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Burials during the Viking Age were public events in which everyone participated. The social standing of the living, the dead, and the family as a whole was expressed through rituals and the placement of the grave in the landscape. The tombs were supposed to remain visible, and can be found on heights, near settlements or...

Everything has been prepared for the great reindeer hunt. For several weeks, people from the village have cleaned and prepared the large trapping pits on the mountains and hillsides, covering them with twigs, leaves and peat. It had been a substantial task, and everyone, regardless of gender, age or size, had done their share of...

The leather-clad hunter moves with quiet purposeful steps through the vast mountainous area opposite the small mountain village of Oppdal. He has spotted a herd of reindeer on top of a snowdrift. Cautiously he slips within shooting range, places the arrow on the bow, draws, aims and shoots. It misses completely, with the arrow piercing...

The large coastal cairns at Slakken are memorials to friends and loved ones buried during the Early Iron Age, more than 1,500 years ago. The cairns are particularly visible from the sea, and to seafarers they signalled that people lived on this land. The dead residing in the mounds could gaze across both land and...

A summer day in 1913 Olai runs along the road to Refsneshagen. In his pocket he has the letter to Uncle John in America. He hurries a little, as his mother has told him to come straight back home, since dinner is almost ready. He knows the road well; he has walked it with his...

Sometime during the Early Iron Age, more than 1500 years ago, a woman was buried in a mound on a Refsnes hillside. Some of her belongings were placed in the grave with her, and on top of the tomb, friends and family assembled a cairn of rocks as a monument to her. Over time, the...

Once upon a time there were two married men from Stjørna. They both took a fancy to Barbara, the wife of the farmer at Husby. One winter Barbara and the two lovers came up with a plan to get rid of her husband. They drilled a hole in the wall right by the bed of...

There once stood a simple log cabin on the Refsnes oceanfront. In the cabin, men sat patiently waiting for the salmon to enter the bay. This was the vorp, an ancient fishing method which is also called ståarnot or sitjenot, meaning sitting net, because you sit, waiting and scouting for salmon. In the sea below...

At the start of the 20th century, landowner Anders Refsnes (1879-1939) dammed up the pond on his farm in order to produce ice. The ice from the new ice pond was needed to keep the salmon caught in the seine nets at the farm cold and fresh during the voyage to Trondheim. Today the ice...

Out here on the Refsnes cape there is a burial ground from the Iron Age. The ground consists of several circular mounds plus one that stands out; a very rare grave, quite unique in Norwegian context. The grave is a square mound, large and rectangular, almost like a land lot, constructed as a barrow of...