Tingstads kyrka

The present stone church was probably built in the first half of the thirteenth century, though signs found during the 1957 restoration suggest an earlier wooden church and burial ground may have stood on the site as far back as the late eleventh century. A medieval indulgence letter of 1442 records that the church was originally dedicated to Saint Olof. Fragments of an Eskilstuna coffin stone, a type of early Christian grave marker, were discovered built into the tower wall, though the runes are too fragmentary to reveal whose grave it once marked.

The church's tower was completed in 1769, replacing what may have been a medieval predecessor on the same site. A major exterior alteration came in the 1860s, when the roof pitch was lowered, buttresses were added for structural support, the shingle roof was replaced with sheet metal, and the old porch was demolished. A further restoration in 1957 renewed the plasterwork inside and out and uncovered and conserved medieval limewash paintings.

Inside, visitors can see traces of blocked-up early windows and a pointed triumphal arch dating from the High Gothic rebuilding, along with brick vaulting added in the fifteenth century. Two consecration crosses, painted directly onto the triumphal arch, mark where a bishop once anointed the walls with holy oil when the rebuilt church was reconsecrated. The pulpit dates from the 1660s and was later painted in 1741, while the altarpiece, depicting Christ carrying the Cross, was painted by Pehr Hörberg in 1791 and is considered one of his finer works.

The church's best-known object is a Romanesque font carved around 1200 by the Gotland stonemason Sigraf, decorated with an image of a contemporary church complete with tower, nave, chancel and apse. The original font was sold to the Swedish History Museum in 1886; the font now standing in the church is a cast made in 1961. Three runestones, thought to date from the late Viking Age, stand in the churchyard; one inscription refers to a bridge built in memory of two sons, bridge-building being regarded at the time as a pious Christian act.

A notable grave slab in the nave marks the burial of the seventeenth-century land surveyor Jean de Rogier and his family, its carved roundels unusually depicting the four known continents of the age rather than the more common cherubs or evangelist symbols. De Rogier and his wife are also recorded as having funded the repainting of the church's fifteenth-century triumphal crucifix in 1671.