Visit the historic burial mounds on Møn

Since the earliest times, man has lived in the Møn landscape. The areas near Møns Klint was hiding a very special wealth, which was otherwise in short supply in most of Europe: FLINT.

The flint could be chopped directly from it Møns Klint, and it was used for tools, for weapons, and for status symbols. These flint tools were indispensable and were used for everything from hunting, harvesting grain, clearing forests, building houses and boats - and even for starting fires. Even when the Bronze Age had officially begun, people in Denmark continued to use - and sell - their flint, as bronze was both expensive and fragile, and had to be imported from outside.

The transitional period between the Peasant Stone Age and the Bronze Age is called the 'dagger time' in Denmark, because flint daggers, made as copies of southern bronze daggers, became the man's most important status symbol during this time.

On Møn, all three periods are richly represented in the form of burial mounds. The dolmens of the Peasant Stone Age (approx. 3.600 – 3.400 BC) and in particular their slightly later giant houses (3.400 – 2.800 BC) are some of the most beautiful in Denmark. The giants' chambers on Møn have some characteristic, local features, such as, for example, that the burial chamber is often narrowest in the middle at the mouth of the chamber passage, and thus has almost the same shape as the flint axes of the time. Furthermore, the spaces between the large stones and the intermediate tile walls in the burial chamber are often filled with chalk mortar, instead of clay, which was commonly used elsewhere in the country.

In the Dagger Age (2.400 – 1700 BC), when the long Peasant Stone Age comes to an end, these large stone graves are replaced by the peat-built mounds we know from the Bronze Age. This shift marks the immigration of a new people at this time, which eventually becomes our Bronze Age culture. Their characteristic tumulus mounds are found over large parts of the Old World from this time. In the Klinteskoven on Møn, they are found in particularly high numbers, which bears witness to the dependence of the Dagger Age and the Early Bronze Age on the good flint as raw material, in the competition against the emergence of metals from the south.

You can crawl into the burial chambers on several of the burial mounds!