Hedeby is the name the Danes used for a town that the Germans call Haithabu, and for roughly three centuries it was one of the great ports of the Viking world. It lay at the head of an inlet, the Haddeby Noor, on the narrow neck of the peninsula where goods could be carried overland from the North Sea to the Baltic, and its streets are said to have held perhaps a thousand people at its height, a huge number for the time. Traders arrived from Norway, Sweden, the Frankish lands, the Slavic coast and even the distant Islamic world, to sell furs, amber, iron, slaves, glass and silver.
An Arab-Jewish merchant from Spain, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, visited in the tenth century and left a famous account, in which he described it as a large town with little food and a lot of noise, where the people sing in a way that sounds like the barking of dogs. It is a rare outside view of Viking life and it is not flattering, but it is vivid. The town was attacked and burned several times, and after its final destruction in 1066 the surviving inhabitants moved across the water to the new town of Schleswig.
The semicircular rampart that once enclosed Hedeby is still visible on the land side, a great horseshoe of earth in the meadow, and a reconstructed settlement of Viking houses stands near the water. Excavations began in the early twentieth century and continue still, with the dig turning up combs, coins, boots and, in the harbour, the wreck of a long warship. The museum shows the best of the finds and has a reconstructed ship.
The road in is quiet and flat, through meadows and past reed beds, and the water beside it is calm and often full of birds. Fahrdorf is the closest village, and Schleswig, three kilometres away, has everything else. Bring a layer against the wind off the water, and give the museum an hour. The grass and the sky and the sound of the reeds are the same as they were when the ships came in.