The town takes its name from the factory, and the factory takes its name from a man who was betting on it. Bertel Bruun, a wealthy merchant, bought the Asmild Kloster estate outside Viborg in 1809 and decided to put an industry on it. He sent his eldest son, Johannes Ivar, abroad to study chemistry and physics and to learn how cloth was being made on the Continent. Johannes Ivar came home in 1820, and the following year father and son opened Bruunshåb Klædefabrik. Håb is Danish for hope. The site was chosen for water, not sentiment: two mills, Søndermølle and Ålemølle, sat on the Mølleå, the stream running from the Viborg lakes down to the Nørreå, and there was already a fulling mill at Ålemølle that a cloth works could use. A village grew up around the enterprise and took the family's name.

Bertel's sons Peter Daniel and Mads Pagh Bruun took the factory on after him, and Mads Pagh went further, establishing a second cloth mill, Ny Bruunshaab, near Aarhus in 1852. Then fire took the works in the early years of the twentieth century. The replacement main building went up in 1909 to a design by the architect Søren Vig-Nielsen, and it is the building visitors see today. In 1916 the mill was bought by A/S J. Smiths Papfabrik, textile production ended in 1919, and from 1920 the machinery was turning out paperboard instead. Commercial production wound down and finished in the late 1960s. It was never a glamorous business. Cardboard is what gets wrapped around other things and then thrown away, which is exactly why almost none of the plants that made it have survived anywhere in Europe.

This one did. The buildings were listed in 1999, and the complex as a whole still looks very much as it did in the 1950s: the machine hall, the drying lofts, the water channels, the ordinary un-beautiful fittings of a small provincial factory that nobody thought to modernise into oblivion. Visitors watch cardboard being made on antique machinery rather than reading about it on a panel. That distinction matters more than it might sound. A paperboard machine is a long, wet, noisy sequence of felts and rollers and heated cylinders, and no diagram conveys the scale of the thing or the racket it makes. Standing beside it, you understand instantly why a mill of this kind needed a river, and why the Bruuns picked the spot on the Mølleå that they did.

Denmark has grand industrial monuments, and this is not one of them. Bruunshåb is small, rural and modest, four kilometres southeast of Viborg on a stream you could throw a stone across. That is the point. Most nineteenth-century European industry looked like this rather than like Manchester - a family, a watercourse, a few dozen employees, a product with no romance in it whatsoever. The Bruuns' bet on the Mølleå created a village that still has around 776 residents, and the factory outlasted the cloth trade, a fire, a change of owner, a change of product and the end of its own commercial life. It is still making cardboard. Very few things built in 1821 can say that.