Stone walls as artistry

Many times, I have stopped and admired the stone walls around the cemetery at By church. Stop when you’re there. Take a look. I’m sure that you’ll agree with me that they are a work of art. Stone blocks that weigh between 150 and 1500 kg, carefully laid on top of each other so they look like – you guessed it – a puzzle.

To find out about how these phenomena were created I went direct to the source, Lars-Erik Bäckman at Bäckmans Stenhuggeri in Karlstad. According to him, behind these walls there is a production process, which I will relate here from start to finish.

Handmade from Bohus granite

The specific wall that fascinated me is alongside the main entrance to the new kyrkogård at By kyrka. According to Lars-Erik it is handmade from Bohus granite. He adds that this type of wall is called a blocksten mur. In other words, it’s a wall consisting of rectangular, square and triangular and other shaped blocks. See the accompanying picture.

After the church ordered the wall, first step in the produktionsprocess was when people from the quarry in Bohusland visited where the wall was to be built to determine how long and high it would be. With this information, they returned to the quarry. There they selected the granite that they would shape by hand to form the puzzle-like wall. Each block was numbered to eliminate any guesswork when it came to assembling the wall at the cemetery.

Next the blocks are transported to the cemetery Where they are assembled by following the numbered scheme. The puzzle-like wall that can be seen from outside the cemetery is matched by another puzzle-like wall that can be seen from inside the cemetery. The two walls are separated by about a half a meter. This space is filled with small pieces of granite that were chipped away from the blocks that were finally put in place with the help of machinery. 

Vegetation can be seen between the two walls in the accompanying picture. Lars-Erik points out that this vegetation decomposes to soil and this can cause problems. If this space fills completely with soil and then freezes and expands during the winter, this can damage the wall. To prevent this from happening, a fiber cloth is laid over the stones about 20 centimeters below the top of the wall. 

Other kinds of walls

Blocksten murar aren’t the only kind of walls that appear in cemeteries. Nor is granite the kind of material used to build them. In fact, there are examples of two other kinds of walls built from different materials in the Säfflepastorat. 

The wall at the cemetery at Tveta church is made of rounded gnejs blocks stacked on top of each other. See the accompanying pictures. This wall also features the space between two walls as described above. The gnejs in this wall is probably from a local source, which means it was built with lower transportation costs.

Recently a slantstabilisering wall was installed at Bro kyrka. See the accompanying pictures. A kallmursblock wall made of skiffer from Norge is what is seen when you first look at the wall. If you could look behind this façade, you would see two-meter long by one-meter wide back and one-meter high nätlådar placed end-to-end and filled with stones to hold the earth from sliding downhill.

As was said at the end of each Looney Tunes cartoon, “That’s all folks!” The produktionsprocess behind these walls is deceptively simple. Nonetheless, they demand a lot of hard work and, clearly, skilled artisans.