Day 15 part 3. Dagali to Skagoset. The Museum at Uvdal.
We started with the church itself dating from the twelfth century. A stave church is made of wood and in the Numedal churches had four main vertical pillars and a post in the middle for the spire. An unusual feature of the churches we visited was that there was no triangulation of the main structure. We learned that as a result many of the churches have become a bit wonky over time as the rectangles turn slowly into parallelograms. The interior was lovely with paintings dating from the 16th century in Italianate Renaissance style all done by itinerant painters. I asked if I could take pictures but was told no pictures of the interior could be taken. So we didn't take any but it is worth going to see for yourself.
I've been to many churches as old and a couple older but it was amazing to see a wooden structure that was still standing after all this time and was still in use. Part of the secret to this state of preservation was the use of pine resin sweated out of logs as a sort of pitch on the outside. This gives the characteristic honey golden brown appearance to the buildings that are treated in this manner.
It also makes them burn extremely well (a problem shared with pitch coated windmills in the Netherlands). A group of anti-religious 'activists' (labelled Satanists by the lovely guide) made a point of burning down stave churches in the seventies and eighties and sadly a great many of these beautiful buildings were lost. Go and see the ones that remain whilst they are still there. The three twelfth century stave churches on the route all have video surveillance in the hope that future attacks can be prevented.
We were told that the use of pine resin whilst faithful to the techniques used by the builders of the churches is now very expensive. Then it was the only material that the residents had to hand, the valley being so poor that it never fell under feudal control. The people involved in maintaining the church wanted to redo the coating but this would cost tens of thousands of Euros.
We thanked the guide and then had a quick look round the rest of the open air museum. A collection of buildings had been brought to the site to show the range of styles used by the people of the valley.
The interesting buildings on stilts we had seen earlier were old grain stores. The two horizontal beams that support the main structure were semi-circular, and the underside was concave. This made it impossible for mice and other small rodents to climb up onto the top of the beams and hence into the grain store. We were to see buildings of this type in the next couple of days still in use, or converted into houses. Some of them were very old indeed and all of them were 'cute'.