Audio guide along the Hälsingland Farm Trail

Listen to our audio guide while traveling the Hälsingland Farm Trail, the 28 km long trail between Alfta and Edsbyn that is signposted with the brown and white flower, the symbol of the tourist route.

The journey begins at Hälsingegård Ol-Anders in Alfta, marked as point 1 on the map, and ends at point 9, which is Hälsingegård Mårtes in Edsbyn. Scroll down to the point where you are to hear or read the story about the place along the way.

Your journey begins here

Welcome to the Hälsingland farm trail. Your journey takes you through the villages and districts with the biggest Hälsingland farmhouses, all with magnificent porches and superbly painted interiors.

The 28 kilometer trail goes between Alfta and Edsbyn and links three farms, Ol-Anders, Löka and Mårtes. All three farms are open in the summer season or by previous arrangement. Telephone numbers to the farms are listed below the map on the CD sleeve. Follow the brown and white flower signposts which are along the whole Hälsingland farmhouse trail. Your journey begins at the Hälsingland farm Ol-Anders, marked as point one on the map, and it ends at point nine, the Hälsingland farm Mårtes in Edsbyn. We'll make several stops on the way, all marked on the map. At every stop there is an information board and a recorded track for you to listen to. We will also pass several places for refreshments and they are all well worth a visit. Enjoy your journey along the Hälsingland farm trail.

1. Hälsingland Farm Ol-Anders

Coordinates: N 61° 24.562', E 016° 01.506'
Address: Runemovägen 6, Alfta,
Phone: 0271-577 77

1. You're now standing by the Hälsingland farmhouse Ol-Anders. Ol-Anders once stood close by the church in Alfta, but Ol-Anders farmhouse was one of those destroyed in the Great Fire of 1793. This huge fire broke out on a May day and all of 222 buildings, mostly clustered around the church, were destroyed. The fire destroyed the church, rectory, courthouse, the inn, officers' residence and 18 big farms in the village centre. 183 people were made homeless. With very few exceptions, all the biggest and most prosperous farms were lost. A farmer's wife from a nearby village was taken to court for saying that the fire was a punishment for the farmers' ”excessive pride”. On the farm Ol-Anders, ten buildings were destroyed and nine people were left homeless. Immediately after the fire, rebuilding began on a new farm, but in a new and safer place, on a high hill to the east of the village.

It is thought that the farm name, Ol-Anders, comes from the farmer Olof Andersson, born 1640. The farm remained in the family for 400 years. New owners and new times arrived and today the farm is a visitors centre, with cafe, an arts and crafts shop, an exhibition farm and a gateway to the Hälsingland farm trail. In one of the buildings there are beautiful wall paintings. During the late 1700s it was most often painters from Dalarna who came and decorated, and in the 1800s they almost completely took over mural painting in Hälsingland.

Also on the farm is the emigrant museum, which tells the story of how Erik Jansson came to the area and was responsible for the beginning of the great mass emigration from Sweden to the USA. In the years between 1846 and 1850, 3917 people emigrated from Sweden to the USA. 382 people were from Alfta, about 10% of the parish population. They founded the colony Bishop Hill west of Chicago, which today is reckoned to be the most important memorial of the Swedish emigration to America.

2. Alfta church

Coordinates: N 61° 23.449', E 016° 02.740'
Address: V:ä Kyrkogatan 2, Alfta
Phone: 0271-100 79

2. You're now standing by Alfta church. In Alfta, the church and village community are all close together, and seldom does one see such a treasure trove of fine carpentry as here. The village is counted as the best preserved of its type in the county. After the great fire in 1793, a new village was quickly built up and the community flourished. A new rectory was in place only one year after the fire, and the church was completely rebuilt within a very few years.

From the 1850s to the end of the century, Alfta grew quickly. Near the church and along Långgatan, there are many well-preserved buildings from around the turn of the last century. Opposite the church, there is the magnificent inn from the 1870s, well ahead of its time, with a new panel architecture and glassed-in verandas.

The carpenter and master builder Jonas Holm was a significant figure in most of this building. He came from Bollnäs, but married and moved to Alfta in 1887. Axel Almfelt, architect at a government office in Stockholm, designed the church and the wonderfully decorated pulpit. On the back of this pulpit, a little modestly carved, are the names of the two skilled and popular local carpenters, Olof Brum, and Per Tulpan, together with a date 1815. Brunk and Tulpan had been given the job of carving the pulpit, which, among other things, is embellished with the Alfta rose, with its scalloped petals. There are countless examples in the area of porches and woodwork ornamented with designs copied from the pulpit. The Alfta rose itself has become the foremost symbol of the parish.

Next to the church is the church school, which dates from 1847. The building work was led by carpenter and farmer Hans Brunk in Näsbyn, son of master carpenter Olof Brunk, who had carved the pulpit some 30 years earlier. The school porch, with its two magnificent wooden pillars, was designed by Hans Brunk himself. The pillars, which still stand, are a tribute to Brunk's keen eye for proportions. The double doors and entrance were an inspiration for the porch of the big farm called Jon-Lars in the village Långhed. Hans Brunk was one of those from Alfta parish who went with the preacher Erik Jansson to America. This early emigration, which had a major impact on the Alfta parish, is described in the emigrant museum at Ol-Anders.

3. Hälsingland Farm Löka

Koordinater: N 61° 21'34', E 16°3'2'
Address: Gundbogatan 24, Alfta
Phone: 0271-107 30

3. You are now standing by the Hälsingland farm Löka in the village Gundbo. As you can see, the main farmhouse is in fact three buildings. This farm had passed down within the same family since the beginning of the 1600s, until Alfta Heritage Association bought it in the 1950s after having had use of it ever since 1923.

The name Löka probably comes from the local dialect word lök, which means lid. The lid, löket, was earlier the name for the common public area in the village. Originally the farm lay to the south of its present position, but in the 1840s it was moved to the present site by the stream called Löka-bäcken. The stream was used to power a treasure, a mill and a flax scutchery. Löka is now open to visitors and is a heritage museum with a fine collection of textiles, arts and crafts sales and coffee and refreshments.

From a cultural heritage perspective, the most valuable village environments are in Långhed and Näsbyn, but Gundbo and the villages to the east of it are also important. The farms have dominating positions on the hills and uplands, around the winding stream of Hässjaån. Along the trail, you can see how the master builder Jonas Holm’s outbuildings and farmhouses, dating from the turn of the last century, harmonize with the older buildings. It was thanks to Jonas Holm that the big Hälsingland farmhouses were built in a new, more rational and practical architectural style, where farmhouse, brewery, barns and cow sheds were all linked together.

But why were such big farms built in Hälsingland? Farmers in Hälsingland were always the dominant social class. There was no nobility. The farmers owned their land, they could run their farms as they wished, and they had power over the villages and parishes. As a group, the farmers and their families stuck together. Farms passed from father to son, and as far as possible, farmers' daughters were married off to men in neighboring farms or villages.

Families can often trace their history back to the 1500s, evident in the family trees often displayed in the farmhouses. The farm buildings were a manifest of the farmers' high social status. It was not unusual that a Hälsingland farm had some 30 outbuildings. Essential for farming were cow sheds, stables, grain stores, a mill, underground storage cellars and several barns, mostly built with nutted timbering.

A Hälsingland farm is most carefully planned, for there was much that had to fit together. The site had to be near good soil and water resources. The building material, timber, was taken from the locality in which the farm was built. Architecture was adapted and suited to both the landscape and the parish building traditions. There was a prudent wisdom in the building, and a clear motive that the farm should remain in the family, generation after generation.

4. Långhed's Heritage Community Centre

Coordinates: N 61° 23' 30", E 16° 2' 40"
Address: Långhed 611, Alfta

4. You are now standing by Långhead's Heritage Community Centre. Longhead is the centre of the grand building style of the Hälsingland farmers. It's here we find farmhouses with up to 500 square meters of living area and equally large empty spaces on upper floors and in attics. These buildings are often two and a half stories high with mansard and hipped roofs, as many as nine windows on the gables and with six or seven pairs of windows on the long sides.

It was Olof Persson, a farmer on the farm Schols in the village Näsbyn, who began building big in the district. He was an admirer of the imposing manor houses built by mill owners and industrialists and in 1821 his new farmhouse was completed. It showed a marked change from the old-fashioned traditional double cottage format all around. Schols was a source of inspiration for the whole parish.

The biggest farms were Jon-Lars and Pallars in the village Långhed. The developing sawmill boom strongly affected the buildings. Many of the houses were covered in wood paneling, which at the turn of the century was painted in pale pastel colors, further underlining the manor house character. In the whole Voxna river valley, you find these pastel colored farmhouses side by side with older red-painted timber houses. The big houses were embellished with glass verandas and much ornamental woodworking. It's seldom one finds such richly decorated woodworking as in Alfta, writes Frederic Bedoire, professor in architectural history. Some of the big farmhouses were never covered in wood paneling, but retained their plain red-painted timber.

From Långhed, the trail goes through the forest that bounds the two parishes Alfta and Ovanåker. The parish boundary is marked on the trail by a boundary stone dated 1927. When you come out of the forest, at the village of Vängsbo, you are met by a magnificent view overlooking Hälsingland's vast forest and agricultural landscape with blue-toned hills and the watercourse and lake system of the Voxna river.

5. Vängsbo Flax Scutchery

Coordinates: N 61° 22' 59", E15° 55' 11"

5. You are now standing by Vängsbo Flax Scutchery. When you come out from the forest, the road winds through Vängsbo village, close to the buildings with a view of a meadows, fields and the lake Vängnan. The village has an old-fashioned layout and a long history. Unusually, most of the farms remain undivided. Land allocation disputes meant that the 1794 land reforms came to nothing here, and the 1853 redistribution led to only three farms being moved.

Vängsbo is dominated by big farmhouses and cow sheds built in the late 1800s and around the turn of the century, but its origins are much older. There is a striking difference between the grand buildings of Långhed and those in Vängsbo. In Långhed, all the traditional farm cottages were completely replaced around 1850 by the new, wider building of that time. In Vängsbo, however, people simply modernized their old farm buildings and made them longer and higher. The Hälsingland farm Nygårds is an excellent example of this. The older farm building with its long side facing the road, a tall traditional cottage painted in pale pink oil paint, has been extensively studied by experts as those at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. The farm's transformation from a small single story cottage, built in 1786, can be traced step by step all through the decades of the 1800s up to the turn of the century. By this time the farm was longer, had two stories and an attic, a veranda, oil painted paneling and a characteristic pediment.

The Hälsingland Farming Society and industry was a heavy user of water resources. It was used to power threshing, grinding, scutching, chopping, crushing and much more. The stream cutting through Vängsbo has on both sides old water mills with their huge wheels. In the middle of the village is a dam with sluice gates to control the flow of the water. In the middle of the village is a dam with sluice gates to control the flow of the water. This farm based industry dates back in the middle ages. It expanded strongly in the 1700's and made flax processing more efficient up to the mid 1800's. Still remaining in Vängsbo are flax scutchery, mill, a shingle machine and a threshing barn.

In Hälsingland farms, one mastered very early the art of decorating and furnishing rooms. On well-scrubbed floors lay dark rag or dobby woven mats and vivid carpets. In windows hung delicate sheer white curtains, with pelmets to catch the light and spread it across the rooms. It was the women who were responsible for the home, through their work, artistry and creativity, the farm could expose its wealth and status. Flax has been grown here since time immemorial, so linen has always had a special place in the home. Bedsheets with bobbin lace edges, embroidered long pillows with carefully ruffled ties and bundles of specially woven monogrammed towels.

The foremost display for linen was storsängen, the big bed. This was not for sleeping, but stood as an ornament in some strategic place in the house. Stories around these beds all relate that nobody should ever sleep there. It was just for glorious show.

In the linen cupboard were long linen tablecloths, which were taken out only for great occasions, like funerals, christenings, parish catechisms, and weddings, to be laid on tables in herrstugan, always the finest room in the house, reserved for just such festivities. Cotton, which was both exclusive and expensive, was to make inroads into this linen culture in the mid-1800s.

6. Knåda village

Coordinates: N 61° 22' 35", E 15° 53' 55"

7. You are now in the Sässman district, which lies between the two lakes Ullungen and Vägnan, with a bit further on glimpses of Knåda village. The Voxna river winds gently on, surrounded by networks of lakes, wetlands and leafy groves. Stretching away on both sides is typical ancient farming country, with fields, pastures and cow sheds. The farms lay close to the edge of the woods, well protected from river flooding. Exceptions are the farm called Näs, which is alone in the middle of its pastures, and the farm Hoppet, which lays south of the river. These farmers build embankments in an attempt to protect their farms from the annual floods.

The special interplay between nature and culture has helped getting the area classed as of national interest. 150 bird species have been found here and author Hans Lidman has called the area, “the singing valley”. Already in the mid 1800s, the old main road running by the side of the south bank of the river, was renowned as one of Sweden’s most beautiful roads.

South of Knåda you will find Roprabäcken. From time in memorial, this has been a river crossing for travelers heading south. Because of its location, Knåda became an important trading point. Farmers came from near and far and one of Sweden's most famous markets was established. In the past markets were where farmers sold their farm surplus and at the same time bought what they could not produce themselves. Knåda village became famous far and wide for its annual market. People streamed into the Hans and Olpas farms for a few days around January 20th to buy, sell, barter, and socialize. Knåda market was a stop on the regular winter trips made by folk from Hälsingland, Jämtland and other northern counties, to the towns of Falun, Kopparberget and Hedemora in Dalarna.

Even today, Hälsingårdsvägen, Hälsingland farm road, is a street in the city of Falun and is evidence for these trading links. For the Knåda farms the markets were also a source of extra income. Some farms provided overnight accommodation. Others opened an inn and some let out premises for magic shows and acrobatics. The market and some of the farms were sold out and some were sold out premises for magic shows and acrobatics, and in the middle of all this a market street with a market square. By 1843 Knåda market was so important that it was noted in calendars as a national trade market. This led to further expansion with a golden age in the period 1850 to 1867. At the same time a new age was dawning and Edsbyn began to establish itself as a new trading center in the district.

7. Roteberg's shop

Coordinates: N 61° 23' 42", E 15° 49' 54"
Address: Rotebergsvägen 61 A, Edsbyn
Phone: 0271-201 85

7. You are now standing by Roteberg’s shop. Roteberg is a typical farm village with very old roots to which in recent years modern buildings have been added. The village lies on the sunny side of the valley with fields and meadows going down to Lake Ullungen. The farms are placed like a string of pearls along the forest edge in the north.

Roteberg is a long village connecting Östra Roteberg, Mellanbyn and Västra Roteberg. Since the early 1900s the village centre has been near the shop surrounded by the big farms Pallas, Uddas, Prans, Lassa, Lillsvens and Svensollas. Located behind the farms were outlaying buildings where tradesmen and soldiers had their farms. This survives in farm names like Skomakra, Glasmästars, Skräddarns and Smens.

Johan Erik Olsson called Lim-Johan lived from 1865 to 1944 in the villages around Ovanåker. After his death he was recognized as one of Sweden's, perhaps one of the world's, finest naive artists. Very well worth seeing are some of his works exhibited in Edsbyn's museum. Roteberg’s summer pasture lands are within a 20 to 30 kilometer radius in the vast wooded areas to the north and west. The animals were driven to these areas for summer grazing and here cheese, whey cheese and butter were made.

8. Ullungsfors

Coordinates: N 61° 24' 4", E15° 46' 58"

8. You are now by the river in Ullungsfors. Streams and becks from the northwest all run together into lakes and watercourses past the bottleneck at Ullungsfors into Lake Ullungen and on to the river Voxnan. The rapids provided power to the small Ullungsfors community and the village grew with industry, factories, shops and free church.

Farmers have used water power in simple water mills since the Middle Ages. Water technology developments in the 1600-1700s made farm work simpler and more efficient. Population expanded and new trades found their place in the agrarian society.

Industry began along the banks of rivers and waterways. Here in Ullungsfors in 1840 was established the first industry in Edsbyn, in fact the first in the whole parish, the forge, popularly known as the nail factory. Nails were the main product but the forge also made plows, hinges, horseshoes, horseshoe nails, slails, sledges, cartwheels, everything the farmers needed.

Nearby was a mill and there were always disputes between the miller and the blacksmiths, arguing over water power. The miller was the one who finally gave in. Competition from factory-made nails led the far-sighted smith Olof Åberg to change his production. In 1857 the forge was transformed into Ullungsfors Manufacturing Works, which later became The Axe Factory. The new forestry industry created new businesses, which in turn created the need for new products. Nail manufacture was replaced by producing axes and bark spades. At the beginning of the 1900s the business has grown so big that part of it was relocated to Voxnan in central Edsbyn to harness more water power. The remainder of the forge continued to make tools for the forestry industry until the 1940s. The Ullungsfors factory has closed but there are still thriving timber processing industries in Edsbyn and Alfta.

9. Hälsingland Farm Mårtes, Edsbyn

Coordinates: N61°20´30´´, E15°49´23´´
Address: Hembygdsgatan 9, Edsbyn
Phone: 0271-205 81, 216 67

9. You are now standing by the Hälsingland farmhouse Mårtes in Edsbyn. Mårtes is Ovanåker's Heritage Association's heritage centre, with buildings and objects collected by the association since its formation in 1915. The name comes from the magnificent farmhouse that was moved here in 1921 from the Mårtes farm, which was on the opposite side of the road.

Very early on, the Hälsingland farmers decorated their rooms and cottages with paintings on the fabric and paper on the walls. Mårtes is most famous for its baroque-style paintings from the 1700s in its finest room, herrstugan, painted by Hälsingland artist Jonas Hertman. A town painter was trained in bourgeois decorative ideals, but a rustic painter followed the taste which was widespread in the parish in which he worked. Here follows a description of what might have happened as painters worked on a farmhouse:

Lisa Jonsdotter dried her hands on her apron and brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead. Her hands were sticky with paint, her arm ached, and she felt sick. She was together with her husband, Jonas Hertman, at Mårtes farm in Edsbyn to decorate herrstugan. Sometimes the paints she mixed had a strong smell, which meant she often had to sit down outside on the porch for air. The chill wind sweeping over the courtyard made her feel better. The sun warmed her and a bit of color came back to her cheeks. It was June, perhaps in the 1790s, and they were busy painting the ceiling. They sometimes stood, sometimes lay with cushions under their heads, on the scaffolding they built up in the room to be able to get at the ceiling. After the ceiling they would continue with the walls, which had been covered with a coarse linen fabric to be painted white. Herrstugan at Mårtes is full of brilliant colors. The decoration has blue, green, yellow, ochre, brown and red. The color display is strong, wam and impressive, a beautiful room, ideal for feasts and celebrations. In herrstugan at Mårtes, as in many other Hälsingland farms, both sacred and profane motives were chosen for the figure painting on the walls.

Mårtes is open to the public during the summer months, or by prior arrangement. The Heritage Association also runs Edsbyn Museum, open all year round. And now, while you are in Edsbyn, we can recommend a visit to Ön, which is marked on the map. Here you can see the Dina Arena, a fine example of contemporary building in timber. The arena is the first indoor hall built in Sweden for Bandy. Bandy is a popular national sport and Edsbyn has a team in the top division.

Thank you for joining me on the Hälsingland Farmhouse Trail. What you've listened to is based on many people's collective knowledge of the history of the farms along this trail, which takes you through a thousand-year-old cultural landscape.