Store Mosse

Store Mosse is a piece of Lapland stranded in Småland: a hundred square kilometres of open raised bog and fen west of Värnamo, the largest mire landscape in Sweden south of the far north. The flatness is the spectacle — a treeless brown-and-gold plain to the horizon, patterned with pools and pine islands, under the biggest sky in southern Sweden. The park (1982) protects essentially the whole system, which is what makes it rare; southern Europe drained its equivalents, and southern Sweden drained most of its.

The bog has a history as a lake. After the ice, this basin held Fornbolmen, a vast meltwater lake; when it drained, the winds off its floor built sand dunes that now stand forested in the middle of the mire like beached whales — climbing a wooded dune to look out over a bog that used to be a lake bed is the park's geology lesson in one move. The peat began accumulating on the old lake floor and has been at it for some eight thousand years, several metres deep now, an archive as much as a landscape.

The birds are the daily news. Kävsjön, the shallow lake at the park's heart, and the surrounding fens hold breeding cranes, waders and wildfowl in numbers that made this a bird reserve before it was a park, and the towers overlooking the lake are staffed by tripods most spring mornings. Nightjars churr from the dune pines on June nights; eagles patrol in winter.

What's worth knowing before you go

The main entrance and naturum sit on road 151 between Värnamo and Hillerstorp, fifteen minutes from Värnamo; some forty kilometres of trail, much of it boardwalk, cross the mire, and the walking is dead flat but utterly exposed — wind and rain here have nothing to break them. Late April–May for the crane-and-wader crescendo, July for bog cotton whitening the plain, October for colour and quiet.

The connoisseur's hour is dawn at the Kävsjön tower in late April, when the cranes start calling in the mist — the most northern-sounding moment the south of Sweden can produce.