Some day I will go to Aarhus…
Like Seamus Heaney I too was inspired to go to Aarhus by PV Glob’s book The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved. I had come across it in 2010 and longed to see those northern landscapes where the bog bodies had been found in the early 1950s. Professor Glob, the Danish archaeologist who led the excavation of the bog bodies evokes so powerfully the lonely Jutland fenland as he unravels the dark, forbidding background to the discovery of Tollund Man and Grauballe Man:
‘ a unique feeling of antiquity still rests over the landscape around Tollund Fen. A ravine with sandy wheel-tracks leads down between high heather-covered slopes to the sacrificial bog, passing through vegetation into which the red trunks and dark caps of fir, and willows – with light golden catkins and slender pointed green leaves in early spring – predominate. Wild cherry, blackthorn, crab-apple and briar grow on the sloping banks, and with them the ancient Danish forest tree, the aspen, its leaves still shivering from the winter’s cold. It is the primeval northern woodland’.
As well as being a fascinating story, Glob’s account has proved to be a rich source of darkly inspiring imagery for other writers, especially for Seamus Heaney who wrote a celebrated series of ‘bog poems’. Heaney’s poems along with Glob’s account and the extraordinary photographs included in his book have inspired me to put together a portfolio of photographs created in response to my time spent in Aarhus.