Viks by, Torsåker

A Grave Matter

The Antiquarian's card for Vik is a report of something that is no longer there. It records no coordinates. Where the field for map position should be, the surveyor left the line blank. What it does record is this: on the rising ground above the tilled field at Vik there was an opened and damaged mound, and the traces of two more in which a sword and a spearhead had been found. Another mound had been cut through to make a road. Sidenbladh wrote this down in 1865. Ekdahl had been there before him, in 1827, and noted only that a farmer named Nils Jansson had thrown out the mounds twenty years earlier when he broke the ground for cultivation, and that there were others nearby. Later the inventory reader K-G Selinge went over the two accounts and concluded that more graves had stood in the village than either man had listed. The whole area is now registered as a burial ground, a grey shape drawn on the map between Vangsta and the Vik farms, with nothing inside it to see. Iron was buried there with the dead, which places the graves in the last centuries before the church arrived. The ploughing continued for another hundred and fifty years.