They settled on Skamlingsbanken, a moraine ridge two to three kilometres long running above the coast between Kolding and Hejlsminde. Its high point, Højskamling, reaches 113 metres — the highest ground in historic Sønderjylland, which is no mountain but is a great deal of hill in Denmark. Ice built it: a lateral moraine shoved up roughly 22,000 to 25,000 years ago, later reworked by glaciers pushing in from the east and south. Eastward the land drops steeply into a cove at Mosvig; westward it settles to around 60 metres and runs on toward the Jutland ridgeway.

Supporters raised 440 silver thalers and bought the hill outright. This was not a scenic acquisition. It was a rally ground, purchased because a movement needed ground that nobody could refuse it.

The first meeting was set for 14 May 1843 — the anniversary of the royal decree that had introduced Danish into a number of public offices — and shifted to the eighteenth when the date fell on a Sunday. At sunrise a split flag twelve alen long and six broad went up over the hill. The farmer Laurids Skau, who had drafted his address with Christian Flor, gave the opening speech, and the rest of the day ran to singing, shooting competitions, dancing and bonfires that burned into the evening.

The great gathering came on 4 July 1844, called in protest at a royal patent of 29 March that had weakened the standing of Danish in Schleswig. N. F. S. Grundtvig spoke there, and Orla Lehmann, Carl Ploug and Meïr Aron Goldschmidt; a steamer carried 120 Copenhageners down for the day. In 1845 eight thousand people came, Norwegians and Swedes among them, to hear Skau, Steen Steensen Blicher and Ploug again. Danish censors suppressed Ploug's speech at home — so Danes read it in Swedish newspapers instead.

In 1863 a granite column rose on the summit: sixteen metres tall, twenty-five blocks, honouring eighteen people who had advanced the Danish cause in Schleswig, Laurids Skau, Christian Flor, Peter Hiort Lorenzen and Mørk Hansen among them. It stood for less than a year.

On 21 March 1864, during the Second Schleswig War, Prussian soldiers came to take it down. The stone did not cooperate. When the first attempts failed, a local stonemason was threatened with death until he agreed to drill the holes, and a large mine finished what gunpowder had started. Denmark lost that war, and lost Schleswig with it — but the blocks were gathered up and the column was raised again in May 1866. That the hill remained Danish at all was an accident of an earlier territorial exchange between the kingdom and the duchy, which had transferred eight parishes in the northern part of Tyrstrup Herred, Vejstrup among them, to the crown.

A midsummer meeting in 1902 resolved to build a permanent speaker's platform, and it was inaugurated on 24 June 1903, designed by Lorenz Frølich, carved by Niels Larsen Stevns, and guarded by the two lions of Schleswig's arms. Around it stand five groups of trees for the five Nordic countries — beech for Denmark, birch for Sweden, spruce for Norway, rowan for Iceland.

The crowds kept coming. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson addressed 10,000 people from Højskamling on 4 June 1906. Some 15,000 came to a reunification festival on 13 July 1919. In 1934 the first assembly of Det Unge Grænseværn sold 25,000 tickets and drew perhaps five to ten thousand more who never bought one. On 24 June 1945, weeks after the German occupation ended, more than 80,000 people covered these slopes.

Obelisks and busts mark the speakers in the surrounding woods: Laurids Skau in 1883, Grundtvig in 1884, Regenburg in 1898, Mørk Hansen in 1899, Christian Flor in 1912, Peder Skau in 1921. In 1948 a bell tower, the Klokkestabel, went up for the South Jutland resistance fighters killed in the Second World War. Its bell rings the Prince Jørgen's March every day — the tune the BBC used to introduce its Danish-language broadcasts under occupation.

Skamlingsbanken has never stopped doing the thing it was bought for. The Skamlingsbanke Society holds its annual assembly here and runs a programme built around song, dance and public speaking. Danes gather on Constitution Day, 5 June. And since 1998 the Royal Danish Theatre has staged an open-air opera concert on the slope each year, drawing audiences of up to 30,000 — a crowd on the scale of the old language meetings, standing on the same grass, listening for entirely different reasons.