Murar och gärdesgårdar

If you want to see more of the impressive landscape of stonewalls and traditional roundpole fences can you make a detour and follow the road towards Hasselbacken and Oden’s grave. The gravel road is surrounded with a remarkable system of fields separated with stonewalls. In one of the meadows close to Hasselbacken is there a beautiful log house that were used as a storage for hay.

Traditional roundpole fence The fencing was during a very long time important for the village. There were laws that said that if a farmer didn’t take care of his part of the fence he had to pay a fine. The fences were about 2 metres high and had to be really tight so the calves and lambs couldn’t escape. The traditional roundpole fence that you can see in the many parts of Sweden are made of fir and juniper.

Stonewalls Another resource which Småland has a lot of are of course stone. The tradition of building stonewalls are younger than the one of roundpole fences. The plough made its entry during the 1800’s and it needed bigger fields without stones because it couldn’t turn around them like the old tools could. That led to a massive amount of work with clearing the fields from stone. All that stone had to be put somewhere so people started to built fences with it.