Vrangfoss Locks
Interesting facts
- Before the canal, up to 14 men were employed all year round at Vrangfoss just to free the timber that jammed in the gorge.
- Logs could stay wedged in the rapids for years, and the friction of the grinding timber sometimes made it catch fire.
- Of the canal's total climb of 72 metres through 18 chambers, Vrangfoss alone accounts for 23 metres, nearly a third.
- The concrete dam beside the flight is 32 metres high and 21 metres thick at its base, and it replaced an earlier timber dam.
- King Oscar II and Prince Eugen visited on 29 October 1893, and their signatures were also carved on stones by the uppermost chamber.
- The canal's first phase, the Norsjø–Skien Canal, was finished in 1861, three decades before the Vrangfoss flight opened.
- In 2012 Norwegian television broadcast a full canal voyage in real time as a slow TV programme, minute by minute.
- The Telemark Canal was chosen as the county's millennium site, its symbol for the year 2000.
Why it is worth it
Vrangfoss is the grand staircase of the Telemark Canal. Five chambers cut side by side into the rock climb 23 metres beside the place where the Eidselva once tumbled through a narrow gorge, and they make up the largest lock flight on a waterway that runs 105 km from Skien into the mountains at Dalen. Before the canal, this two-kilometre stretch of rapids and deep chasms, with a fall of about 25 metres, was the worst obstacle on the route: timber floated down from the interior piled up here, and boats could not pass at all.
The flight was built between 1887 and 1892 as part of the Bandak–Norsjø Canal, the second and more ambitious phase of the system, and when it opened the canal was hailed as a kind of eighth wonder of Europe. The gates are still worked by hand, with lock-keepers pushing long poles to swing them open. A full passage through all five chambers takes about an hour. In 1893, a year after the opening, King Oscar II and Prince Eugen came to see it, and their names and the royal monogram are carved into the rock face above the lower channel.
The setting is part of the pleasure. The locks sit among tall trees with a small park around them, a yellow lock-keeper's house (now a café), a little Swiss-style guard house of 1909–1910 with a slate roof at the upper chamber, a red sawmill where gate timbers are still repaired and a working smithy. A viewpoint above looks down the whole flight to the dam, which was rebuilt in concrete in 1962 when a power station was dug into the mountain beside it. In summer the old canal steamer Victoria, in service since 1882, and the Henrik Ibsen work their way up and down the steps, and the sight of a nineteenth-century boat rising through a nineteenth-century lock in a Norwegian forest is the reason to come. The Bandak–Norsjø Canal was declared national cultural heritage in 2017.
Getting there
Vrangfoss lies at Lunde in Nome municipality, about 4 km north-west of Ulefoss and roughly 25 km from Skien, where the canal boats start. The nearest airport is Sandefjord Airport, Torp (TRF), about 62 km away; from there the drive runs through Skien to Ulefoss. Many visitors arrive the classic way, by canal boat from Skien, and a footpath links the locks with the surrounding area.
On these lists
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