Ale's Stones
Ales stenar
Interesting facts
- The two great sandstone end stones were once a single block, split apart and probably brought by sea from near Gislövshammar, south of Simrishamn.
- The so-called rudder stone at one end is not granite or sandstone but white quartzite, chosen to stand out from the rest.
- Some stones bear cup marks typical of Stone Age tombs, and a long dolmen about 5,500 years old once stood just outside, suggesting its boulders were reused.
- A sketch from 1777 and notes from around 1870 record two smaller ship settings beside the big one; radar traced one of them in 2006.
- The wide gaps between the stones mark it as an Iron Age ship setting; Bronze Age examples have their stones set close together.
- The name was first written Als Stene in 1624, then revived as Ales stenar in 1873, and probably means the stones on the mighty ridge.
- Charcoal found beneath an undisturbed boulder was dated to between AD 540 and 650, one of the clues placing the monument in the Vendel period.
- In the 1970s the Swedish comedian Hasse Alfredson noticed with a simple compass that the ship's axis points to midwinter sunrise and midsummer sunset.
- Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about the stones, as did Swedish poet Anders Österling in his 1933 collection Tonen från havet.
Why it is worth it
Ale's Stones — Ales stenar in Swedish — is a great ship of standing stones on the south coast of Scania, set on the headland of Kåseberga 32 metres above the Baltic. Fifty-nine boulders, each weighing around five tonnes, form an oval 67 metres long and 19 metres wide, with the stones rising in height towards the two pointed ends like the stem and stern of a boat. It is the largest surviving ship setting in Sweden, and the setting is as striking as the monument: bare grassland on a cliff-top, open sky, and on clear days the island of Bornholm on the horizon.
Most radiocarbon dates from excavations around and under the stones point to the Vendel period, around AD 600, towards the end of the Nordic Iron Age, and the Swedish National Heritage Board dates the monument to about that time. One much older date, around 5,500 years, came from a hearth just outside the ship and shows that the site was used long before. Ship settings are generally thought to be grave monuments, and a clay pot with burned human bone was found inside in 1989, but no grave has been identified with certainty. Some have argued that the stones were aligned to the midsummer sunset and used as a calendar, an interpretation that remains disputed.
Most of the stones are granite from the local ridge, but the two tallest end stones are sandstone that was quarried near Simrishamn, some distance up the coast, and was probably carried by sea. The monument has been heavily handled: in 1916 about forty fallen stones were raised, not always in their original place, and in the 1950s the ground was levelled by machine. Locals still sometimes use its older names, Heds stenar or Urban's grave.
Getting there
The stones stand above the village of Kåseberga, in Ystad municipality; Ystad is about 16 km away. Malmö Airport (MMX) is roughly 46 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Ale's Stones is a megalithic monument in Scania in southern Sweden. It is a stone ship, oval in outline, with the stones at each end markedly larger than the rest. It is 67 m (220 ft) long formed by 59 large boulders, weighing up to 5 tonnes each.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
55.38270, 14.05440per Wikidata