Hälsingland

The people are civilised, have nice houses, tidy and clean inside and better built than in other places.

The old tradition that Hälsinglanders never suffer from the ague has no validity for, in each parish where I inquired, quite a few had had it, though it is not especially common.

Between the IGGESUND inn and UPPӒNGE I inspected the valuable IGGESUND iron-works with its 2 hammers and one blast-furnace. In the hammer-shop the smocked servants of Vulcan were making a master-craft of their trade.4

There were 3 or 4 kinds of ore used here. 1st from Dannemora. 2nd from Söderön. 3rd from Gräsön, which contains excellent tesselated iron pyrites. 4th, black sand from the parish of Arbro, which sand lies on the seabed but is washed onto the shore in storms. All the rocks were blue, which was worthy of note.

Blue stone, of which I saw plenty both before and after this in Hälsingland, is used here to line chimneys because they say that it lasts better than millstone.

The limestone used for separation was taken from the seashore and was full of petrified coral.

It is my belief that every type of granite that exists in the world is to be found in the forest here.

Wherever there was a river, there was a wheel driving a hammer for pounding flax; they are designed in such a way that a trapdoor in the floor can be raised in order to stop them.

Butterflies were flying in the forest, both the ordinary all black ones and the larger blacks with a white fringe.

At NJUTÅNGER and all the way on to Bringsta I saw violet-coloured clay in places on the road; it was used for road-surfacing.

On the road to IGGESUND I found an insect with half-sheathed wings that has not been described before.

Between the inn at Iggesund and Hudiksvall I saw the same violet clay in abundance. I noticed how it formed a layer in the sandy ditches and also observed it on a hillock above a lake that lay immediately alongside. The hillock was 18 feet high, of which humus made up 2 to 3 fingers’ depth, followed by sand of one or two hands’ depth, violet clay of two hands’ depth and, finally, barren sand. Small bivalve shells, white and quite unbroken, lay in this clay; the violet colour, however, when I examined the particles, seemed to me to come from the brown shells that are found in such numbers on the seashore.6

I am firmly convinced, therefore, that all these valleys and marshes used to be part of the sea and that the highest part of the hill was formerly cliffs.

It was here that I saw ‘Hepatica’ with purple flowers, very rare elsewhere, and I would like the chance to test the gardeners’ theory that states that the colour of the soil affects the colour of the flower.

I noted that the hills, where they had been cleared and burned, had become barren, with nothing but heaps of stones remaining.

Since the yield of the arable land is poor, they bake bread from barley which they mix with peas and chaff. They make the loaves 2 feet in diameter but only a fraction of an inch thick so that the taste of the peas seems less disgusting.