Along the Finnish coast
Kate Simon savours views, amber ales, and tales galore as she cycles along Finland’s new Coastal Route.
Aforest glade seems an unusual place to find a hunk of granite emblazoned with the hammer and sickle and inscribed with Cyrillic script.
‘‘It has been called the most beautiful of war memorials,’’ says my guide, Ville.
‘‘I’m not sure what that says about other war memorials, though,’’ he adds.
It’s less the memorial and more the setting that appeals to the eye.
The Soviet Monument, which remembers 453 Russian soldiers killed in battle during the Continuation War (1941-1944), is cradled by tall pines and serenaded by chittering chaffinches. It sits just off a country road on the edge of the Finnish city of Hanko, southwest of Helsinki, once a key strategic port at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland.
The evidence of conflict is clear to see in the abandoned trenches and lines of boulders that still scar this gentle terrain 75 years later, remnants of a bitter battle between the Finns and their Soviet invaders, which is well told at the nearby Front Museum.
This dark history is just one story I discover on a two-wheeled tour of the Coastal Route, a 200-kilometre cycling trail that loops to and from Salo around the shores of the Finnish Archipelago Sea.
This sprawl of mainland and islands offers up a landscape of deep forest, wide lakes and long beaches, with public transport access to other entry points, including Mathildedal, Kasnas, Hanko, Tammisaari and Tenhola.
My journey along part of this new
route began in Mathildedal, an enclave for escapees from Helsinki who have migrated 150km west to this historic ironworks village for a slower pace of life. There, on the shores of the Baltic, they’ve set up artisanal businesses making delicious bread, sweet chocolate and quaffable craft beer in workshops where iron was once tooled for the Swedes (another former master) whose influence is still identifiable in the official use of Swedish and the many Finns of dual heritage.
The clapboard dwellings where workers lived in the 19th century, traditionally painted in red punamulta, are now covetable homes that, I learn, rarely appear on the open market.
My billet is a stylishly simple room above a cafe and shop, in a hotel fashioned from a factory building.
The village is also on the fringe of the Teijo National Park, where I go for a walk with Krista, a nature guide, beneath a canopy of spruce, pine and birch, which echoes to the chirrup of the wood sandpiper, with drifts of blueberries at my feet.
We step along a slim boardwalk across a mire where bog rosemary and cotton deergrass grow, before emerging on the shores of Lake Matilda. We stop to enjoy the peace and pine-fresh air on a strand of sand on which the lake, tinged brown by the swamp, rolls golden bands of water. ‘‘Don’t bears roam your forests?’’ I break the silence.
Krista laughs: ‘‘Yes, they’re here, but you would be very lucky to see any.’’