Archaeology day

On Monday I headed down to the southern coast of Sweden to a town called Ystad. It's a typical beach town, and I was really looking forward to enjoying the sun, the sand and the sea!
I chose Ystad because it is the closest descent size city to this Stone Ship that I wanted to see, the fact that it is a beach town was surprisingly secondary.
Ystad, when I left that morning had a weather forecast of being in the high teens, slightly cloudy and 10% chance of rain. But when I arrived it was pouring rain. Ahhh! Ok, no big deal, the man at the hostel said that Tuesday was supposed to be much better weather. The hostel I stayed at was on the beach, a few km out of town, so I rented a bike and cruised the beach! My plan was on Tuesday to bike to Ales Stenar, about 20km away along the coast.

Wake up Tuesday morning to even more rain! Seriously! Well, I was pretty rotted at first and contemplated just coming back home. But, I was there and I was't sure if I'd get another chance to get down there... so I packed a lunch, pulled on my rain coat, hopped on my bike and started peddling in the rain. Ha, and all I could think about was that I better not get sick from this.
The bike was actually quite pleasant, and the rain let up after about a half hour. The scenery was all fields and farms, or rolling hills. It was really pretty.
Anyways, so Ales Stenar, is a large stone ship up on a high cliff in the middle of fields and cows. I arrived there expecting to be the only one, alas, no. It was full of little school kids. I guess I believed that because the weather was so crappy, and it's very isolated that it would be deserted. I was wrong.  The stones were very short. Nothing like the stones at Stonehenge. I was taller than all of them, except the two stones at the edges.
Ales Stenar is sort of in a league of it's own, a mystery to scholars. Generally stone ships are burials, but there have been no bodies found there, or evidence that there might have been a burial. The two other theories are that it was built as a memorial for a lost or sunken ship (the coastal area is a notorious ship graveyard) or some sort of astronomical calender - during the solstices the sun shines on one or the other of the two end stones. Regardless it was neat, and I enjoyed my little picnic amongst the stones.

On Wednesday I woke up to blistering heat and sun. Just my luck. It pours rain on the day that I went on my 40km bike trip, then the day that I'm travelling via bus, it's rediculously nice out! I took advantage of what little time I had left there - enjoyed breakfast on the beach. I then bussed to another town called Kivik.
Kivik is home to the largest bronze age burial mound in northern Europe - Kungagraven. Though it's extremely flawed... probably not the right word, but I cant think of what else I could use to describe it? According to it's history, it was used a stone quarry by famers until the mid 18thC when some historical people stepped in and intervened its destruction when some petroglyphs were reported to be found inside the mound of stones.
They tried to restore it, but failed miserably. The petroglyphs inside look extremely retouched, so much so that they dont look real. They reconstructed it based on 18thC sketches of other mounds and it is now assumed that it should be about 3m taller than it actually is now. All the archaeological research at the time stated that because of it's size, it was obviously a Kings burial, but recently the bodies exhumed were restudied and at least one of them is actually a women. Aw yeah for armchair archaeologists!
The setting was nice, next to a large apple orchard in a quaint little beach town. I really liked the town, sadly I couldn't stay, so I hung out on the beach waiting for my bus to return back home to Örebro. I would have gone swimming, but considering it was the Baltic Sea, I refrained on the of chance that it would be fricken freezing. Despite my regular dips in Great Slave, I didnt think I could handle the Baltic.