Back … and Crowing

After three years Observing Gothenburg, if at all, from back of beyond (that’s a place called Falköping), I moved home again last week. For a more developed account, see my blog at ipernity.com/supercargo.


Last Saturday, after days of dust and distress and lifting and lugging, my wife and I decided to take a day off just to celebrate my return. We went out into the countryside – for more on that, see below. But first, let me crow a little. This morning I had a picture published in our local paper!

The Opera ship

On Monday, one of the paper’s journalists repeated a frequent comment made by the guides on the sightseeing boats here in Gothenburg. The guides love to point out the new waterside opera house and say something like: “The design is supposed to be based on a boat, but I’ve been coming past here for four years and I still can’t see it. Perhaps you have a better imagination?” The journalist added his tupennyworth “Nej, tyvärr” (= no unfortunately).


Well, I see it every time I cross the bridge into town, so I thought I’d respond. I also thought I could point out that the view is from Hisingsbron, as you come from Hisingen. This is important (in a very parochial way) because some mainland Gothenburgers look down their noses at us Hising Island dwellers as not real Gothenburgers. (Hisingen houses about a quarter of the tax-paying population of the city. It also includes most of the Volvo plants – where upwards of 20,000 Gothenburgers work – the major container and oil ports, Gothenburg’s second airport and large areas of countryside. It’s also been lived in and on for several thousand years more than the city of Gothenburg has existed. More about that below.)


But the fight against local prejudice is long, and setbacks are many; Göteborgs-Posten removed my Hisingen references when they published.

Violence and Death on Hisingen

That could be a headline in GP. We Hisingers feel the local press unfairly highlights social problems with a Hisingen connection. If someone is murdered in Askim (posh mainland district), or if there’s a bank robbery in the centre of town, and they can connect at least one of the perpetrators to Hisingen, then that’s what they’ll do. Am I going on too much about this?

OK, what this heading actually refers to is Saturday’s walk and some of the pictures I took. We enjoyed the walk on Saturday so much, that we repeated a part of it yesterday evening, in order to sit on the rocks by the sea and paddle by the light of the setting sun. On the original walk, we’d seen masses of wild honeysuckle and wanted to smell it in all its glory, but even at 8.30 p.m. the sun was still too high and it wasn’t till we were walking back again that we began to notice the scent that would not come into full strength for an hour or more. It was a beautiful evening, even so, and the walk on Saturday also.


Yesterday it was really warm, over 25 degrees, and today as I write it must be about the same, with blue sky and the very occasional fluffy white cloud. But on Saturday the weather was still changeable. The walk was the Bronsålderssund stig (the Bronze Age Sound Path, where sound means a narrow inlet of water).



Bronze Age Settlements

Once upon a time, about 5,000 years ago, the whole of Scandinavia was lower relative to the level of the sea than it is now. Hisingen was not one large island, but many smaller islands. The first permanent inhabitants here were fisher folk and farmers, and they made their homes at the edge of the water. As the land rose, what were shallow bays and straits, drained and ultimately became rich farmland, while the stony meadows of the Neolithic and Bronze Age people were abandoned as too infertile.

The places they lived and worked became overgrown, or were used only to pasture sheep and goats. For centuries, the only signs of the earliest people were the cairns of stones they raised to cover their dead. These were on the higher ground, above the settlements, on land even the Bronze age people thought too infertile to farm. But the cairns stood out and as the land rose, they became even more prominent. Generations of sailors used them as markers to identify the coast and navigate the channels.

Then came the archaeologists, who opened the cairns (those that hadn’t long ago been plundered) and found cremated bones, earthenware pots, bone combs and bronze artefacts. They began to piece the story together.

The Bronsålderssund walk, meanders along the Bronze Age coast, visiting the sites of the settlements that have been discovered. Sometimes it clambers up to the cairns and stone settings on the tops of the hills, and furthest out on the island, it reaches the present sea coast, which is where we went paddling on Thursday. There’s not a lot of history to see. A few signs with brief information in Swedish (and briefer information in English). But the landscape is large on a small scale. Though the hills are not high, there’s a scramble to climb them, though the path itself is only about 4 km (1 mile), it winds about through trees and bushes, rocks and boulders, and gives a sense of great variety, complexity and distance. And it is easy to picture how it might have looked all those years ago, when the settlements were alive and the dead in the cairns were newly mourned.

A good day’s outing, in fine weather any time in the year. If you’re visiting Gothenburg and want to find out more go here! The path (my wife assures me) is clearly marked. Clearly, if you are not red-green colour-blind. If, like me, you have difficulty seeing red spots painted on lichen covered rocks, it’s a good idea to take someone with you who doesn’t have that problem. Or a dog.

The are more photos from the walk at my Ipernity site. Come and visit!

Well, it’s good to be back and I will try to keep up this blog with a new entry every few days from now on. For now, though, Hej då!