Millstone park

About

Join the stone adventure! The Millstone Park in Hyllestad is an outdoor museum in the largest stone quarry landscape from the Viking period and Middle Ages in Northern Europe. Here you will experience another side of history: The Vikings as skilled craftsmen and traders!

At the Millstone Park you can travel back in time to the Viking and Middle Ages. Stone was the “gold” of Hyllestad. Stonemasons worked at hundreds of stone quarries, carving millstone after millstone to be shipped out into the wider world. At this time the millstone was a fundamental item. There was no food without the millstone! If you wanted to eat bread or porridge, you first had to grind the grain using a quern stone or water mill in order to make flour. The millstone trade in Hyllestad was a good source of income – for those who owned the land and held the power.
 

ACTIVITIES
At Millstone Park we take you on a tour through the stone quarries. The Vikings toiled here more than a thousand years ago, with skill, sweat, and perhaps tears when yet another stone got a crack and broke. This was a world in which it was very important to be able to make things with one’s own hands. After the tour of the quarries you can also use your hands - or relax by the fire and enjoy something good to eat. 
Summer activities:

- Grind grain with the rotary hand quern, made from local garnet micaschist, or with an even older, simple grinding stone
- Make your own dough from the flour you have just ground, bake it over the bonfire
- Get a piece of soapstone and carve whatever you fancy from this softest of stones. Pendant for a necklace?
- Try traditional whipcording and make a cord for your necklace pendant
- Try the traditional loom, weave on!
- Visit the smithy and help the blacksmith with the bellows (irregular activity)
- Make your own tar from pine wood – in an empty can… (irregular activity)
- Enjoy at the fire place, with fresh milstone bread or raised pancakes
- Say hello to the rabbits and feed them with dandelion.

HYLLESTAD
In Hyllestad you'll meet Norway at its best! Close to the Atlantic Ocean, at the mouth of Sognefjorden – far away from the hassle of mass tourism! Here you can enjoy fjords and mountains, watch fantastic sunsets (and storms!) and immerse yourself in a grand history of millstone production.

kvernsteinsparken.no