Stjørdal & Hegra

Why this place

Stjørdal and Hegra sit a short way up the valley east of Trondheim, strung along the Stjørdalselva river. Between them they hold two of the older active parish churches in Trøndelag — one stone, one wood, one medieval, one eighteenth-century.

What happens here

The Gråhårsklubben (the Oldsters) drive out from Trondheim on Day 4 to walk both churchyards and continue upvalley to Kylloplass. The day is unhurried — most of it is spent walking ground rather than seeing sights.

• Værnes Church (Værnes kirke), just east of Trondheim Airport at Stjørdal, is one of the oldest standing stone buildings in Norway. It was built in stages across the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and is the most complete medieval sandstone church the country still has. Its wooden ceiling — a clear span of more than eleven metres — is the original from the 1100s, the only medieval church roof of its kind still in place anywhere in Norway. Runic inscriptions, carved stone figures, and faded wall paintings remain inside it.
• Hegra Church (Hegra kirke), further up the valley in the village of Hegra, is a white wooden church built in 1783 to seat about 450. It stands close to where older churches stood before it — records of a church at Hegra reach back to 1450, and the first was most likely a stave church.

Background

Both churches belong to the Diocese of Nidaros, the medieval church province centred on the cathedral in Trondheim; Værnes is the seat of the Stjørdal prosti (deanery). Norwegian parish registers reach back roughly four centuries, and a churchyard in a rural parish is not an abandoned place but a maintained one — names on the stones are often still the names in the surrounding farms.

The Stjørdal valley itself was one of the country’s earliest cultivated regions. Iron Age burial mounds sit on terraces above the river; the medieval Værnes Throng — the old assembly site for the district — gathered here for centuries before parish administration replaced it.