Skäfthammars kyrka och kyrkogård, Skäfthammars socken, Uppland 2008

The picture has been taken in connection with the cultural historical characterization of Skäfthammar’s church, Skäfthammar parish, Uppland 2008. The church of Skäfthammar stands as a typical representative of many upland parish churches. It is a rectangular salt church with sacristy in the north and gunhouses in the south. The church is built with shellwalls of graystone. Arms houses and longhouses and cows are arched with brick rib vaults while the sacristy is provided with a barrel vault. The church’s year of construction is not known more closely, but Ann Catherine Bonnier claims the high and narrow brick extent of the southern portal in three leaps to support the view that the church is late medieval. She also claims that the thin-vaulted sacristy is older than the church in the rest. It may have been built into a former wooden church, as occurred in several other uplands, in the 18th century. The façades of the longhouse are mosaicised with their large, different colored stone blocks in uneven shifts. The stone walls are attached with wide-cut calcareous joints. The gunhouse and the facades of the sacristy are plastered and whitewashed. The longhouse and the choir have large, round-arched window openings with trimmed and whitewashed sneaks and scopes. There are two windows to the south, a window over the altar to the east and a gable window to the west. By contrast, there has never been a window to the north. There, the closed stone facade is preserved in untouched condition. The outer window arches are made of wrought iron and the inner arches are wooden. The east cross window is clogged on the inside but has left the window arch outwards. The window benches are uncovered with copper sheet. The longhouse and the gunhouse have steep saddle roofs covered with tar shavings. The sacristy has a particle covered powder roof and is fitted with a copper alley and a tailpipe. The cemetery of Skäfthammar is surrounded by a cold-walled graystone wall with a tree wreath of deciduous trees. The Great Entrance to the South has trimmed, whitewashed gate posts and forging gates. It is crowned by a bow of forging with a glass lamp. The northern cemetery was created by enlargement and was inaugurated in 1930. It has inter alia a carefully gestured staircase up to the old cemetery and an entrance with gate posts and forging gates in a kind of neo-baroque style. At its northern wall stands a tomb chapel from 1941 with trimmed, white facades and mottled saddle roof.