Skive appears in King Valdemar's land registry as Skyuæ, and it received its market town charter in 1231 - old, even by Danish standards. The name is thought to come from an Old Norse word for a palisaded enclosure or fortification, which suits a settlement placed where a river mouth meets a fjord.

For centuries the fjord was a dead end. That changed in 1825, when the sea broke through the Agger isthmus and gave the Limfjord a direct connection to the North Sea. Suddenly the inland fjord towns were on a shipping route. Skive built its harbour in 1869, and the industrial town grew from there. The railway followed the same logic: Skive station sits on the Langå-Struer line, with direct InterCity services to Copenhagen and regional trains to Aarhus and Struer.

Vor Frue Kirke, the Church of Our Lady, began in the 12th century and very nearly ended in the 1880s, when the congregation had outgrown it and demolition looked like the sensible option. What saved it was what was found on the walls: kalkmalerier, lime-paint frescoes of saints, dating from around 1522.

Painted around a decade before the Reformation reached Denmark, the saints were later covered by whitewash and lost from view for centuries, until the demolition debate brought them back to light. The building was spared because of them. A congregation short of pews came within one decision of erasing the oldest thing it owned.

Skive Museum opened in 1942, in a modern building by the architect Leopold Teschl - a structure so ambitious for its moment that it developed damp and cracking before it even opened, needing extensive repair in 1957-59 and a full renovation and expansion between 2016 and its reopening in September 2018. From 1 January 2025 it operates as Skive Kunstmuseum.

The art collection runs from the mid-1800s onward, with a stated appetite for expressive landscape painting and New Realism: Christen Dalsgaard, the national romantic painter born nearby in 1824; Hans Smidth; Emilie Demant-Hatt; Per Kirkeby; Jens Søndergaard. The cultural-history holdings reach back into prehistory and include amber finds from the region, alongside some of the oldest bicycles in Denmark. And in one corner stands a stuffed polar bear, a gift to Skive from its friendship town of Scoresbysund in Greenland - an object that says more about twentieth-century Danish-Greenlandic relations than the label beside it manages to.

The surrounding district is unusually well supplied with days out. Spøttrup Castle, a 14th-century moated stronghold, was heavily repaired in the 1940s and now runs as a museum with a medicinal herb garden, ghost tours, and the large summer medieval market known as Bispens Market. Hjerl Hede is an open-air museum presenting three centuries of Danish country life through relocated buildings, old crafts, shops, and games. On the island of Fur, part of Skive Municipality, the Fur Museum specialises in the island's remarkable fossils.

Modern Denmark shows up too. The Four Boxes Gallery, in the grounds of Krabbesholm Højskole, was designed by the Japanese practice Atelier Bow-Wow. Thise Mejeri, at Thise on Salling, is one of the country's largest dairies and entirely organic, credited with pushing forgotten and unfamiliar products - skyr among them - onto Danish shelves. Skive was also the first place in Denmark to offer trips in fully transparent kayak-canoe hybrids. Even the roundabouts have been treated as an opportunity: eleven of them carry artworks by the designer Timothy Jacob Jensen, collectively known as the 11 Stars.

Just north of the town, on a rise above the fjord, stands Jenle, the house the poet and novelist Jeppe Aakjær built in 1906. Born at Fly in 1866, Aakjær was a central figure in the Jutland Movement and wrote about heath farmers and farm labourers in a register that had not much been used for them before. He lived at Jenle until his death in 1930, and the house is now open to the public. Marie Bregendahl, the novelist of rural life, was born in the same parish a year after him.

Skive has attracted outside attention of a different kind as well. The sociologist Richard Jenkins based his book Being Danish: Paradoxes of Identity in Everyday Life on fieldwork here - an entire study of Danish national identity conducted in a Limfjord market town, on the reasonable assumption that this is where you would actually find it.