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 worth noticing: fieldstone walls to the east, south and west, a hedge on the north side, 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 building elements, Gothic panels and later decorations meet in a compact space, where you can move from the altar front and the cupboard 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 brownish-red edges. It gives the church a different expression from many medieval churches with frescoes and makes looking upward quite rewarding.
The churchyard also contains traces from the First World War. A memorial stone commemorates the fallen of the parish, and a war grave site with uniform grey concrete crosses tells of military prisoners and the North Defence Line. In the porch there is a free booklet about the church and its contents; a practical key to a place where many details might otherwise easily pass by 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.
