Mel's Iron Age Holiday

Mel Giedroyc takes a British family back 2,000 years to live in a Danish Iron Age village at Sagnlandet Lejre.

Every summer ordinary families apply to live in the authentically reconstructed village for a week, to experience living as close to the Iron Age as possible.

This year one lucky British family has been accepted.

Mel joins them and immerses herself with glee: putting on the layers of hand-woven woollen garments and matching bonnet and settling down onto her sheepskins in her pitch-dark wattle-and-daub hut. It's hard and primitive living.

Days are occupied by gathering and preparing food as close to authentic Iron Age food as possible, grinding flour, fetching water, forging iron and chopping wood. Through the week, there are emotional highs and lows for all of them.

Then the week ends with a pagan ceremony at the Sacrificial Bog...

Producer: Beth O'Dea

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2011.