The barrow stood about 30 metres across and 4 metres high. When it was opened on 24 February 1921 the excavators found the oak coffin lying east to west, still sealed, and made the decision that saved the find: rather than open it in the field, they crated the whole thing and shipped it to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Inside, the acidic and oxygen-poor conditions had slowed decay almost to a stop for well over three thousand years. Her hair survived, and her brain, teeth and fingernails, and a little of her skin. Her bones did not. Tree rings in the coffin timber later fixed the year of her burial exactly: 1370 BC. She was between sixteen and eighteen years old, 160 centimetres tall, with short blond hair and neatly trimmed nails.

Her clothes caused a sensation when they came to light in the 1920s, and they still look startlingly modern. She wore a loose woollen blouse with sleeves to the elbow, left her waist bare, and below that a skirt of twisted woollen cords, 38 centimetres long, hanging free. Around her waist ran a woven sash carrying a large circular bronze plate worked in spirals with a spike at its centre. She had bronze bracelets and an earring. For decades this looked like one girl's unusual costume; it is now understood as the best-preserved surviving example of a style worn widely across northern Europe in the Bronze Age. Textiles almost never last. Hers did, and rewrote what the period was thought to have looked like.

She was not buried alone. At her feet lay the cremated bones of a child of five or six, and nothing in the grave tells us who that child was to her - sibling, kin, or someone whose connection to her nobody living can now reconstruct. By her head sat a birch-bark box holding a bronze awl, dress pins and a hairnet of horsehair: the working kit of someone who made and mended things. A second birch container held a drink brewed from wheat, honey, bog-myrtle and cowberries, with the flowering yarrow laid across the top. These are not the leavings of a ritual performed at a distance. They are the choices of people who knew her, packing what she would want.

In 2015 Karin Frei and colleagues measured strontium isotopes in her teeth, hair, fingernails and wool, and concluded that she had grown up somewhere like the Black Forest in southern Germany, married into Jutland, and travelled back and forth between the two in the last months of her life. It was a vivid story of Bronze Age mobility and it went around the world. Then it came apart. In 2019 Erik Thomsen and Rasmus Andreasen showed that the local baseline used for comparison had been skewed by strontium from agricultural lime spread on modern fields around Egtved; on a corrected baseline she may have spent her whole life in the area, moving seasonally between river valley and plateau. Sophie Bergerbrant's reassessment the same year pointed instead towards Sweden or Norway. Where she was born is, honestly, still open.

The mound at Egtved has been rebuilt on its original ground, and a small museum beside it shows copies of the garments, the jewellery and the great spiral belt plate, along with the story of the 1921 dig. The originals are in Copenhagen, where the Lejre Experimental Centre's reconstruction of the outfit hangs beside what is left of the girl herself. It is worth remembering, standing in front of either, what the display case actually holds: a young woman who died in early summer, and a household that stopped what it was doing to bury her properly.