When i walk around the woods here in Vestland, I sometimes find these walls made out of rocks, can someone give me the lore behind them and approximately how old they are?

15 comments

  1. This is an old stone fence, called steingard or steingjerde in Norwegian. They were built to mark borders and as general fences, often from rocks removed from a field to make it easier to work the land and grow crops there. The oldest ones can be up to around 2000 years old but most that you see are much newer.

  4. They are used all over the world to mark the border between different properties. Like any fences.

  5. The oldest stone fence – “steingjerde” we have is approx 500 B.C.

    However, the biggest changes in agriculture happend just before and after “Svartedauen” aka the Black Death around 1350 – small farms were brought together in a “fellestun” – like a small village. The stone fences then marked the border between cultivated farm land, grazing lands, and forest. The stone had to be removed from farmed land, and was a strong (if heavy) building material that kept the animals away from the farmland and gave clear indications about property borders. A stone fence may be hard to build, but is pretty easy to maintain (usually when the frost goes) and can last for centuries.

    1600-1700 saw a lot of the forest cut down and exported. Building with stone became very encouraged, and stone walls were considered good shelter/keeping the land protected.

    We got a new law concerning agricultural land in 1857. Most “steingjerde” is from that time or newer. Smaller farms were consolidated into bigger farms, and new property-lines had to be established. Some of the older “gravrøys” – that is burial mounds of stone – were being cleared and farmed, and the stones used to make new stone fences.

    It seems you are looking at a “ordna røys” steingjerde in your photo – mostly used to separate grazing land from forest or farmed land. Fun fact – if one side is pretty and the other more odds and ends, the pretty side is probably towards farmed land and it is more probably a “dobbel-mur”. Kistemur is another kind, where there are (pretty) blocks at either side and often sand/gravel/small stone in the middle; those were often used inside villages/between houses.

    The law states that neighbors have equal responsibility for maintaining the fence. We called that law “keeping neighbors friendly law” when it came in 1902. “Gjerdeloven” has been updated since, but good fences still makes good neighbors.

    So it is very likely this stone fence – steingjerde – is from after 1857, and made as a boundary between 2 farms. Looks pretty new to me, but I am no expert. Perhaps just well maintained.

  6. They’re just stone walls, dude. Every country I’ve been to has them. They’re even in parks in NYC. There’s no lore. It just marks off properties, grazing areas, for runoff, etc.

  7. Had the same question, thanks for asking! But what about the stone huts, made from the same type of rocks? Are they just old structures which were used by farmers?

  8. Apart from seeing a ‘steingjerde’, or a border/fence, you also see the result of arduous work in clearing an area from rocks to make it arable. Remember that most of Scandinavia -save from the mountains – is really glacial silt and it was covered in rocks – those areas are now fertile farmland.

  9. These where the old ruins of the so-called “troll catchers”. The old lore is that these walls where created to gather the trolls in a area so they didn’t dispersed. Nowadays we have these giant masts scattered all over the country keeping them gathered

  12. Whoever tells you this is walls are wrong and is working for the big troll business.

    These are evidence of trolls. Basically it is troll poop logs. The reason some of them are really long, is because they have forgot their poop knife.

  13. You should visit the South of France, the Cévennes specifically.

    It all used to be terassed agriculture, pre-dating the Roman era, that was abandoned with the Industrial revolution.

    The forests re-grew since, but the walls they built to hold the soil in horizontal terasses remain.

    You can find yourself in complete wilderness, yet every hillside is lined with man-made stone walls.

    And sometimes, on a hill top, you will find that the walls now form square enclosures. Those are the collapsed remains of abandoned houses

  15. Aaah, the “Steingard”. If you are lucky you can find stuff hidden in the craks of a steingard, like knifes, whetstones, other tools, coins and even small bottles of booze.

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