The Hill Behind the House No. 3

I wanted to write so much more about the hill behind the house than I have written. Here is a day last June that I should have written about. Everything was yellow on that day. There were yellow flowers blooming in all the meadows, the evening sun was suffusing all the trees with yellow light, and someone had been out tying yellow strips of cloth on branches to make a course for orienteering along the forest tracks.

Now, deep in the heart of winter, when every morning on the way to work is black, and every evening on the way home is the same, I think about these summer days and long for them to be back. Last weekend, I walked with my daughter across the hill taking photographs of bare trees and the stalks of dried flowers. I got her to count how many types of tree she could identify. We saw about ten different varieties of pine and about the same number of deciduous types. Silver birch are the most common, and the most wintry looking.

As we turned towards home, the dusk started to fall. The darkness descends quickly at this time of year. At the foot of the far side of the hill, we examined the roots of two trees that had entwined about each other. One of the trees had been cut down, and we thought that rather sad. By the time we had got to the top of the hill, the trees were standing out in silhouette against the fading sky, looming above us. Then we watched the overhead lights along the path come on, glowing orange at first like coals, then slowly gleaming into phosphorecent brightness, as if someone had blown on them.

The Hill Behind the House No. 2

After a somewhat longer interval than I anticipated (it's almost a year since I posted the first Hill Behind the House post here), I've finally got around to thinking again about the hill.

Not that I haven't been there of course. All through the past year I've been visiting the woodland tracks that cross the summit, occasionally taking photographs, sometimes diverting through thick undergrowth to see what I might find.

It's been clear to me for some time that there is a half-buried archaeology up there on the hill. One group of remains consists of a series of very large concrete blocks set into the ground. They are about 2 metres high and four metres across. One of the long sides is sheer and the other is steeply sloping. the sloping side has a set of steel or iron loops embedded in a line down the centre. According to a guidebook called "Out and About Stavanger's Green Belts" by Erik Thoring, these concrete blocks are the remains of a radio tower built on the hill in 1914.



Thoring says that the blocks are situated on Auglendshøyden (Augland Heights) which I suppose identifies the western side of the Hinnaberget hill. According to Thoring, the blocks are nearly one hundred years old, and represent the foundations of radio masts which locals once referred to as "Ullandhaug's Howler". The masts existed for around twenty years before being torn down in 1935.



I found the photograph above of Ullandhaug (Hinna) on the internet. The location seems correct, but I didn't recognise the area at all. After looking up the location on Google maps, I found that the building in the photograph still exists, and I went to take a photograph of it. The building is still complete, however you can only see half of it because the view is blocked by trees.



The hill is now covered by woodland, some of which is very mature and must have been planted with pines at least fifty years ago. But if the photograph was taken before 1939, I suppose the landscape could have considerably changed over the past 70 years.



Here's another picture which shows how completely naked of vegetation the hill was at that time. The photograph is a more expansive view looking in the same direction and indicates that further radio masts were added to the first one through time. The masts appear as tall poles, but in fact they were held up with a cobweb of guy lines that were attached to the concrete blocks I described earlier. The aerial itself consisted of 24 bronze wires, each approximately 1070 m long, hung between 10 steel masts which were 122 metres high. Each mast was in turn held by six guy lines and weighed 62 tons.

According to one of the web sites from which these pictures are sourced, the radio mast was an example of Marconi's directive antenna type and was constructed in 1914. The radio waves were beamed directly towards Boston, Massachusettes and for this reason the Stavanger radio station was referred to as the America Exchange.

The architect of the Stavanger radio station was Ole Sverre. The transmitter at Ullandhaug is said to have been one of the noisiest workplaces in the country. Farmers in the neighborhood complained about the noise pollution. The noise was produced by the radio signal creation process. The signals were generated by huge turning wheels inside the transmitting station. The technicians had to use artillery gun ear protection, and the ground shook when the broadcast was in progress. I had imagined that the radio masts were called "Ullandhaug's Howler" because of the noise of the wind in the wires, but it seems that the noise of the radio signals might be a more likely explanation.

Below is another photograph of the tall radio antenna constructed at Tryvasshøgda which was once a famous feature of the Kristiana region. I think they make a rather beautiful construction.



What this shows is that, only seventy years ago, the Hinnaberget looked extremely different to how it appears today. Over that time, it has been transformed from a bare mountain with hardly any soil or vegetation into a forest covered by tracks and paths. The old landscape is still there, just below the surface, and is revealed by occasional large patches of bare rock. It is the reason many of the tracks through the forest pass over a shining web of trees roots, these roots being unable to penetrate the rock below.

The Hill Behind the House No. 1

When we moved to Norway from France last August, I knew I would have to start a new blog about our new life in a different country. I also knew that it might take me some time to get the measure of that country, as it had taken me some time in France. I think I had been in France for at least a year before I started the Connaissances blog, and it wasn't too soon because in the first year I had many adverse reactions to the culture change which would not have been good to spread around in public.

I later realised that these adverse reactions were not so much to do with short-comings in the French as an inability in myself to adjust. Thus I have been cautious in coming to conclusions about Norway and its people too soon after arriving here and have not posted very often on this blog. When I first arrived I thought about writing a different kind of blog, not about Norway as some vague anthropological entity, but a blog that limited itself to descriptions of the hill behind our house. In this way I thought I might avoid causing any offence in my newly adopted country. I imagined myself up there on the hill most evenings, making observations of this or that minutae and recording them lovingly like a latter-day Henry David Thoreau.

Well, I didn't follow that impulse at the time, but because a blog is a thoroughly untethered form of literature, I am going to indulge myself now and tell you a bit about The Hill Behind the House. In fact, The Hill Behind the House is not in reality so much behind the house as under the house. It is a very solid hill, made out of very ancient rock. Solid that is, except that it has a very large hole drilled through it where the E39 duel carriageway travels south out of Stavanger towards Sandnes, a nearby town. Living on the hill not far from where the tunnel cuts through, we are occasionally aware of the E39 traffic as a distant noise, especially if the wind is blowing the sound of traffic towards us. Which is a strange concept, is it not?

The hill is easily accessible from suburban housing on 3 points of the compass. Well marked paths run up from the houses and converge on a circling trackway that encloses a small nature reserve on the summit. The fourth point of the compass, towards the west, leads out into more open countryside away from houses. It is possible to follow tracks down into a valley closed off from traffic and then reascend onto another twin peak called Ullenhaug which is topped by a towering white building covered in radio antennae. But more about that on another occasion...

Our hill doesn't really seem to have a name, perhaps because it is dwarfed a little by Ullenhaug and its tower. Everyone knows Ullenhaug, and sometimes they drive to the car park and walk up to the summit, but few people make a special visit to walk on our hill. And because of this it is quiet, especially late in the evening.

This evening, at 11 pm, I went for a jog around the summit's circular path as I have started doing lately, now that the summer weather is with us. Here it is still very light at that hour and the fjord and distant grey-blue mountains beyond are still quite visible. I tried to run up the hill from our house in one stretch, but was again beaten by a lack of fitness and the cobbly roughness of the track. And then I set out along the summit circle track which is wide, well looked after and fairly flat.

As I rounded the first corner, I saw one hundred yards ahead in the twilight a graceful animal which I first took for a large brown doberman-type dog, judged partly by its sturdy posture and insolent stare. But as I continued to approach, I saw that it was in fact a red deer. It had been drinking at a small Guinness-coloured pond situated at a cross-road of two paths. Seeing my advance, the deer ambled off the path into the trees and disappeared from view. I continued forwards until I reached the point of disappearance, and then I saw the deer again. It had not moved far, perhaps fifty yards over a stretch of grassland. It was clearly not very concerned about my presence and only flinched and darted away when the distant bang of a car back-firing drifted up from the houses below.

As I continued around the pool of Guinness, I noticed two wild ducks standing out in the shallow water, their heads tucked under their wings. They were completely still, roosting, and made not a motion as I passed only a few feet away. Like the deer, they trusted me. I continued on between the pine trees that cover the summit. Here, where the path is a little darker due to the trees, there are lamp-posts positioned every 30 yards. Their bulbs gleam through the branches of the pine trees in a manner that recalls the famous lamp-post discovered by Lucy when she first entered Narnia.

Once over the summit, which was no effort at all, I came into an open area where a rough, quaggy football pitch has been sited in an approximately flat clearing among the trees. A wooden hut has recently been constructed on the edge of this clearing where anyone can come and build a small fire to sit beside and meditate or grill food.

The path descends past some well constructed wood piles and then disappears again into the forest. Immediately on entering the forest, another animal suddenly sprung out in front of me: a large brown rabbit. It casually gazed at me as I approached, then lolloped a few yards ahead of me before turning off into the trees on the other side of the path. I watched it go unhurriedly on its away among the bronze pine needles. There are quite a lot of rabbits on the hill. Some are black and some are brown and some are browny-black or blacky-brown. Perhaps the domestic rabbits that have escaped onto the hill have brought a little of their docility to the wild, or perhaps the animals that live here on the hills have found they have little to fear from the Norwegians living densely round about. I think it may be more the latter.