6 kmHorne Church
The same manor connection and a crane weathervane; a natural historical church tour
Thorstrup Church does not look grand from afar, but it has details that reveal a long and close neighbourly relationship with the manor house Nørholm. Look up at the spire: here sits the Teilmann crane as a weather vane, a mark from the period when the church was shaped by Nørholm and Andreas Teilmann.
The church interior brings together several layers. The Romanesque granite baptismal font is the church's only medieval furnishing, while the pulpit points towards the Renaissance. In the apse, Stefan Viggo Pedersen's fresco of Christ's Return fills the space, and the former altarpiece with Carl Hartmann's bronze relief now stands in the tower room. It is a church where older furnishings do not simply stand in a row, but have been moved, reused and placed in new contexts.
Outside, the churchyard is part of the story. The older boundary is still preserved on several sides, and the earth banks are built with fieldstones, iron slag and bog iron. To the south, you enter through a drive gate between masonry pillars. In the churchyard stand black-painted cast-iron crosses, and together with gravestones and epitaphs they connect the place to both the parish families and the Nørholm circle. The bricked-up north door can still be faintly seen in the masonry as an almost hidden trace.
At Thorstrup Churchyard, 17 black-painted cast-iron crosses stand. Nine of them belong to the Nørholm burial in the northwestern corner of the churchyard, where they stand in two rows behind a neo-Gothic cast-iron fence.
The burial plot makes the connection between the church, the manor house Nørholm and the Rosenørn-Teilmann family very concrete. The crosses are not identical: some have clover-shaped cross ends, others are lobed, and the size varies. They are modest markers, but together they amount to a family history in iron.