Travel on Land
All the following material is quoted from pages 79 - 80 of Roesdahl, Else, The Vikings. Trans. Susan M. Margeson and Kirsten Williams. London, England: Penguin Group, 1991.
In Viking times people walked, rode horses or drove wagons, while in the winter sledges, skis and skates were much used. Busy routes over even ground consisted of broad bands of wheel tracks that kept to dry land where possible. The main road through Jutland, for example, which came to be known as the Army Road and the Ox Road, ran along the ridge and the watershed.
Ever since the Stone Age people had built causeways and fords, but bridges were not build in Scandinavia until he Viking Age. The earliest that have been discovered are in Denmark, all built within a short period at the end of the tenth century. The Danes may have learnt how to build them from the Slavs, as south of the Baltic large-scale bridge-building had been undertaken for a long time.
The largest and possibly the earliest bridge in Denmark is that over the Vejle river valley in Ravning Enge near Jelling, dated by dendrochronology to 979+/- one year. It was built of oak and was 700 m long, about 5.5 m wide and supported by more than 1500 large oak timbers. The bridge can only have been in use for a few years, for it was never repaired, and wooden bridges require repair after ten or fifteen years. It was probably built by order of King Harald Bluetooth, who also had large fortresses built in various parts of his realm at this time. The bridge made it much easier to cross the wide Vejle river valley and the Army Road presumably made use of it while it was in good repair. The king may have charged tolls for passing over it, but prestige was certainly and important reason for building it. The bridge was on a royal scale and it must have made the approach to Jelling an impressive experience for the traveler from the south, as well as facilitating troop transport to the vulnerable border regions.
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