Langhammars
Langhammars naturreservat
Interesting facts
- Until the 1990s Fårö and northern Gotland were off-limits to foreigners because of a military installation, enforced by large multilingual road signs.
- Besides Shame, Bergman shot Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna and Scenes from a Marriage on Fårö.
- Mia Hansen-Løve's 2021 film Bergman Island was both set and shot on Fårö.
- The medieval farm settlement south of Langhammars, with at least eight house foundations, was only discovered in 1978 and excavated between 1997 and 2009.
- One of its houses was in use from the 12th to the 15th century, and 19th-century local accounts suggest the village of Langhammars once stood there.
- When the chimney of the 1725 farmhouse was rebuilt, an inscribed runestone recording the building of a fireplace was found; it is now kept at Fårö church.
- The shared village windmill is of the Dutch type, with a rotating cap rather than a whole body that turns into the wind.
- The word rauk comes from Gutnish, the old local tongue of Gotland.
- The Langhammars reserve is also part of the European Natura 2000 network of protected sites.
Why it is worth it
On the north-west tip of Fårö, the island at the top of Gotland, the shore is guarded by a crowd of grey stone figures. These are rauks – free-standing limestone pillars carved by the sea – and at Langhammars they stand in groups on a beach of rounded shingle, some squat and broken, others tall and strangely human. Two of them are often likened to the profiles of a man and a woman.
Rauks are found on Gotland and a few other Swedish coasts, and Fårö is especially rich in them. Their stone is limestone laid down as reefs in a tropical sea during the Silurian period, more than 400 million years ago. After the last ice age the waves of the Baltic attacked the cliffs along existing cracks, hollowing out caves and arches until only isolated columns remained; photographs from 1900 and 1966 show that some rauks have since vanished, so the shapes are still changing. Carl Linnaeus, who travelled through Gotland in 1741, was the first scientist to describe them, calling them "stone giants".
The Langhammars peninsula has been protected since 1931 and the nature reserve covers about 479 hectares of rauk field, shingle beach and sand dunes partly grown with pine. Its bare, austere beauty made it a location for Ingmar Bergman, who lived on Fårö and filmed several of his works there; Langhammars was a setting for his 1968 film Shame. Just south of the reserve lies the small village of Langhammars, with two old farms – one main house dates from 1725 – and a shared windmill, and a little over a kilometre further south are the remains of one of Gotland's best-preserved medieval farm settlements.
Getting there
Fårö is linked to Gotland by car ferries across the narrow Fårösund strait; Langhammars lies about 15 km north of Fårösund, the ferry port on the Gotland side. Visby, the main town of Gotland, is about 65 km to the south-west, and Visby Airport (VBY) is about 60 km away.
On these lists
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