The unique Iron Age Experimental Centre at Lejre, about 40km west of Copenhagen, serves as a museum, a classroom and a place to get away from it all

The centre was founded 40 years ago with government and local support and a sizeable grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, after a group of activists, alarmed by the onslaught of the technological revolution, decided to create a sanctuary where the ancient ways of life could be revived and studied.

How did people live during the Iron Age? How did they support themselves? What did they eat and how did they cultivate the land? These and a myriad of other questions prodded the pioneers of the Lejre experiment. Orthodox museums, they reasoned, could give some idea of the past 4000 years removed from today’s technology and comforts, but the only way to truly re-establish the lost links was to live as our ancestors did.

Living in the open and working 10 hours a day, volunteers from all over Scandinavia led by 30 experts, built the first village in the ancient encampment in a matter of months. The house walls were of clay, the roofs of hay – all based on original designs. Then came the second stage – getting back to the basics of living. Families were invited to stay in the ‘prehistoric village’ for a week or two at a time and rough it Iron Age-style.

Initially, this experiment proved none too easy for modern Danes accustomed to central heating, but it convinced the centre that there was something to the Lejre project. Little by little, the modern Iron Agers learnt that their huts were, after all, habitable. The problems were numerous – smoke belching out from the rough-and–ready fireplaces into the rooms, straw beds taking up too much space, cooking over an open fire, adjusting to primitive sackcloth clothing and so on.

These problems, however, have led to some discoveries: domed smoke ovens made of clay, for example, give out more heat and consume less fuel than an open fire, and when correctly stoked, they are practically smokeless. Primitive Iron Age pottery has been made in primitive kilns at Lejre, fields have been ploughed with an ard (a primitive form of plough) and grain harvested with flint sickles.

By contacting other museums, the Lejre team has been able to reconstruct ancient weaving looms and pottery kilns. Iron Age dyeing techniques, using local natural vegetation, have also been revived, as have ancient baking and cooking methods. A genuine blacksmith fashions the tools necessary for the village’s survival, a tile works is in full swing, and the carpentry, joinery and tailoring methods of ages long gone by live again.

Apart from its extensive work as an historical archaeological institution, the accent today at the Lejre Experimental Centre is very much on activities: visitors can sail on the lake in replicas of ancient dug-out boats, visit a Stone Age settlement, chop logs with an Iron Age axe, light bonfires using ancient techniques, pop in on a Viking marketplace and inspect an ancient sacrificial bog and reconstructions of Bronze Age burial mounds, hillock graves and dolmens.

In the high season, which usually runs from the end of June to mid-August, displays of Vikings in battle are staged along with a welter of action activities requiring audience participation.

Lejre is open to visitors in the summer months – from the beginning of May to the middle of September – and stays in the antediluvian cottages of its reconstructed Iron Age village can be arranged for families wanting to stay for weekends or up to a week. The centre is also open during the autumn holiday in October as well as select days in December.