Nysunds kyrka

A small medieval chapel, Skogsbo kapell, is thought to have stood on this site earlier, associated with Riseberga convent and serving travellers on the old Letstigen route. The present church was completed around 1639, with sources differing slightly on whether construction began in 1638 or was finished by 1639, and it was consecrated in January 1641. A three-sided chancel was added in 1683, and the building was enlarged into its current cross-shaped plan between 1735 and 1740, when the transepts and the west tower were built.

The church is constructed of timber, clad externally with tarred wooden shingles, and pierced by round-arched windows with white-painted frames. The shingle-covered roofs are hipped over the gables, and the west tower is topped by a tall shingled spire. Despite later additions, the exterior has remained largely unchanged since the eighteenth-century rebuilding, and many of the wall shingles themselves date from that period.

Inside, the church is notable for its ceiling paintings of 1747, the work of the Karlstad painter Petter Mård (also recorded as Petter Måård), rendered in a Baroque idiom with Rococo colouring. Among timber churches built in the Bergslagen region during the 1600s and 1700s, Nysund's are considered to have some of the best-preserved painted ceilings of their kind. Combined with the church's carved fittings, they give the interior a notably unified character from this period.

The altarpiece, made in 1694 by the sculptor Bengt Svensson of Kristinehamn, was later enriched with further carving by Isac Schullström in the 1750s. The pulpit, carved in 1690, likely by Olof Ersson according to one source (though also attributed simply to Svensson elsewhere), was similarly completed by Schullström. In the chancel stands a wooden font of 1710, with a hexagonal foot, attributed to the joiner Erik Larsson, above which a carved figure of John the Baptist by Schullström, dated 1759, could once be lowered towards the font. Two bridal pews near the chancel windows, decorated with painted Rococo motifs, date from the early 1700s.

The church retains galleries on three sides, and much of its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fittings survive largely intact, apart from pews added in 1913. Gravestones set into the church floor are also considered of particular interest. The organ has a history of rebuilding: an eighteenth-century instrument by Gren & Stråhle was replaced in 1885 by Setterquist & Son, whose case survives today housing a mechanical organ built in 1960.