Cool Finds

The Ruins of a Long-Lost Medieval Convent Have Been Discovered Just a Few Feet Beneath a Soccer Field

St. Clare’s Convent closed in the 16th century, and researchers assumed all traces of it had been lost. But a new ground-penetrating radar survey revealed surprisingly intact remains of pillars, rooms, cloisters, a courtyard and a church

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

September 16, 2026 7:00 a.m.

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Scholars have long known about St. Clare’s, a convent that operated in eastern Denmark during the Middle Ages. They assumed, however, that all traces of the structure had been lost to history. Locals have been using the land as a soccer field for decades.

But earlier this year, when researchers scanned the site, they were surprised to find that well-preserved ruins survived underground. A ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey revealed remnants of rooms, cloisters, pillars and a church buried just three feet below the surface.

“The results are simply impressive. GPR data do not always provide such clear images,” Arne Abel Stamnes, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), says in a statement. “In my assessment, these are among the clearest GPR results from a monastery complex in Scandinavia.”

Officials in the municipality of Roskilde recently started discussing plans to build a new parking facility beneath the soccer field. That’s what prompted ROMU, a Danish museum organization, to partner with NIKU and the National Museum of Denmark to survey the site.

In January, researchers drove an ATV across the snow-covered field. The vehicle was equipped with a GPR scanner, a noninvasive tool used to study subterranean structures without disturbing them.

Often, GPR produces images that require extensive processing before useful data emerges. But inside the ATV, as Stamnes watched the images appear on a laptop screen, he immediately realized that the team had made an exciting discovery.

Founded in 1256, St. Clare’s Convent belonged to the Poor Clares, a Roman Catholic order of nuns. Of the three Poor Clare convents in medieval Denmark, St. Clare’s was the oldest, Søren Steensig notes for the Danish magazine Historie.

St. Clare’s was one of five monastic sites in Roskilde, which emerged as a medieval center of “both ecclesiastical and royal power.” Today, the other four sites are protected monuments. But St. Clare’s never received such protections because experts assumed it had been destroyed. After all, the convent closed during the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, and much of the building was demolished at that time. Half a million of its bricks were sold to the nearby Selsø Castle.

Based on the scans, researchers can tell that the structure measured roughly 230 feet long. It featured four wings built around a courtyard, which may have held a well at its center. As Jesper Langkilde, an archaeologist at ROMU, tells the Danish television station TV 2, monastery buildings with similar layouts have been found elsewhere in Europe.

The church, located in the south wing, was likely a tall building with a vaulted ceiling, per Historie. Langkilde speculates that the nuns may have sat in an elevated area, separated from men and other churchgoers.

After the convent closed, no new structures were built on the site, and it’s been used as a soccer field since 1961. As such, the ruins of the convent have remained relatively undisturbed underground.

Now, researchers want to conduct excavations at the site. They anticipate finding “lots of pottery sherds and animal bones,” as well as “religious objects, like pendant crosses, rosary beads and pilgrims’ badges,” Langkilde tells Fox News Digital’s Andrea Margolis. He says that a dig could also reveal graves, which would “tell us about who the nuns were and who else was buried at the convent.”

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.