Søborg Castle

Søborg Castle first enters the written record in the 1100s, when ownership passed from the Danish king to the Bishop of Roskilde in an exchange of properties. It stood then on an island in a fjord that opened to the Kattegat at Gilleleje, north-west of the village of Søborg in North Zealand. Søborg Church was raised around 1180 as a market-town church attached to the castle.

Tradition has long held that Archbishop Eskil of Lund expanded the existing buildings into a true fortification, closed by a ring wall and a moat. Eskil was in close contact with Esrum Abbey, and it is considered likely that he lived nearby at Søborgby. Saxo Grammaticus wrote in the Gesta Danorum that Eskil had built a castle in the Lethrian bog, though whether that meant Søborg is unknown; Inge Skovgaard-Petersen has argued that the place intended may be the royal seat at Lejre — Lethra — where Ledreborg was formerly Lethreborg. No one has yet linked Eskil to Søborg by excavated find or by written source, and the connection remains a hypothesis.

In 1985 Robert Egevang and Søren Frandsen had two trenches cut to settle the relationship between the octagonal tower and the palatium. A rampart some 11 metres wide proved to be the oldest enclosure of the site; brick was found in it and in the octagonal tower, which was raised at the same time. The palatium came later — the excavations suggest perhaps not before the end of the 1200s, which would rule out Eskil, who died in 1181. The bricks are very unevenly made, and brick-firing was wholly new to the Danes: kilns were put up beside the building sites, standard sizes came only afterwards, and brickmakers and masons came from Lombardy to help.

Søborg was reckoned among the strongest castles in Denmark and served as a prison. Buris Henriksen was put in there in 1167 and probably remained a prisoner until he died. Bishop Valdemar was held from 1198 to 1206, and Valdemar IV, Duke of Schleswig, was confined in 1285–86. Jens Grand, Archbishop of Lund, was imprisoned from 1294 until his dramatic escape a year and a half later.

Erik Menved and Valdemar Atterdag both made use of the castle. Margrete Valdemarsdatter, later regent over the Nordic kingdoms as Margaret I, was born at Søborg in March 1353 — in the prison where her father, King Valdemar IV, had confined her mother, Helvig of Schleswig.

The castle was inhabited until the Count's Feud of 1534–35, when it is thought to have been destroyed. In 1577 Søborg was laid under Kronborg and the feudal tenant was granted permission to break stone from the ruins. The fjord later became Søborg Sø, and that lake was drained between 1872 and 1896 by the digging of the Søborg Canal, which ran out at Gilleleje as the fjord had. A decision to re-establish the lake had been only partly acted on by 2025. The ruin lies in Gribskov Municipality and is a protected ancient monument.