Agri Bavnehøj Trail – Mols Bjerge

Reaching the starting point

The trail starts at the parking lot across from Femmøller Efterskole (which is an alternative boarding school for pupils aged 14-17) at the address Molsvej 137, 8400 Ebeltoft. You can park your car here free of charge, although you might find it to be full a few times a year when the boarding school hosts events for parents or visitors – the last Sunday in September every year is such a day. You come to the parking lot by heading to the small town Rønde, either following national road (‘hovedvej’) 15 or 21 in the eastern part of Jutland. Take the appropriate exit to Rønde, and follow the main road going through town until you reach the T-crossing with Molsvej. You then follow Molsvej for a bit more than 10 km until you reach the boarding school and the parking lot across from it. You can also reach the starting point by public transport as bus number 123 from Aarhus bus station stops just outside the boarding school. Plan your trip by using rejseplanen.dk.

Trail

At the parking lot you will find benches as well as a table with a map of the national park and its official hiking routes – the Mols Bjerge route (20/60km – marked with white dots) and numerous shorter trails (marked with yellow dots) and pathways. Along the marked routes on the map, you will see small beige boxes with numbers inside. These numbers indicate the numbered gates of the various livestock enclosures you will enter and exit on your way, and can thus be helpful for navigation along the way (I will be referring to them and the map in the following). Our trail is, however, not marked as one separate trail so the best is that you download the GPX trail above and use your hiking watch, GPS device or phone to navigate with.

From the parking lot you follow the path up the hill towards southwest, entering gate 15, and for approximately a kilometer you are walking uphill through more or less forested terrain. The forest then gives way to more windswept grassy plains, and you soon after reach gate 50 as the trail intersects with the dirt road called Stenhøjevej. From here you take the unmarked, but very well-trodden path further southwest to reach gate 49 after having walked 1.5 kilometer altogether. Then you follow the Mols Bjerge route for 500 meters towards west, until you reach the path to Karpenhøj which runs southwest.  After passing Karpenhøj the path intersects with a dirt road. The intersection is also where the two dirt roads Tyvelhøjvej and Agri Bavnehøjvej meet up; the latter runs west, while the former takes a sharp turn towards southwest. If you want to shorten the hike and get to Agri Bavnehøj as soon as possible, you should follow Agri Bavnehøjvej, but we wanted to reach the Tremosegård shelter for a lunch break so we continued southwest.

After walking a bit more than 3.5 kilometers, you reach Tremosegård which features a shelter for spending the night down in small valley along with benches and a water post with drinking water up on the small hill behind the shelter. Unfortunately, there was already a group lunching there, so we merely refilled our water bottles and decided to push on towards Agri Bavnehøj since our daughter was fast asleep in the backpack. Then we followed Tyvelhøjvej further south for a few hundred meters more until it ends and meets Tremosevej, which is also a narrow dirt road. You then follow Tremosevej for 500 meters towards northwest until it reaches Mols Bjergevej which is a wide dirt road with a separate dirt path for pedestrians running parallel to it. There were only few cars rolling by at a very slow speed, but we stayed on the dirt path, nevertheless. You follow Mols Bjergevej towards north/northwest until you have walked approximately 5.5 km altogether; here the dirt road intersects with Agri Bavnehøjvej and you will see Agri Bavnehøj ahead of you.

To reach the top of the hill, you have to enter the enclosure it is in – the gate is number 5. Both in- and outside the enclosure you will find benches for resting and having a snack. Once inside, there are a few well-trodden paths to the top of Agri Bavnehøj from which you have a great view of the surroundings as it is the highest point of the entire national park. Besides the magnificent moraine formations of the hills of Mols Bjerge, you can see the Kattegat sea and, in clear weather, all the way to Samsø. The hill was, however, quite windswept when we were there, so we decided to have our lunch on a bench just outside the enclosure of the hill. Here, there are also tables where you can read (in Danish) about Agri Bavnehøj being used twice as an airdrop zone for the Allies supplying the Danish Resistance movement with weapons, explosives etc. in the last years of Second World War.

Getting back to the starting point

For returning back, we first went 150 meters along Agri Bavnehøjvej towards east and then followed a gravel forest road up towards northeast. You can, however, also just follow Agri Bavnehøjvej back to where it intersects with Tyvelhøjvej, and follow the narrow path back towards north but we wanted to take a slightly different route. We thus followed the gravel road, which runs between two ridges, for about 900 meters until we saw a gate at the fence running below the eastern ridge, and decided to ascend the low ridge to come to the plateau above. We crossed over the plateau, heading northeast, until we came to the narrow path that leads up to gate 49. From there, we took the same route back as described above.

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