Götavirke (''Geatish Dyke'') are the remains of two parallel defensive walls going from north to south between the villages of

Västra Husby Västra Husby is a locality situated in Söderköping Municipality, Östergötland County, Sweden with 486 inhabitants in 2010. There are many places in Sweden called Husby, making it easily mixed up with the suburb in the capital Stockholm ...

() and Hylinge () in

Söderköping Municipality Söderköping Municipality (''Söderköpings kommun'') is a municipality in Östergötland County in southeast Sweden. Its seat is located in the city of Söderköping. The present municipality was created in 1971-1973 when the former ''City of ...

Östergötland Östergötland (; English exonym: East Gothland) is one of the traditional provinces of Sweden (''landskap'' in Swedish) in the south of Sweden. It borders Småland, Västergötland, Närke, Södermanland and the Baltic Sea. In older English li ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

. The walls cover the distance between the lakes Asplången () and Lillsjön (). North of Asplången there are remains of several ancient

hill fort A hillfort is a type of earthwork used as a fortified refuge or defended settlement, located to exploit a rise in elevation for defensive advantage. They are typically European and of the Bronze Age or Iron Age. Some were used in the post-Roma ...

s that may have been part of the defensive line. South of Lake Lillsjön, the terrain is so hard to pass that it hardly needed any defenses. The walls seem to be constructed to protect the

Geat The Geats ( ; ang, gēatas ; non, gautar ; sv, götar ), sometimes called ''Goths'', were a large North Germanic tribe who inhabited ("land of the Geats") in modern southern Sweden from antiquity until the late Middle Ages. They are one of th ...

ish heartland around today's Linköping from attacks from the

Baltic Sea The Baltic Sea is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the North and Central European Plain. The sea stretches from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from ...

. Archaeological excavations have shown that the walls were constructed ca 800. Defense constructions were also built along the 20-kilometer narrow inlet Slätbaken that stretches from the Baltic Sea to Götavirke, and even pass it during the Viking Age when the water level was 1.5 meters higher. The measures that Geats had taken to protect the route have no match in Viking Age Sweden.Anders Högmer, Arkeologiskt kontaktseminarium, Jyllands Rømø 1994. Published in ''Marinarkeologi 1998''. Article is also availabl
online
The wall supported a wooden pale and behind it are traces of a military road, which makes it similar to the Danevirke protecting the contemporary town of

Hedeby Hedeby (, Old Norse ''Heiðabýr'', German language, German ''Haithabu'') was an important Danes, Danish Viking Age (8th to the 11th centuries) trading settlement near the southern end of the Jutland Peninsula, now in the Schleswig-Flensburg dist ...

. No Viking Age towns are however known in the vicinity of Götavirke.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gotavirke Archaeological sites in Sweden Germanic archaeological sites Fortifications in Sweden Geats Medieval Sweden Linear earthworks

See also

References