Fruo

At Fruo, nature has built its own little "Chinese wall ". Some kilometers south of the Vøringsfossen waterfall, there are a number of moraine ridges, the longest and most notable of their kind in Hordaland.

Hæreid- geology

The Eidfjord terrace is a gigantic ridge that reaches up more than one hundred metres from the city centre in Eidfjord. It serves as a powerful natural monument left behind by the ice when it retreated.

Langavassfjellet

Skjervet- river theft

At the end of the last ice age the ice flowed out of Hardanger fjord in such a fury that it forced the meltwater from Voss to run back uphill toward Granvin. The glacier from Raundalen down the windy valley along the Vosso to Bolstadøyri went too slow to make the turn.

Storegraven

The first mention of Granvin church in written sources is in 1306, but the church location must be far older than this. The farm Storegraven is centrally situated at Granvinsvatnet, by the important traffic artery between Hardanger and Voss, where the road takes off to Ulvik.

Haganes

The gneiss landscape west and north of Bergen viewed in profile can remind us of a saw blade of the kind that has long, slanted sides that get broken off shorter transverse sides. It has taken several hundred million years to file this saw blade, an enduring interplay between various geological processes.

Landro

Landro has been the largest estate on Sotra, including 15 farms with reasonable conditions for agriculture. Their boathouses have had an excellent harbour in Landrovågen. Landro thus has been a good basis for the combination of agriculture and fishing.

Vatlestraumen

There are coal bits hidden in the sand under Vatlestraumen. These remains from a geological layer from the Jurassic Period were discovered when the undersea Bjorøy Tunnel was built in 1994. Oil- and gas reservoirs in the Troll Field in the sea west of Hordaland are from the same time. It is, nonetheless, quite surprising to find bedrock from dinosaur time inside of the outer islands of western Norway. On the Scandinavian mainland north of Denmark, there are only a very few places where one f inds rock from this time in earth history.

Berge

Down by the fjord on the farm Berge in Tørvikbygd, is Stekkavika – a sheltered eastward facing harbour, protected against the fjord by headlands and rocks, even manifest in the name. Here is also a comprehensive milieu of coastal industry, with boathouses and sea-sheds that belong to the farms Berge, Heradstveit and Halleråker. Belonging to the farm Berge there is also a mill-house, circular saw, workshop for sloop building, and – a little further up into the woods – the old water-powered sash-saw.

Bru

Bruosen is one of the few river harbours in the county. As landing place for the churchgoers, this place and the boatshed environment follow a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, but the country store of today is much younger.