20 kmBallum Church
Medieval church in a compact village setting, fitting Arrild’s church history.
Arrild Church lies on the eastern edge of Arrild, where the churchyard surrounds the building on all sides. Even from the outside there are details to notice: fieldstone walls to the east, south and west, a northern side with a hedge, and a west tower that is not quite like an ordinary village church tower.
The church interior is especially worth knowing for its rich furnishings. Here Romanesque architectural parts, Gothic panels and later decoration meet in a compact space, where you can move from the altar front and the cabinet altarpiece to the pulpit and baptismal font without long museum distances between them.
There are no frescoes, but the ceiling has its own story: outlined large acanthus motifs in black on a white background with reddish-brown edges. This gives the church a different expression from many frescoed medieval churches and makes looking up quite rewarding.
The churchyard also holds traces of the First World War. A memorial stone commemorates the parish’s fallen, and a war grave with uniform grey cement crosses tells of military prisoners and Sikringsstilling Nord. In the porch there is a free booklet about the church and its contents; a practical key to a place where many details would otherwise easily go unnoticed.
In Arrild churchyard lie 16 identical, grey cast concrete crosses over military prisoners of war from the First World War. The burial site covers about 11 x 3 meters, and the names on the crosses are today difficult to read.
Three of the buried came from a camp about 200 meters south of the church; the others came from Øberg 2.5 kilometers to the southwest. The graves connect the churchyard to the North Defensive Position and the hard construction work behind the German defensive line.
In Arrild Church cemetery stands the memorial stone for the parish’s fallen and missing from the First World War. It was erected in 1922 for 23 people and bears both names, dates of birth, and dates of death or disappearance.
The stone is a large natural stone with an engraved tree on the left side and the signature “NHJ 1922” after the sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen. The local grief is carved into a striking piece of Southern Jutland war history.
