G E O G R A P H Y

HVEN is an island situated just off the Swedish Coast at Landskrona in the northern stretch of the Øresund, The Sound between Denmark and Sweden. The closest spot on the Swedish mainland is Ålabodarna at 4.3km as the crow flies. Rungsted, right opposite Hven's Kyrkbacken Harbour,
is the nearest shore on the Danish side at 6km. The distance to Copenhagen is 24km
Hven is 4.5km long and 2.6km across. Its area is 7.5 sq.km. The highest spot on Hven is
where Tycho Brahe built his castle, Uranienborg, at 45m. above sea-level.
Hven forms a sloping shelf, highest to the south and gradually sloping away northward to just 5m above sea-level at the new Western Lighthouse at the north western tip of the island and the
harbour of Norreborg.

When you go ashore from the Landskrona ferry at Bäckviken, the grass clad pastures of "Backafall" rise steeply from the sea. Here and there you can spot places where cliff-faces have subsided exposing the clay beneath. This erosion is most noticeable along the south western edge of the island and up toward Kyrkbacken. If you go north from Bäckviken, along the cliff path to Haken, the erosion is less visible.
The beaches vary in size from next to nothing up to about 100ms by the camping ground and Kyrkbacken.
This is partly due to land reclamation during the brickmaking period, when the original beach foundations were "improved."
Hven's landscape is mainly made up of loose deposits -- morain clays, rich in flint, chalk, outwash sand and gravel plus a great deal of granite and all sorts of stone dragged here by the great glaciers of the last ice ages. 		You can see for yourself in the hill faces around the island how it's layered -- on top there's the yellowish morain clay, then shifting layers of sand and clay on a bed of blue morain clay. You don't reach bedrock -- chalk from the Cretacious period -- until 65m. below sea-level..
Hven's history stretches back some 14-15000 years, when the the great ice cap receded from Skåne. Water levels during the early stoneage were 7 or 8m. higher than they are now and the beaches and harbours we visit today were made possible by the inexorable grinding away of the coastline by the waves -- and the grassy knoll behind it of course. The shallows in the NW are areas taken from the island by the sea.
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Updated 2000-03-22 Copyright Johan Runeberg