Sweden in the Green Season

Sweden in the Green Season: Three Walks and a Beach

Just beyond the muted ochres and calm sophistication of Stockholm is a wilder world. Summer is the green season and it is greener the deeper into the woods you wander. You can catch a train to the last metro stop on the line going south or north and find yourself on a long-distance walking trail. Here is our story of walking the first section of three of these trails.

Walk One

Björkhagen to Skogshyddon to Alby friluftsgård

Out of the subway, past the restrained and beautiful Markuskyrkan, a church designed by Visgurd Lewerentz, one of the architects of Skogskyrkogården, the world heritage listed woodland cemetery in Stockholm, and on to the first section of the 1,000-kilometre-long Sörmlandsleden trail.

Through birch and spruce and pine forests and along the shores of a string of dark, lustrous lakes. An adder surprising us, an owl calling, a red-crested black woodpecker drumming on a tree. Small songbirds sweet after the rain shower.

A lido, an outdoor swimming pool in the lake with children swimming. Dusky blue butterflies on the pale grey lichen. Small golden frogs hopping across the track in front of us. Wild raspberries, and even more intense in flavour, wild strawberries. Ravines and cliffs and a rift valley linking two of the lakes.

Deep in the valley floor by a freshwater spring, the traces of a Stone Age settlement lay hidden. Up and on through ancient oak forests and out to once farmed land, its crofter cottages now summer houses with pale horses roaming the fields. Between 1850 and 1930, one million Swedes emigrated from areas like this to the great plains of the USA and Canada; small scale peasant farmers displaced by the cataclysmic shift to large, enclosed holdings. 

Roe deer on the path alongside the rail line as we travel back through suburban Stockholm.

Walk Two

Danderyd to Korby Gård, on the Roslagsleden Trail, part of the E6, a long-distance walking trail that stretches from Finland southwards to Greece.

From the 15th-century Danderyd church, we take a circuitous and uncertain route to Rinkebyskogen forest. Once we find a waymarker we settle into the walking. Through spruce and pine forests on Nordic ski trails that are lit and magical in winter. Gently up and down, past people out picking wild blueberries, raspberries and strawberries. We graze from a wild cherry tree.

Deeper into the mossy green forest of birches, pines and oaks and out into a clearing. A lake with a lido and diving board. Then along an old Viking way with 1,000-year-old rune stones still standing, their text and illustrations memorialising the lost thoughts and deeds of long-dead Viking warriors and holy men.

The path weaves its way between two lakes then follows the southern edge of Vallentunasjön, its shoreline yellow with flowering water lilies, its banks lovely with meadow grasses and wildflowers. 

A farm with red-painted barns and two white horses in zebra-striped coats, looking like mythical beasts as they roam the rocky terrain. A thunderstorm building in the sky and, just as we need it, a bus back to the metropolis.

Walk Three

Brunnsviken is a fjord that juts into the northern end of Stockholm and is part of the Royal City National Park. Sparkling on the day we walk around it in the enjoyable company of our Stockholm dwelling nephew Kym. It’s a 12-kilometre walk through greenness. People sunbathing on the granite outcrops and the wooden piers. Yachts out sailing, canoes gliding by. Glimpses of the long curving wooded drive to the princess’s palace, surrounded by water, forest and the English landscaping of Haga Park with its sweeping lawns, flower gardens, lakes and woods. 

Sultan-like blue and golden copper tents, a Turkish pavilion and the classical round Temple of the Echo, all exotic follies glittering on this Swedish summer’s day. The Bergianska Botanical Garden has trees and flowering plants from all over the world and an ornate cast-iron glasshouse proudly displaying the world’s largest water lily. 

Even though we are close to the city, the landscape feels remote, even wild at times, with its gnarled oak trees, flowering summer meadows and country-style houses half-hidden in their rambling gardens. We stop at the lakeside Café Sjöstugan for fika (coffee and cardamom buns), soaking up the afternoon’s warmth and the laid back bohemianism of the cafe. These summer cafes are a delight. Situated within a flower garden or community allotments they are gentle, lovely spaces where you can sit out in nature, enjoy a coffee or organic beer/wine and listen to live music or watch a play. 

The Beach

Out in kayaks on Lake Märalen, the world silent, the calm before the approaching summer storm. Herons skim the surface of the dark water. Paddling close to the reeds on the further shore, searching for a beaver’s nest that Elisabeth and Leif saw earlier. The forest on this side of the shoreline is undisturbed by human habitation (there are no houses or farms), it being part of the estate of the 17th-century Skokloster castle and once a royal hunting ground. Grey geese, cormorants, and white swans gliding past. A Muslim family picnicking on a pier. Small beaches and red-painted summer houses. Families out sunning themselves. Blond-haired children cycling through the wheat fields to the lake. We paddle as far as the medieval Wik castle before turning for home. If we kept going we could paddle all the way to Stockholm, 90 kilometres away by water. 

With blue skies and temperatures in the high twenties, it’s warm enough to swim in the lake and lie out on the timber pier afterwards, taking in the lilt of the language and the languidness of the green season. Strolling down to the beach we pick wild cherries and raspberries and look out for deer in the ripening wheat fields. 

We are five now that Erika has joined us at Leif and Elisabeth’s home in the lakeside village of Björk. We eat late and stay up even later, gathered around the kitchen table or out on the terrace, seduced by conversation, music and the long twilight.

One day we travel a maze of backroads and byways to an electronic music festival at an abandoned iron ore mine, its buildings still massive and raw but now derelict. It’s an extraordinary venue for the hypnotic music and light shows of Norberg. 

On the way there and back we see eagles, buzzards, foxes, deer, hares and, most amazing of all, a lynx. So rare to see a lynx. Young and not alert to danger it crosses the road in front of us and continues along just in front of the car before disappearing into the darkness, its ears pointed, its black-tipped tail swinging.

When we wake the next morning we wonder if the lynx is more dreamt than real, so marvellous was its sighting. Like the paradise that is Sweden in the summer, in the green season.