Moesgaard Museum

Moesgaard, which opened its current building in 2014, is a wedge of concrete pushed into a slope with a sloping meadow roof that locals use for picnics and sledging. Inside, the exhibitions run from the Stone Age forward, staged with a lot of dark, theatre and sound rather than glass cases in rows. The centrepiece is Grauballe Man, an Iron Age body preserved in a bog with hair, skin and fingernails intact, displayed alone in a low-lit room. A Viking gallery, an ethnographic section and a large hall of Iron Age objects recovered from bog deposits fill the rest of the building.

What you actually see

• Grauballe Man - the Iron Age bog body, shown alone in a dark room.
• The grass roof - the sloping meadow you can walk up for a view towards the bay.
• The Iron Age hall - tools, gear and equipment recovered from bog deposits.
• The Viking gallery - ships, silver and the world of Aarhus a thousand years ago.

When to go

Year-round, and mostly indoors. Weekday mornings outside school terms are calmest; weekends bring families, since the roof and the surrounding woods make it a day out rather than a museum visit. Allow time for the walk down through the beech woods to the beach if the weather holds.

Honest expectations

It is a bus ride out of the city and the trip eats an hour each way. The staging is dramatic and dim, which some find immersive and others find hard to read, and labelling is sparse in places. Tickets are not cheap and the cafe is expensive. Grauballe Man is a human body, and children can find it upsetting.

Nearby

The beech woods and the beach at Moesgaard run down to the bay; central Aarhus is twenty minutes by bus.