Completion of the Danish 'Marilyns'

Denmark is a very flat country. It does, however, have a Lake District, which, although low lying and gently undulating, is as hilly as the country gets. It is also home to a few lakes.

We woke up in the Lake District today (a good thing, as that's where we went to sleep), conveniently positioned with immediate access to a number of walking routes. I picked a selection to take us on a circuit including the top of Himmelbjerget which was, until the mid 1800s, believed to be the highest point in Denmark. It stands a dizzying 147m above sea level.

Starting off along the shore of Julsø...


...the path was well marked. From there it became ridiculously so, even though it was an unmissable motorway of a path:


In case the 'turn right' marker (1) combined with the sign showing the name of the hill with a distance (3), and the 'you are in the right track' dot of a waymarker (4) weren't enough, the tour boat company caters for people who can't piece together these clues and has thus places an A frame at each junction too (2).


The Stoodley Pike of Denmark?

We didn't go up the tower as we arrived too early (and we had no cash on us for the entry fee even if we had waited). Instead we just spent a few minutes looking at the views before heading down to the main car park, just a couple of hundred of metres or so away.



The good waymarking continued for at least three quarters of our outing, which aside from the summit interlude, was through pleasant mixed woodland. Then we must have missed a marker, and took to the dirt roads instead, thinking we would pick the path up again further along. So we did, but much further along than expected and after a bit of thrashing around trying to work out where we were. The fact that Denmark makes large scale walking maps so easily available (with dispensers in car parks) was a blessing, and was put to good use in combination with a compass.

The route we walked came in at exactly 5 miles. I've drawn around the edge of it on the photo below of the map we were using. It was around Knøsgården, on the left side of the photo that we found ourselves in a maze of minor paths and mountain bike tracks with a dearth of waymarkers.


We might have been happy with visiting the once-believed-to-be-the-high-point, but it was only 19km out of our way to visit the spot that subsequently took the crown (Ejer Bavnehøj) and, 200m away from that, the spot that now holds that accolade (Møllehøj), at just shy of 171m above sea level.

I failed to take a snap of the tower atop Ejer Bavnehøj. This photo is per Wikipedia. We did go up this one.

The sun was shining and the day becoming really quite warm by the time we ambled the thirty metres from the car park to the tower, then on the extra couple of hundred metres, onto the adjacent farm*. At the highest point in Denmark (Møllehøj) there used to stand a windmill, but when it burnt down early in the 20th century, it wasn't rebuilt. Today a millstone marks the spot:


On the basis that it seems unlikely to me that the high point in the area we were in this morning (157m - a spot to the SW of Himmelbjerget) has 150m of prominence, I think I may have a valid claim that in visiting Møllehøj I have completed all of Denmark's hills that would qualify as Marilyns.

I'll finish with a couple of bonus snaps about mountaineering in Denmark:



^{(*apparently when told that his farm contained the highest point in the whole of Denmark, the farmer was entirely unsurprised. Being an amenable chap, and knowing that people would want to visit it, he was happy for access to be given and for paths and information signs to be installed.)}

More Walks We Didn't Do In Norway

There must be thousands of walks we didn't do whilst we were in Norway, but of those there were a handful we would have liked to have done, if the weather had just been a bit more amenable. The most notable of those we bypassed last week was Preikestolen (Pulpits Rock), to the NE of Stavanger.

This is a bit of what the tourist brochure says about it:

Preikestolen, on the Lysefjord ... is one of Norway's biggest tourist attractions. More than 270,000 people hike up to the breathtaking mountain plateau every year.

This is the plateau in question, made striking by the fact that it is block of rock with its sides falling almost vertically for 600m into the fjord below:


The minor deterrent to us doing this 'must do' summit was the thought of the crowds (bear in mind that those 270k people are not spread evenly through the year and we were there in mid season), although we could largely have avoided that issue by setting out at first light.

The major deterrent related to the car park (room for over 500 cars, plus tour buses, so I read), which charges 200NOK (just shy of £20) to park for the day (overnight parking is prohibited). It wasn't the charge, per se, that put us off, as we would have paid it if we had been in the area in good weather. However, as the forecast showed rain every day until the end of time (or at least as far out as the long range forecast goes), we weren't going to fork out £20 to walk for hours in the rain with a high probability of having no views from the top.

Preikestolen wasn't quite the straw that broke the camel's back, but we are no longer in Norway. Having driven past lots of places we would have explored at greater length, had it been a bit less wet, we left the country a week earlier than expected, catching a ferry from Kristiansand back to Denmark on Monday morning. We left Kristiansand without a cloud in the sky and arrived to a wet day in Denmark - harrumph!, I said.

Happily, the weather has perked up. So much so that we went 'mountaineering' today. More of that in my next post.

Hjelmen in Hjelmeland

Against a weather forecast of sunny intervals and rainfall of 0mm, we sat in a car park in Hjelmeland this morning, looking at the small hill (Hjelmen) up which we were supposed to be walking, whilst rain bounced off the tarmac all around us. Again.

Thunder had been added into the mix by the time we finished elevenses and a decision was made: all plans were to be abandoned; we were going to head down to Kristiansand and get out of Norway. Of daily bouncing rain, we have had enough.

Our initial progress down the road was only about a kilometre, before we stopped to take a snap of Mick on a chair:

Little Mick/Big Chair is a theme I have going on Facebook. This is number 5. It's amazing how many oversized chairs there are in the world.

There I wavered on the plan. I *really* wanted to nip up the hill that had been on the agenda (a 207m standalone pimple), so leaving Mick sensibly in the dry, off I went.

Thwarted at the first attempt (Norway has very liberal access rights, but I draw the line at walking down someone's block-paved drive, which is what my map was telling me I needed to do), I ended up walking back to the car park we had left a short while before. The heavens opened on me again in the process.

The walk itself was quite pleasant, up through woodland on a decent path and with grippy rock. The summit was a huge disappointment, being almost completely surrounded by trees, robbing me of views. This is the only snippet I could see:


Having seen a signpost for a sculpture on my way up, I followed a path in that general direction to get down and it proved to be a good move - if you ignore the incident where I was looking at the ground as I carefully stepped through some roots and walked slap into a low branch. At the sculpture was the view that had been missing from the summit:


This was also the site of a picnic area and the Norwegians do excel in proving such facilities. Here there was the option of covered or uncovered dining, depending on the weather, but both options boasted the same views:

Is it cynical of me to think that if this was in a similarly accessible location in the UK it would be trashed and/or full of litter?

By the time I got back down, Mick (kind chap that he is) had relocated back to the original car park, saving me a trudge back through the village in the rain that had just started afresh.

I didn't take my Garmin Gadget on this one and don't even know how long I was out, so I've no stats beyond knowing the outing must have involved 206m of ascent.

The Walks We Didn't Do, And The One We Wish We Hadn't

The morning after the waterfall walk described in my last post, an early start was had. We knew our planned walk would be busy (although it wasn't until later in the day that we came to realise that it is the second most publicised walk in the region, with massive amounts of advertising in the nearby town), so an earlier-than-average start seemed the best plan.

This was where we were headed:

Photo taken from tourist brochure

We didn't get to find out if the walk was worth all the fuss (and the 100NOK parking fee) as 6km before the car park we found a prohibition on motorhomes. Parking 6km away and catching a bus was an option, but not one that appealed (loss of flexibility of start and end times and a guarantee that you'll be setting out with a whole glut of people). We abandoned the route and spent the day elsewhere, taking small solace later when, after a fine start, rain came in that would have made the return leg of the 20km walk rather miserable.

The following day I had another walk planned and was confident that this wasn't a touristy one. Alas, we didn't reach the start point of that one either. No ban on motorhomes this time, but a 2m width restriction. Colin would have been fine, but Bertie is 2.12m. Time for another plan.

The following day I chose a route close to where we were parked (rather than choosing the route then trying to park nearby) and early in the afternoon I set out, telling Mick at what time to expect me back.

Much to Mick's surprise, I returned within half an hour and at a sprint. Having walked across the village to find the start of the trail, I only made it five minutes further before giving up on it for being too overgrown. Probably a good thing I didn't push on in the hope of it improving, as heavy rain hit when I was about 100m away from Bertie (hence the sprint finish).

The only photo I took on this outing showed the power station gubbins in the foreground. Lovely scenery beyond that, though.

Yesterday we did no more than potter, and even then we got drenched. The west coast of Norway is having a wet summer.

Today promised us patches of blue sky, with only a small chance of showers. Accordingly, of the options presented by the 'recommended hikes' leaflet from the tourist office, we chose the one that went highest, promising a good summit with excellent views.

The arrow points at our objective.

The 2km along residential streets to get to the start point turned out to be the best thing about this truly awful outing.

This snap is a good representation of what it was like:


What you can't see in the snap is that the rocks along the route had all of the grippiness of a greased pole. In between the rocks was water, either standing or running, often in huge and unavoidable wallows. It has rained a lot, and heavily, lately, so maybe it's not always so bad.

Being in woodland this was the only view we had on our upward journey, and even that required a small detour from the path

Optimistically, we pushed on, painfully slowly, hoping for an improvement around every corner. Eventually patience ran thin and the trail was given ten more minutes to improve; if it was still awful we would turn around. By ten minutes later the thought of retracing our steps was worse than the thought of pressing on to a junction where the map said we could pick up a track. It gave a very indirect escape route, but looked the preferable option.

Maps can be deceptive. This was the state of the track:

Overgrown and sodden. On the plus side, the rocks like greased poles were now absent. On the negative side, they had been replaced by actual greased poles in the form of banks of tree trunks long ago laid across the track for form a solid walking surface, but now covered in slime.

Then there were the stream crossings:


We finally got back to Bertie having covered around 10.5km (our intended circuit, including the summit, would have been 12km) with around 500m ascent, and with the only good point about the outing being this art work seen on the side wall of a school that we passed in getting to and from the start of the trail:


The second snap is for scale


Thankfully the shower, visible on the left of this photo, skirted us. That would have been the icing on the cake.