Viking Ship Hall

Lonely Planet review

Roskilde's Viking-era inhabitants were expecting trouble in the mid-11th century. The five clinker-built ships, all made between 1030 and 1042, were deliberately scuttled in a narrow channel 20km north of Roskilde, presumably to prevent an attacking army. Once they had been holed and sunk, a mass of stones was piled on top to create an underwater barrier.

In 1962, a cofferdam was built around the barrier and sea water was pumped out. Within four months, archaeologists were able to remove the mound of stones and excavate the ships, whose wooden hulks were in thousands of pieces. These ship fragments were painstakingly reassembled onto skeleton frames in the purpose-built Viking Ship Hall at the Viking Ship Museum. This brutal-looking minimalist construction becomes something magical inside, where the ghostly boats seem to float once more on the waters of the fjord.

The ships, known as Skuldelev 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, show off the range of the Viking shipwrights: there's an ocean-going trading vessel, a 30m warship for international raiding, a coastal trader, a 17m warship probably used around the Baltic, and a fishing boat. Carbon dating and dendrochronology have discovered further secrets, including their builders' geographical scope - Skuldelev 1, for example, was made in Norway, whereas Skuldelev 2 came from Dublin.

Interesting displays about the Viking Age put the boats into a historical context, and the basement cinema runs a 14-minute film (in Danish, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish) about the 1962 excavation. There's also a room where kids can dress up as Vikings, jump aboard a model ship, and write their names in runes.