The medieval church at the heart of Vejle's old town contains one of the most extraordinary objects in Denmark: the Haraldskær Woman, an Iron Age bog body discovered in 1835 in a peat bog near the village of Haraldskær, some ten kilometres away. She lies in a glass-topped coffin in the north wall, her skin darkened and leathery from two thousand years in acidic peat, her features still recognisable. She is believed to have died around 490 BC.
When she was found, the parish priest initially — and somewhat fancifully — identified her as Gunhild, a Norwegian queen supposedly drowned on the orders of King Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century. The theory captured the public imagination for decades before archaeologists established the actual Iron Age date. She has been in the church since her discovery, and the setting — a living parish church rather than a museum display case — gives the encounter an odd intimacy that a formal exhibition would not.
The embedded skulls in the church wall are a second curiosity worth noting. They are set into the stonework at eye level and their origin remains genuinely unclear.