Ancient Monuments Denmark

Ancient Monuments of Denmark

The monuments in this app come from a national register of ancient monuments and of places where museums have made archaeological finds.

THREE MAPS

The app has three maps, and the front page says what each one holds, so you always know which data you are looking at.

Interpreted monuments — 719 sites
Places with a sign and a description on location. Open data from Udinaturen, the Danish Nature Agency.

Notable monuments — 1,049 sites
The selection the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces recommends as worth seeing. Markers are colour-coded by period.

All protected monuments — 35,215 sites
Every actively protected monument in the country, from the Fund og Fortidsminder register. This is where you find the burial mounds, dolmens and ramparts that carry no sign but stand plainly in the landscape just outside your door.

THE FULL MAP

35,215 is far too many to draw as individual pins, so they gather into clusters with counts. Zoom in and the clusters break apart. Burial mounds cluster among themselves without mixing with ramparts and milestones.

Filter by main category — burial, transport, faith and tradition, military and five more — or by site type among 234 types. The type filter also finds structures recorded as part of another: search for a megalithic tomb and you get all 2,118, not just the 210 where it is the primary type.

Search the protection texts — the archive's Danish originals — for terms such as jættestue (passage grave), skåltegn (cup marks) or bautasten (standing stone).

Tap a monument to see the structures on the site, its dating and the full protection text from the register — the archive's own account of what stands there. From there you can open the complete record on kulturarv.dk.

Monuments that also appear in the notable selection are marked with a star, so that curation is not lost among the many.

OUT AND ABOUT

All three maps are interactive. Zoom in and more monuments appear. You can switch the map to satellite view.

Tapping the Map icon in the info box opens the Maps app on your iPhone or iPad with directions to that monument.

DATA

The data comes from open sources. Fund og Fortidsminder is maintained by the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces. Udinaturen is maintained by the Danish Nature Agency.