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Kate and Corwen's Norwegian Adventure page 3

 

Ringebu Valley

It was very cloudy, looking back the way we'd come up the valley.

 

Ringebu Church Porch

The Church is a wonderful colour that comes from hundreds of years of creosote. You can smell it from quite a distance too, and the no smoking signs start about 200 yards away!

 

Ringebu Church Pillar Base

You can see how thick the creosote is on the footing here. You can also see the stone plinth the church stands on.

 

Strange Marks.

Some of the planking on the outside of the church has these strange carvings on. It looked to me like the sort of symbols you see on Sami drums, apparently they are the marks of local farmers. Some clearly have runic components.

 

Church Tiles

All these little tiles are wooden. Thats a lot of carving...

 

Ringebu Priests House

This is the old Priest House (now a souvenir shop).

 

Water Energy

We found this Pokemon water energy card on the way out of Hamar, and carried it as a magical way of reducing the extreme heat of our journey! As we were laying in our sodden tent it seemed like a good time to 'discard' this card so in a variation on an old spell to dispel rain we threw it out the door... The next day it wasn't raining, hurrah!

 

Inside Ringebu Church

The next morning the church was open, its as stunning on the inside as it is on the outside. The pillars are all wooden but are painted to represent marble (by someone who has never seen marble). It is like most Norwegian churches a crazy mixture of folk carpentry and fantastical baroque carving and giltwork. A lovely dutch lady who seemed to fluently speak every European language showed us round, and let us take pictures, which is against the rules!

 

Altar end of Ringebu church.

This is the altar end of the church.

 

Ringebu Centrum Cafe.

We walked into Ringebu Sentrum and finally after much searching found the cafe on the second floor above a DIY shop. We had an omlette and a lot of coffee. It was here that we discovered that the cost of a coffee usually includes at least one and sometimes infinite refills. No-one had thought to tell us this! Caffeeeeeeeeeeeeeein.

 

Waffle Ladies Stabbur.

It was still early so we walked out of town, stopping in the suburbs to admire this fine Stabbur which was in someones garden. The kind lady owner came out to tell us it was 300 years old and to give us some waffles!

 

Fryabrua Chasm

We crossed this fantastic chasm, the photo doesn't do justice to the sound and power of the water.

 

Fryabrua River

The river soon widens out, we had a nice sit down and a cup of tea.

 

Phallic Symbol.

Late in the afternoon we came to an old barrow which had a big sticky up stone on top, and...

 

Yonic symbol...

and a kind of lunar looking white quartz stone balanced on another rock in a grove down below. The coffee spirits were pleased with our observances as although the nearby Gudbrands Gard hotel and museum was closed the nice young lady, who we discovered played fiddle in the Valley Fiddle Band took pity on two itinerant fellow musos and gave us all the left over coffee! Caffeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeein...

 

Funky House

On a coffee high we passed this house with lovely dragon gable ends.

 

Gudbransdal 'Cathedral'

We started to climb again past Sor Fron Kirk, which is called Gudbransdal Cathedral as its the largest church in the Gudbransdal valley.

 

Fingers of God

The gathering storm clouds let through shafts of light briefly illuminating the cathedral.

 

Gudbransdal Valley

The valley was transformed by a beautiful light show...

 

Gudbransdal Valley with  Kate

as we climbed higher, though the rain soon passed, we'll never forget the view.

 

Robert at Sygard Grytting.

After getting slightly lost we arrived at Sygard Grytting, a famous old Pilgrim Hostel, still providing hospitality to Pilgrims 700 years after it was built. Robert the English pilgrim we had met earlier arrived shortly after us, which was really great. The normal rooms that pilgrims slept in were all full with people attending a nearby concert so we were bedded down in the old pilgrims day room on the ground floor. It was a creaky building but we eventually got to sleep.

 

Sygard Grytting

I took quite a few pictures of Sygard Grytting, it is a very photogenic place. We had a nice chat with Robert, and then a chat about music with the owner, who is quite a well known fiddle player locally.

 

Sygard Grytting

We asked him how long he'd lived there, he told us his family had lived there for sixteen generations, since the 15th century, before that the farm had belonged to another family for two generations, but before that it had belonged to his family, going back he presumed to the migration period...

 

Sygard Grytting House

And that, we thought, is the difference between Norway and England. Only an aristocrat in England would have such a sense of his family history. The average Englishman was disposessed after the Norman conquest and we have been shoved about the country to suit the needs of our 'betters' ever since. In Norway it is common for the surnames on the post boxes to be the same as the name of the village, whereas few people know where they come from in England, the only clue as to where they belong being the street names on their UB40s. Viva la Revolution!

 

Sleds

These beautiful sledges were laid up for the summer under the big Stabbur.

 

Clouds

We had dinner and watched the clouds form over the valley.

 

Balcony

 

The place had the stillness that comes with age, handmade furniture and natural materials, all weathered by time and use. Every chair and table a work of art.

 

Kate

We wouldn't have missed our stay for anything.

 

Juniper

The next morning it was off up the steep mountainside, through juniper bushes.

 

Cockle

There was an intense burst of 'Pilgrim Vibes' up on the hill. Someone had fixed a cockle (familiar symbol of the Santiago Pilgrimage) to a post. When you have walked the Camino the sight of a yellow arrow or a cockle when you are not expecting it gives a great sense of nostalgia and a sense of being at home. It might sound funny to some, but every pilgrim will know exactly what I mean.

 

Skar Farm

We passed this old farm, abandoned for many years.

 

Pilgrim Signpost

More pilgrim energy next to the old farm, signposts to each of the main pilgrim destinations. Reminded us of a similar signpost we saw near the Cruz de Fer in Spain.

 

Inside Farm

Inside the old farmhouse there were still bottles and a biscuit box on the shelf. The floor didn't look safe enough to see if it still had biscuits in...Kate spent hours wondering how they got the stoves so high up such steep mountains...

 

View

The view from up here was quite astounding.

 

Railway carriage

You find these old railway carriages in the most unlikely places.

 

Caravan

As we came down off the mountain we passed this lovely caravan. By now dear reader you will have sussed all the weird things we are into by the photos we chose to take. Caravans and Pylons and Old Wooden Buildings, Housetrucks and Birchbark and Strange Pilgrim Thingies, Churches and Barrows, Megaliths and Kings, these are a few of our favourite things...

 

Life Size Bonsai

This life size 'Root over Rock' style bonsai tree was on the road to Kvam. A lady's dog followed us for miles down this road. For a long way she followed behind on foot trying to call it, and we kept trying to shoo it away, but it could sense we were on a Big Adventure and it wanted to come. Eventually she caught up with us in her car, bundled the dog in, apologised profusely in flawless English and drove away. We missed him for a while, I must confess we had contemplated taking him with us the rest of the way, he was very cute.

 

Kvam

Late in the day we arrived at Kvam, the only truly ugly place we found in Norway. It's mostly a big timber mill. A lot of Norwegian towns have one ugly building, a sawmill or a grain silo, but Kvam was ugly to the core. We had a nasty burger in a nasty convenience store, found the ugly campsite (which was closed, but we camped there anyway) and went to bed.

 

Barn

There are a lot of barns in Norway with a ramp up to the second floor, Corwen took this photo because this was a particularly fine example. We always imagine James Bond, Smoky and the Bandit or the Dukes of Hazard driving in only to shoot out the other end after much sqwarking covered in chicken feathers and maybe sharing their car with a goat.

 

E6

The guide book warns about walking on the E6 motorway as its so busy and dangerous. The biggest danger is falling asleep through boredom and collapsing into the path of a passing cow.

 

Otta

We entered Otta.

 

Downstream of Otta

The river/lake that we had been walking alongside for weeks was very very green now.

 

Stripy River at Otta

It soon joined another river that was clear, you could see the two differently coloured waters.

 

Waymark near Otta

We stopped at Sel Kirke for the night. There is a campsite described in the guidebook here, we spent ages looking for it till we spotted the row of abandoned huts in a nearby field. Since the campsite was no more we camped by the church.

 

Sel Kirke

Oh did we mention Corwen is also into weird ironwork? All the ironwork on each church gate and door etc is handmade and varies from church to church. Sometimes it can take quite a while to work out how to operate some of the more ingenious mechanisms.

 

Sel Kirke

This is a particularly fine example.

 

Lagen

The next day we crossed the river, this time for good. The next few days would see us cross the watershed from the Gudbransdal Valley, over the high point of Dovre Fjell, and then down into the Oppdal Valley whose river runs north, not south. It felt very odd to see our familiar river from the wrong angle.

 

Mountains ahead

Even at this altitude the Norwegians use any bit of flat land to cultivate a crop. Barley in this case, the fully grown plants a little over a foot tall. We could see the mountains we would shortly be crossing ahead of us, they looked very steep!

 

Funky pillar

The farmhouse had a lovely gatepost like a miniature stave church.

 

Typical Norway

Another picture to sum up Norway. This tumbledown barn has a satellite dish, presumably so the farmer can constantly monitor the price of herring.

 

Turf roof

A tumbledown old shed, beautiful in the bright mountain air. You can see the layer of birchbark under the turf that keeps the rain out.

 

Jorundgard_Midelaltercenter

This is the Jorundgard Middle Ages Centre, which is a faithful reconstruction of a 13th century village. Above and below you can see the church. This village was originally built as a filmset for the making of Kristin Lavransdatter, a famous Norwegian novel.

 

Jorundgard_Midelaltercenter

The buildings were beautiful and still contained the props from the film.

 

Jorundgard_Midelaltercenter

The MOT is going to be expensive .

 

Jorundgard_Midelaltercenter

Counterbalanced wellhead.

 

Jorundgard_Midelaltercenter

The medieval forge. We bumped into Robert again here, for the last time, though we didn't know that then. He has our contact details, but we seem to have lost his, get in touch if you see this, Robert! We left the museum and walked into the village.

 

Kristin_Lavransdatter

Outside the church is this statue of Kristin Lavransdatter. She has a little snub nose like a Manga character.

 

Nord_Sel_Kirke

This is Nord Sel Kirke.

 

Nord_Sel_Kirke

It has some nice woodwork.

 

Nord_Sel_Kirke

Oh, and some really interesting door-handles...

 

Nord_Sel_Kirke

and a fabulous gate-latch (or sneck as they call it up-north, which makes a guest who hovers in the doorway on the way out a sneck-hanger). It took me a while to work out how to use it.

 

War_Graves

The church, like many others in this part of Norway, has immaculately maintained war graves, we were moved by the age of the soldiers. There was a Piper and a Drummer among these Scottish soldiers.

 

Cyclist

While we had a snack outside the church we met this fellow, a Swiss who had cycled up from Stockholm. He had an incredible weight of stuff in his paniers, around 40 kilos, no problem to him on his bike! It made us envious as we had 15 kilos between us and that felt heavy! Bicycle travel for us next time we thought. The revolution will not be motorised... We left the church and carried up the valley side which became a steep gorge.

 

Danger_Passing_Trains

There didn't seem to be much danger of seeing a train up here on the mountainside, but perhaps one passes every so often.

 

Clubmoss

There was some lovely moss, if you are into that type of thing (Kate is).

 

Liverwort

So she took a photo of this giant liverwort. Ho Hum...

 

Gorge

The gorge was pretty dramatic.

 

Storrabrua

But opened out into a really lush open valley.

 

Storrasbrua

Fertile cattle rearing country.

 

Haughen_Vollheim

We found a campsite, Haugen Vollheim, which was right by the river. The owner gave us a Pilgrim Discount, which was nice, so we splashed out on a giant tin of meatballs for dinner, which wasn't so nice.

 

Tent with a view

Kate thinks it looks like I'm rolling a spliff, but I promise I'm not! As it happens I don't smoke (well maybe if its your birthday).

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