Borgund Stave Church

Borgund Stave Church tickets: which one to buy

One ticket covers the church and the visitor centre across the road, which has a good exhibition on how stave churches were built and why so few survive. It is inexpensive and includes a short film. There is no guided tour as such, but staff in the church answer questions and the labelling is better than at most Norwegian sites. Borgund sits in Laerdal, about thirty kilometres inland from the Sognefjord, and the practical issue is transport: there is a bus from Laerdalsoyri a few times a day in summer and almost nothing in winter, so most visitors drive.

Tours from Flam combine the church with the Stegastein viewpoint and the old Laerdal village and cost a moderate amount, the price being the coach rather than the entry. Cruise excursions from the fjord ports bundle it at a markup. The car park and the cafe are free to use. The visitor centre also sells the joint ticket for the Laerdal salmon centre in the valley below, which fills a wet afternoon.

Visiting Borgund Stave Church: what to see

Borgund was built around 1180 to 1250 and is the best preserved of Norway's twenty-eight surviving stave churches, out of perhaps a thousand that once stood. The walls are vertical pine staves, tongued and grooved into each other and standing on sills above a stone foundation, so that no timber touches the ground and the whole frame can be taken apart. Six tiers of shingled roofs step up to a ridge crowned with dragon heads, a deliberate carry-over from Viking building that appears on a church dedicated to St Andrew.

The west door is carved with interlaced beasts and vine, again pagan in vocabulary and Christian in use. Inside it is small, dark and smells of tar; there are no windows to speak of, only small round openings high in the walls. A runic inscription scratched by a medieval visitor complains about the weather. The free-standing bell tower is the only stave-built one left in the country. Rows of carved masks look down from the tops of the internal posts, and the scissor bracing that holds the frame steady is left entirely exposed.

Borgund Stave Church opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from May to September and closed for the rest of the year, with the longest hours in July and August. That season is also when the tour buses come through, usually in the middle of the day; early morning and the last hour are quiet. The interior is dim at any time and photography without flash produces little; the exterior is the photograph, and it is best in the low light of a Norwegian summer evening.

Rain is frequent in Sogn and the tarred timbers look their best wet. There is no dress code and the church is no longer used for services. Allow forty-five minutes for church and centre. The drive continues over the Aurlandsfjellet mountain road to Aurland and Flam, one of the great roads in Norway, open only in summer. The old Laerdal village, with its preserved timber houses, is fifteen minutes down the valley and is included in most tours.