I would highly recommend the chocolate stout, it's delicious (and according to them it's also very good served over vanilla ice-cream!)!


There are hundreds of ancient stone engravings dotted around the island. They were carved into huge granite rocks, and some of them date back thousands of years. They are definitely worth seeking out, and even the children found them intriguing (although they did want to know if the fat man's boat sank (see pic!))!. The drawings have been coloured in red, mainly to stop people from standing on them, but to be honest it would be much harder to see them otherwise. Together with the Round Churches, and the Knights Templar myths surrounding them, Bornholm is quite a mystical place at times.

As one of my favourite creatures, I think I will always remember Bornholm for the thousands of hares that roam the land, I have never seen so many in my life. On one occasion I managed to get quite close to a sleeping hare, and hoped to take a really good picture without disturbing it. It was so well camouflaged it proved to be quite a hard task, so I slowly edged closer and closer, until I took one more tiny step... and fell waist deep into a rather large (and also well camouflaged) ditch. The hare woke with a start, and not surprisingly ran like the wind. This was not quite the picture I had been hoping for...

Skagen

We decided before we moved here that what little spare time we had we would use to explore Scandinavia, and last week we began to do just that! Our first proper trip away from Copenhagen was great, Skagen is just beautiful. Famous for its special light that has attracted artist's for hundreds of years, it is situated on the very northern tip of Jutland and is the most northerly point of Denmark. Its beaches stretch for miles and totally live up to a child's ideal of what a beach should be like, with shells galore and various interesting sea-creatures to investigate.
We booked the holiday in what seemed like the depths of winter, so had quite forgotten exactly what lay in store, so we were pleasantly surprised that the cottage that was waiting for us was actually really nice, and only 500 metres walk from the beach. We spent the week enjoying the sunshine and exploring what Skagen and Nord Jylland has to offer(which is quite a lot!). As well as the fabulous beaches, (which I know I keep going on about, but these are some of the best beaches I have ever seen, and best of all they were almost completely empty, have you ever seen a picture of some English beaches at the height of summer? You are totally spoilt for choice here and the dunes surrounding them are just as stunning) we visited the Tilsandede Kirke (the church buried in sand), and partook in the Danish tradition of visiting Grenen so that we could stand with feet in two different seas, quite a strange sight! It was probably the only time we encountered a big crowd of people during our entire trip! We took the lazy route and got the Sandormen,a tractor-pulled coach up to the tip and back again. With a tractor mad three year old we wouldn't have had an option even if we had wanted to walk...

Being married to a food enthusiast, we searched out local food where and when we could. There's obviously lots of seafood to be had, and we found one particularly good fishmonger in Hirtshalls, a place also famous for its North Sea Aquarium. My husband asked if they had any sea bass and they weren't quite sure what it was, so I helpfully directed them to the huge poster of fish species on the wall. My eyesight is obviously failing me, as I thought I had read sea bass as the English name for a fish underneath a picture, but I obviously hadn't looked at the picture properly, you can just imagine the hilarity(!) when it turned out to be a Klumpfiske, aka a Sun Fish. I couldn't have eaten a whole one anyway, and later we saw several in the Aquarium itself and they are just too cute to eat. If I had room for a big aquarium in our house, that would be my pet fish of choice. We had monk fish instead which I felt really guilty about afterwards as we shouldn't be eating those either. We also found plenty of good fresh local prawns and languoustines (which we cooked on the barbecue) and managed to eat out at a few restaurants too. My only complaint would be the lack of variety, the menus are almost identical in each one. I quite often thank my lucky stars that my children will eat most things, so we aren't limited to only choosing things from the children's section of a menu, but seriously the children's menu in every place was plaice fillet with potatoes or typical Danish fishcakes, hardly an inspiring selection! As well as an extension to their menu selection, I would also recommend that a couple of the restaurants in Skagen Harbour have a look at their customer relation skills. Just because you have a good location and have a reputation for being the best, does not mean you can ignore customers, keep them waiting and then be rude to them! I would however recommend the Pakhuset for simple good food, and good service (and a great display of figureheads from local boats). The best place we ate at was actually a tiny place called the Det Bette Olhus in Ålbæk near to where we stayed. The food was really lovely and fresh, and it boasted a massive selection of beers from all over the world (plus really kind and lovely service to boot). The other best meal we had was dinner on our last night, a bbq on the beach with meat from the local butcher. Shame it was blowing a gale that evening, but it was lovely all the same, until the end of the evening when my other half was disposing with the disposable bbq, and I stood on the sand where it had been cooking. Never do that, it hurts a lot! It was a great holiday, the best we have had as a family so far. It could have come directly from the pages of an Enid Blyton book, with plenty of sun, lots of ice creams and long days spent on the beach. The only thing missing was lashings of ginger beer!