Whenever I am home in my native village for an extended period, I gravitate towards the various historical remains that lie scattered throughout the landscape. These are not remains of great age or of any spectacularly unique importance, but vestiges of a past lifestyle that is receding ever more quickly from our own lived experiences. Because so much of what has been built in the fjords has been made out of wood, so little of it survive beyond a hundred years, with the occasional exception in the case of houses or barns. But the testaments to the old agrarian life, or the old patterns of working and living off the land, are often lost after a few generations, typically because they fall into disuse.
An important stage in this process occurred in the period c.1950-c.1980, when Norwegian farming became increasingly mechanised, to the point where horses became obsolete. This change in equipment, so to speak, had wide-reaching consequences. The heavy machines required flat surfaces, so while previous generations had favoured slopes for harvesting grass for hay - since the grass could be rolled rather than carried - this kind of landscape now became impractical. Likewise, the old infrastructure became outdated, roads broad enough for horse and sled became too narrow for tractors, and bridges that could carry the weight of a full sled of, say, hay or timber were not strong enough as tractors began to gain weight and size. With the change towards a more mechanised agrarian life, scores of buildings, bridges, various solutions from the life before the shift turned into relics of a bygone past.
This February, I visited one of these old relics, as my parents and I went hiking up a stretch of a frozen river. The stretch of the river is located where there used to be a summer farm until about 1950-60, which we now use as holiday houses. I do not know when the place was first used as a summer farm, but the starting point goes a long way back, and both sides of the river were used (as is only to be expected). We no longer know when the first river crossing was made across this stretch of the river, and I think it is fair to say that it has been long lost to time. For the farmers currently needing to cross the river, there is a new bridge in stone, concrete and supporting beams of metal, made sometime in the 1980s in order to accommodate new tractors and heavier loads. Before this one, however, there was another one mostly built in wood and stone, but with some concrete reinforcements from a repair job in the 1970s.
This old bridge crossed the river at a wider part of the river, divided into sections and crossing small islands on its way to the other bank. As it fell into disuse, it also fell into disrepair, and stones from its piers were taken away and used for other purposes. Today, only three piers remain - the least accessible ones - two of which are covered by a log with boards that still cling together in spite of time and weather. We rarely approach his historical relic any longer, mostly because now that the river is crossed elsewhere, there is little to attract someone to that particular part of the river. However, now that the river had frozen and we were passing right beside it on our journey upstream, we did get an excellent chance of seeing it up close, to get a sense of its materiality, the building techniques, and the vestiges of the repair job in the 1970s. It was a lovely opportunity, and a reminder of how low-key, yet no less wondrous, our historical monuments tend to be in the agrarian fjords, and how the vicissitudes of time have turned them into hidden or tucked-away little gems that require some efforts to find.
(This is the second instalment of an ongoing series. For the first part, see here.)
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