Hundested

Hundested sits at the mouth of Roskilde Fjord where it meets the Kattegat, and it is a working port with a ferry to Rorvig across the water and a fishing fleet. Its best known building stands on the cliff above the town: the house Knud Rasmussen built in 1917, the Greenlandic-Danish explorer and ethnographer who crossed the Arctic by dog sled from Greenland to Alaska on the Fifth Thule Expedition and recorded Inuit oral tradition on the way. The house is now a museum with his study, expedition equipment and Greenlandic material, and the view from the cliff runs across the fjord mouth. Below, the old harbour buildings have been converted into workshops for craftspeople, with glassblowing, ceramics and a small theatre.

History

The name is first recorded as a field called Hundersted in 1682, and as a village only in a parish register of 1844. The Halsnæs peninsula once held several villages, Kikhavn being a fishing village from the 16th century, and in 1776 Johan Frederik Classen, founder of Frederiksværk, set up the Grønnessegård manor here and closed down the villages of Gryndese, Rorup and Fornerup. The first building of today's Hundested is thought to be a pilots' house of 1835. A breakwater was built in 1862 and Lynæs Harbour in 1872, which soon became the most important fishing port on Zealand, until most of the boats moved to Hundested Harbour around 1910; the railway arrived in 1916, ferries to Rørvig began in 1927 and to Grenå in 1934, and the harbour drew fish auctions, a cannery, a dockyard and the Hundested Motor Factory, which made engines for Danish fishing boats for generations. A downturn in fishing in the 1980s hit the town hard, and the Grenå lines stopped in 1996 (Wikipedia, Hundested).

What you'll find

• Knud Rasmussen's house - the explorer's home on the cliff, kept as a museum.
• Expedition equipment - gear and Greenlandic material from the Thule journeys.
• Harbour workshops - old port buildings converted for craftspeople.
• The fjord mouth view - Roskilde Fjord meeting the Kattegat below the cliff.

When to go

May to September for the harbour and the workshops; the Rasmussen house has reduced winter hours. Half a day. The ferry crossing to Rorvig takes twenty-five minutes and is a good addition.

Good to know

The town itself is plain and industrial in parts. The Rasmussen house is small and its winter opening is limited. Workshop opening depends on the individual makers. The cliff path is exposed and windy.

Nearby

Odsherred Geopark is across the fjord by ferry; Frederiksvaerk lies east.

Key facts