From sea and beach to deep forest

In man's tracks - seawalls and mowing

There have been people in the area since the Stone Age, but there are few visible remains of settlements. From the Hunter Stone Age until the year 2000 BC there were temporary settlements in many places under the protection of Järavallen. People settled here for fishing and to hunt seals and seabirds. At some settlements, archaeologists have found remains of more than seventy species of animals that were caught. On the pasture, parallel to the Järavallen itself, runs one of the old seaweed dikes that were built in the 17th century. The seawall was used as an enclosure due to a lack of stone and wood. The area was long owned by Barsebäck's estate, which used the coastal meadows for mowing and grazing. There were also some small crofts here, where the crofters lived who did the day's work on the estate. The coastal meadows are grazed today by Icelandic horses and sheep to keep the meadows open.

Thousand-year old seawall

Järavallen got its name from the beach embankment, Järavallen or Litorinavallen, which runs along the Öresund coast a couple of hundred meters inside the current shoreline. The embankment began to form 7,000 years ago on the shores of the Litorina Sea. The name comes from the common beach snail, Litorina litorea, which is still common in the Sound. The seawall itself consists of sand and stone that the waves have thrown up from the seabed. In the upper layers, you also find a lot of beach flint. The pine forest on and inside the Litorinavallen was planted at the end of the 19th century with black pine to prevent sand escape.

Varied nature from west to east

The inner part of Lundåkra Bay is a long, shallow sea beach area, with seaweed banks that are exposed at low tide. Salt-tolerant plants such as saltwort, red fescue and coastal heather thrive there. Just inside there are open, sandy meadows with grasses such as sedge and gorse together with the semi-grassy sedge. in the pine forest you will find oleander, elder and wild honeysuckle. In the moss under the sparse pine forest, wood bracken and wood ion thrive, and in damp depressions, reeds can form dense mats of several hundred square meters. On the dry hill north of the pine forest, the small fern plants the rutlåsbräken and the autumn lockfern, which are very rare in Scania, grow. At Hofterup's marsh, nature changes dramatically. The parts of the bog that are part of the roaming area are now largely unclaimed, which means that they are more or less heavily overgrown with, among other things, birch and gray willow. Here, sedge, crow's-clover, spike-leaf and sea-claw grow together with tall herbs such as elk grass, torch flowers, rose-wort and broad-leaved wort.

Bird paradise

The entire Järavallen nature reserve is a birdwatcher's paradise - regardless of whether you are scouting down by the sea shore, in the pine forest, by the lakes or in Hofterup's marsh. The beach area is an important resting place for many migrating waders. Some look for food in the shallow water at the edge of the shore, while others depend on the grazed beach meadows (amongst others, grebe, pintail and spoonbill). Mild winters also hibernate some geese and ducks here. On the beach meadows, magpies and swifts nest, and you can often see shear patches. Inland, the usual Swedish bird species dominate, but also the occasional guest from southern Europe, such as the fire-crowned kingbird, has been observed. Kestrels hunting over the open fields are a common sight and buzzards are also present. If you're lucky, you can see both peregrine falcons and sea eagles.