Sonnerup Forest - yellow route

On the path around Sonnerup Forest, you can walk along both wide gravel paths, as well as grassy and dirt trails along the coast. The route is marked with yellow dots on signs, trees, and stones. Here you can hear the woodpecker tapping on dead tree trunks, collect cones from the old pines, and find beautiful stones on the beach.

Sonnerup Forest has come into being against all odds. It took 100 years, an incredible effort, and several failed attempts before it finally succeeded in conquering the sand, wind, and salt from the Kattegat.

Sonnerup Forest covers 290 hectares and is located where there was once seabed. On the map in the hiking brochure, you can see where the old coastline was. In 1763, it was decided to plant forests in a long series of places in Denmark. The reason was the high demand for timber.

The sand drift ravaged

At that time, the sand drift had already ravaged Zealand's north coast for several hundred years. Entire villages were buried in sand, and agricultural land had to be abandoned. Therefore, it was decided in several places to take up the fight against the sand and plant forests.

At Sonnerup Lyng, as the place was then called, it was, however, to prove much more difficult than expected. The first attempts in 1802 failed. A total of 15,600 birch and alder plants, 62,600 pines, and 87,500 spruce plants had been planted. Additionally, seeds corresponding to about 450 kg of different tree species had been sown. All in vain.

Still a vulnerable forest

Only when the forestry agency in the 1820s started from scratch by erecting double woven brushwood fences along the entire coast, before planting hardy mountain pine and Austrian pine, did they finally succeed. The two tree species thrived behind the brushwood fences, which you can still glimpse as a sand dune in the northwestern corner of the forest about 120 meters from the coast.

But all in all, it took nearly 100 years before the forest really took hold. And it is still vulnerable to drought, wind, and salt from the sea. During the major storms in 1999 and most recently in 2013, many trees were uprooted. And if you take a walk along the coast, you can see that even 150-year-old oak and pine trees are barely two meters high.

The forest becomes a primeval forest

Today, however, the forest is so well-established that the trees can sprout in the forest floor on their own, and new trees grow up by themselves. Especially oak, Scots pine, and birch willingly self-seed, which is why that is what will be focused on moving forward since the forest has been designated as a primeval forest. In the transition to primeval forest, the row structures from the plantation management will be blurred, there will no longer be any felling of trees for timber and similar purposes, and the trees will be allowed to lie when they fall.

You can see the hiking brochure via the link here: https://naturstyrelsen.dk/media/1anlsyjm/sonnerup_131213_web.pdf