Glimmingehus

Glimmingehus, in Vallby parish in what is now Simrishamn Municipality, is the best preserved medieval stronghold in Scandinavia, and it was raised in a Scania that then formed a vital part of Denmark. The estate was in the hands of Jens Holgersen Ulfstand from 1485: a Danish knight, a councillor of the realm and an admiral serving under King Hans, John I of Denmark. A memorial tablet he set above the entrance records the laying of the foundations in 1499, and the work was finished in 1506. His stone master was Adam van Düren, a North German who also worked at Lund Cathedral and who probably cut several of the carvings inside. In Ulfstand's day the property was called Stora Glimminge, Grand Glimminge, which marked its standing in Glimminge and the country around it.

The house carries the defensive apparatus of its age: parapets, false doors and dead-end corridors, holes for pouring boiling pitch on attackers, moats, drawbridges and other death traps meant to surprise anyone who got inside and to protect the nobility against peasant risings. The outer walls are 2.4 metres thick at the base and 1.8 metres at the top. High above the entrance an oriel allowed hot liquid or stones to be dropped on intruders, and a gallery pierced for the same purpose once ran round the building just below the roof; the gallery is long gone, along with the wall that enclosed the whole medieval fortress.

The ground floor held a brewhouse, a bakehouse, a kitchen, a food store and a wine cellar, a fresh-water well and the hearth that heated the whole building. The lord's own quarters were a flight up; two flights up lay the knights' hall, with an armorial limestone fireplace and two carved limestone reliefs, one showing knights with the shields of Jens Holgersen and Holmgerd Axeldatter Brahe, the other the birth and death of Christ. The lady's chamber, for the mistress of the house and the children, was on the same floor. Everyday comfort ran to hot air channels built into the walls and benches set in the window recesses. Excavation has turned up a great deal of what the knight's family surrounded itself with up to Ulfstand's death in 1523: Venetian glass, moulded glass from the Rhineland and Spanish ceramics, among the most expensive goods for sale in Europe at the time.

The house belonged for a long stretch to the Rosencrantz family. Comfortable as it was for its period, Glimmingehus has been read as an expression of knighthood nostalgia, hardly new or forward-looking even to the knight's contemporaries and less so to later generations of the Scanian nobility. It is thought to have been lived in for only a few generations before it was turned into a store for grain; the chimneys were removed when that use began.

In 1676, during the Scanian War, Charles XI ordered the administrators of the Swedish dominion of Scania to pull the castle down so that it could not fall into the hands of the Danish king. The order was never carried out. A first attempt, for which 20 Scanian farmers were made to help, failed, and a further body of men was sent to Glimmingehus to see it through. Before they could do so a Danish-Dutch naval force appeared at Ystad, and the Swedes abandoned the demolition.

Through the 18th century the building served as a deposit for agricultural produce. In 1924 the agronomist Nils Månsson gave it to the Swedish state, and between 1935 and 1938 it went through a thorough restoration and excavation: the old moats were emptied and their stone-faced edges restored, and the digging was carried out by conscientious objectors doing non-military service. Glimmingehus is a registered ancient monument, owned by the National Property Board of Sweden and run by the Swedish National Heritage Board. There is a museum on the site, with a medieval kitchen, a shop, a restaurant and a café, and several guided tours a day through the summer. Local folklore has the castle haunted by more than one ghost, and the storytelling that grew from it is kept up in the summer evenings billed as Bisarra berättelser och hiskeliga historier, bizarre stories and terrifying tales.