The Sand-Covered Church

Interesting facts

The church first appears in records in 1387, when cloth salvaged from a stranded Hanseatic ship at Skagen was carried to it.

The local priest kept seven packs of the salvaged cloth, swearing on his priestly dignity to report their exact length to the king and queen.

Queen Margaret I took 400 pieces of that cloth and in 1394 paid restitution, though far below the value the merchants claimed.

In its day it was the largest church in Vendsyssel, the northernmost region of Jutland.

The church belonged to the Crown until 1459, when it passed to the Hospital of the Holy Ghost in Aalborg.

On Great Prayer Day in 1775 the congregation had to shovel the door free before the service could begin.

The tower was originally built of patterned yellow brick and was whitewashed only after 1816.

The drifting sand also buried the village that once surrounded the church.

The floor, altar and font of the demolished nave are believed to remain under the sand; today red posts mark where the nave and vestry stood.

Hans Christian Andersen used the buried church as a setting in his tale 'A Story from the Dunes'.

Why it is worth it

Only a whitewashed tower with a stepped gable rises from the dunes near Denmark's northern tip, yet it marks the site of a large medieval church swallowed by sand over two centuries. The Sand-Covered Church, known in Danish as Den Tilsandede Kirke, was once the parish church of St Lawrence, built for the fishing community of Skagen in the late fourteenth century.

The Gothic brick church was built between about 1355 and 1387 and dedicated to Saint Lawrence of Rome. It had a long vaulted nave braced by buttresses, a vestry on the north side, a porch on the south and, from around 1475, a tall west tower with a crow-stepped gable. In all it measured some 45 metres from end to end, and part of its brick was brought in from the Netherlands and northern Germany, including Lübeck, reflecting Skagen's ties to the Baltic and North Sea trade.

From around 1600 the landscape began to turn against it. As the region suffered from desertification, drifting sand, blown in from the great migrating dunes such as the Råbjerg Mile, crept steadily towards the church. By the late eighteenth century the congregation had to dig their way in to hold services, and after some twenty years of this struggle the church was closed by royal decree in 1795. The nave was demolished, but the tower was left standing as a landmark for sailors. Today about 18 metres of it shows above the sand, and the building is in the care of the National Museum of Denmark. Some of the church's furnishings, including its bell and altar vessels, were later taken into the new Skagen church built in 1841.

The tower stands among the dunes of the Skagen Odde, the long sandy spit where the Skagerrak and the Kattegat meet.

Getting there

The tower lies about 2 km south-west of the town of Skagen; the larger town of Frederikshavn is about 30 km to the south. The nearest airport is Aalborg (AAL), about 80 km away. Skagen is the terminus of the railway from Frederikshavn.

From the encyclopaedia

The Sand-Covered Church is the name given to a late 14th-century church dedicated to Saint Lawrence of Rome. It was a brick church of considerable size, located 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) southwest of the town centre of Skagen, Denmark. During the last half of the 18th century the church was partially buried by sand from nearby dunes; the congregation had to dig out the entrance each time a service was to be held. The struggle to keep the church free of sand lasted until 1795, when it was abandoned. The church was demolished, leaving the tower with crow-stepped gable as the only part of the original structure still standing.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

The Sand-Covered Church

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia