In 1885, a farmer in Norway came up with a very different way to get heavy loads of hay into the second floor of his barn. The farmer was Lars Petter Olsen Valldal, and the problem was getting heavy loads of hay into the loft without making horses and wagons climb a steep hill to get there. His answer was to build this massive stone ramp that curves around the barn, slowly climbing until it reaches the second floor.
Coming up with the idea was probably the easy part. Building the stone ramp would take seven years. Most of the stone came right off the hillside around the farm, but somehow he still had to get all of it moved and into place. For the biggest pieces, Valldal built his own crane, and he even made a special sled to haul the stone across the farm.
Getting all that stone into place was only part of what he had to figure out. An access road to other farms in the area already crossed the property, so he couldn’t just block it with the ramp. That’s why he built the huge stone archway you see in the photo. The road could still pass underneath, while horses and loaded wagons made their way around the ramp and right into the hayloft.
He built the ramp to make one job on the farm easier. More than a century later, it’s still doing what it was built to do. The barn is standing, the stonework remains, and that long curved ramp leads all the way up to the hayloft, making it one of the most distinctive farm buildings in Norway.