In Roskilde's Stændertorvet square stands Sankt Laurentius, with its original bell tower from 1500. Squeezing up a narrow spiral stairway takes you past two 19th-century jail cells to the clock at the top of the bell tower for peeped views across Roskilde's main square. This is where the night watchmen used to sit, and there's still a listening pipe so the watchman could eavesdrop on conversations in the jail cells below.
After you come down from the tower, descend into the basement where you can see the excavated ruins of a much older 12th-century church and a whole series of medieval graves – skeletons and all.
The church was demolished in the 1530s after the Reformation, but the still-new tower was spared and desanctified. Two hundred years later it was incorporated into a new town hall that was built next door, hence its partial historical use as a prison.
