Stenshuvud

Stenshuvud — "the stone head" — is a 97-metre hill of primary rock shouldering out of the soft Österlen coast, a landmark for Baltic sailors for as long as there have been Baltic sailors. The national park (1986) is small, but it is the most concentrated piece of southern Sweden in the whole system: warm slopes of hornbeam forest — the country's finest stands of a tree that barely reaches further north — sandy swimming coves at the foot, dry orchid meadows and heath on the shoulders, and on the summit the rubble ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort, from centuries when a defensible stone head above a landing beach was worth walling.

The park's celebrity resident is small and green: the European tree frog, at the northern edge of its range, breeds in the ponds below the hill, and on warm May evenings the males' chorus carries absurdly far — one of the loudest sounds any amphibian in Europe makes, coming out of an animal the size of a thumb. The warm-country theme runs right through the species lists: this is Sweden playing at being somewhere considerably further south, and mostly getting away with it.

Around the hill, Österlen supplies the frame — apple orchards, fishing villages and the open coastal light that has made the district a painters' and holiday country for a century.

What's worth knowing before you go

The entrance, with a naturum, lies just south of Kivik; Simrishamn is the nearest town, and summer buses serve the coast. The summit circuit over the hillfort, down through the hornbeams and back along the beach is a half-day at ambling pace, and the swimming coves make the full day easy. Late May packs the maximum in — orchids, leaf-green hornbeam and the frog chorus after dusk — while high summer brings crowds that the small park genuinely feels. Kivik's apple harvest and market color September.

The connoisseur's hour is the one after sunset in May at the ponds: stand still, let the chorus start around you, and be glad the hillfort's builders never had to sleep through it.