In January 2023 I set about uploading photos of what is now my farm onto an Instagram account, gwyneths_swedish_farm. Over the years I’ve taken hundreds of photos of the place and its contents and it’s been fun to share them with people of all nationalities – some of whom live on the other side of the world.
Mölnebo Nedergård, otherwise known as Kärret, around 1937
The farm had been in my husband’s family for many generations when I inherited it from him in 2020. It’s situated on the island of Tjörn on the Swedish west coast, an hour’s drive from Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. Every century or two the family would knock the old farmhouse down and build a new one nearby, and the picture above shows the current house when it was new, in around 1935.
Over the coming months I intend to choose some of my favourite photos and to use them as starting points to write about aspects of past life on the farm, and on Tjörn as a whole. I’ll also share some of what I’ve learned about the fates of various family members - most of them born less than a hundred metres from the house in the picture.