Møn lies just off the south-eastern tip of Zealand, close enough to reach and awkward enough to have stayed itself. The strait between them is called Ulvsund — Wolf Strait — and until 1943 you crossed it by boat. Then came the Queen Alexandrine Bridge, 746 metres of it, opened for traffic on 30 May and named for the consort of Christian X; Danes still rate it among their handsomest. At the south-western corner a causeway runs out to Bogø, an island five kilometres by seven with a preserved windmill and a summer ferry to Stubbekøbing. From Bogø a second causeway reaches Farø, where the motorway between Zealand and Falster crosses on cables strung from ninety-five-metre pylons. Go the other way, to the north-western tip, and the road narrows to a single bridge onto Nyord — geese, wading birds, an octagonal church, a handful of cottages, a birdwatching tower and very little else.

Stege sits at the middle of the island, where a sea-lake called Stege Nor opens to the water, and it put three herrings on its coat of arms because for a while the herrings paid for everything. The fisheries made the town rich through the fourteenth century and richest around 1500. Eric VII ringed it with a rampart, a wall and a moat about 1430, with a tower at each of the three approach roads; only Møllerporten still stands. Wealth attracts attention. In 1510 the Lübeckers arrived in retaliation for Danish trade sanctions, failed to take Stege, and burned Borre, the island's second town, instead. The worse blow came in May 1659, when three thousand Swedes crossed from Bogø against five hundred defenders, occupied Stege, destroyed the town hall and three hundred farms and carried off the harvest. By the end of that war, in 1660, the population of the entire island stood at 670.

Around 1500, an anonymous workshop master covered the vaults of three Møn churches with pictures. Nobody knows his name — he signed with an emblem — and art history calls him the Elmelunde Master, after the village where his hand was first recognised. His subjects came out of the Biblia pauperum, the poor man's Bible: creation, harvest, judgement, hell, painted in warm reds and russets against pale yellow, green and grey. One quirk makes his figures unmistakable. They all have heavy, half-closed lids, the same drowsy expression on the saved and the damned alike. After the Reformation the whole lot went under whitewash and stayed there for centuries. Fanefjord's frescoes, the most comprehensive of the three, were painstakingly uncovered between 1932 and 1934 under the National Museum's direction and restored again in 2009. Elmelunde and Keldby churches hold the others.

Long before there were herrings to tax, people here buried their dead under stone and earth, and they built well enough that the graves outlasted the villages. Grønsalen, near Fanefjord Church, is a barrow a hundred metres long and ten wide, raised around 3500 BC. Legend hands it to Chief Grønjæger and his wife, Queen Fane, and gives their names to the Grønsund and the Fanefjord. Kong Asgers Høj at Sprove is the largest gallery grave in Denmark, more than four thousand years old, fully excavated and open to anyone willing to stoop. At Klekkende Høj a nine-metre double passage grave has been restored. More than a hundred large graves have been found on the island, along with over two hundred Bronze Age round mounds — each one covering a single body in a coffin split and hollowed from a single oak.

UNESCO named Møn Denmark's first biosphere reserve in June 2017: some 45,118 hectares of islands and islets, woodland, grassland, meadow, wetland, coast, ponds and steep hills. The designation is not decoration. Chalk in the subsoil, a dry local climate and centuries of cattle grazing have produced some of the richest meadowland in Denmark, orchid ground, and it stays rich only for as long as somebody keeps grazing it. The working economy is tourism plus a few stubborn institutions: Bisca, a cake and biscuit manufacturer headquartered in Stege and one of the island's largest employers, and Møns Bank, lending here since 1877 and still drawing about a third of its customers from the island. Stege's old town hall was converted into a centre for entrepreneurship in 2008 and houses around ten start-ups. Fewer than four thousand people live in the town. Out east, past the churches and the barrows, the land tilts up towards the chalk cliffs that most visitors come for — but the island is the better story.