Near the town of Larvik there is a beech tree forest. If you are a visitor from further south in Europe this in itself is not that special. However the beech tree forest in Larvik is unique for several reasons. It’s the largest of it’s kind in Norway, and the most northern natural beech tree forest.
Or is it really a natural forest? For one, most of it is partially managed to keep a disease that attacks the threes at bay and keep it safe to walk in.
Secondly it might originally have been more or less planted (imported as seeds), sometime around the early Viking age. There are some recent genetic analysis that points to a relationship between the beech trees in Norway and those in Denmark.
Beech nuts were used as fodder, and the wood itself were at least used for some artifacts. Though most wooden objects found from the Viking age are made of oak.
There are several paths in the forest and they are easy to walk. We didn’t get to go to the least managed part of it, but will do so another time. I’ve heard it’s lovely there in autumn when the leaves turn red, so I might go back then. It was a nice to walk around in this historic forest.
The photo in the middle show my husband next to a big and old Oak tree at the edge of the beech forest.
Through the forest there also run a “hulvei” (sunken lane). In Norway no roads were built until the 1600s, but people did travel across land. They walked, rode, used carriages or sleds in the winter. Some places in the terrain is easier to travel than others, one of those is on Raet (the largest terminal moraine in Scandinavia). Its basically a heap of gravel making it easier to travel on than the surrounding terrain. Through hundreds of years of travel in addition to the effects of frost and rain it set it marks in the terrain, and we may still see them some places as sunken lanes (hulveier). In the Beech tree forest, there is one such stretch of road. And we know for sure it is at least 1200 years old, maybe more. There are burial mounds in the area along the lane, but none in the lane itself.
Meadowhill and Mountain 