Ringebu

Norway built somewhere between one and two thousand stave churches in the Middle Ages: timber buildings whose walls are upright planks slotted between load-bearing posts — the staves that name them — standing on sills laid on stone so no wood ever touches the soil, and pegged together without a nail. Around 1350 just under a thousand still stood. Twenty-eight are left. Ringebu is one of them, and among the largest, though only its nave is medieval. Eighteen posts carry the raised centre, and whoever set them out made the south wall some thirty centimetres longer than the north — roughly one Norwegian foot, an error found too late to undo.

What everyone photographs is not medieval at all. In 1630 Werner Olsen, a priest's son from Hedmark with a reputation for slender spires, pulled down the ambulatory and the old chancel, extended the church eastwards, cut transepts north and south to make a cross of it, and the next year finished the tower and spire over the crossing — the red tower, with four small turrets at its corners. Inside, the eye goes to a gilded altarpiece carved in the 1680s and to walls painted in 1719: muted blues and reds below a horizontal brace, darkened bare timber above. Left of the chancel stands the church's oldest survivor, a painted wooden St Laurence of about 1250, holding the gridiron he was said to have been roasted on.

Archaeologists lifted the floor in 1980. Beneath it lay the post holes of an earlier church, dated to somewhere between 1000 and 1090, and some nine hundred coins fallen through the boards over the centuries — most of them medieval, and most from the long reign of Håkon Håkonsson, king while the stave church was young. A few are shown next door at the Prestegard, the 1743 vicarage that housed Ringebu's priests until 1991 and now hangs art each summer. Beyond the village the land climbs to Venabygdsfjellet, a broad lichen-grey plateau crossed by a fell road, and past it to Rondane, which in 1962 became Norway's first national park.