Saint Margaret's in winter

Last Sunday, two friends and I took a trip to a lake called Maridalsvann north of Oslo to visit the ruins of the Church of Saint Margaret. This is a thirteenth-century church located close to the lake shore in the northwestern quadrant, and must once have been the religious centre of a wide remit of farms in the hinterland of Oslo. The church has a small but relatively spacious nave and a small square-walled choir.

To my knowledge, no surviving medieval sources provide any detailed knowledge of the history of the church, and the traditional dating to c.1250 appears to be largely on architectural grounds. Its dedication to Saint Margaret of Antioch is attested in later sources, but it is unclear whether this was the original dedication. If the church was dedicated to Saint Margaret already around 1250, this would be a remarkably early attestation of her cult in medieval Norway. While Saint Margaret was probably known by name in Norway since the official conversion of the country to Christianity in the eleventh century, she was not widely famous until the fourteenth century, when the joint impulses of Legenda Aurea and the cult of the fourteen holy helpers improved her standing. In comparison, the altar of Saint Margaret in Oslo cathedral is first attested in 1329 in a letter of property exchange (although the altar was probably established earlier than that).  

Sufficiently much of the outline of the church remains today that it is possible to get a good impression of its place in the landscape, and of its original splendour. Small though it is, it would probably have been a magnificent building in its prime, visible to travellers between Oslo and the hamlets further north. The ubiquitous snow made for a particularly atmospheric view. 

A model that provides a good estimate of how the church once looked

Somewhere beyond the mist and the lake lies Saint Margaret's Church