Lojsta Castle

The site presents the footprint of a timber-built estate protected by earthworks and water. The defensive arrangement combined a dug moat with an embankment and a timber palisade to separate an inner courtyard from the surrounding landscape. The moat was excavated to a length of roughly one hundred metres, its width varying between three and ten metres, and its maximum depth reaching about 1.7 metres. Portions of the bridge used to connect the island to the mainland remain visible, and the location that once required a drawbridge can now be reached on foot.

Within the enclosure the domestic buildings were wooden and are interpreted as long houses roughly twenty to thirty metres long and around ten metres across. The construction relied on timber rather than stone, and today no visible house structures survive above ground. Early twentieth-century surveys reported internal foundations, but those particular interpretations have been called into question in later assessments.

The fortress occupied an island that lay between what are now Slottsträsk and Broträsk lakes. Water levels have changed since the medieval period; the lake surface is estimated to sit about 2.5 metres lower than it did in medieval times, and the larger medieval lake has been divided into three smaller bodies of water. About 150 metres to the northeast a preserved foundation measuring thirty by sixteen metres supports the reconstructed Lojsta Hall. Excavation in 1929 recovered Migration Period material including parts of two log boats, and the 1932 reconstruction shows a reed-thatched building intended to reflect the house that once stood on that foundation. The interpretation for that hall emphasizes mixed human and animal occupation, livestock keeping, and active trade as aspects of life there.