Tiveden

Tiveden is the old dark between the lakes: the forest barrier separating Vättern and Vänern that for most of history was less a landscape than an obstacle — the wilderness border between the lands of the Svear and the Götar, crossed hurriedly, populated in the stories by trolls and highwaymen and in fact by very few of anyone. The national park (1983, roughly doubled in 2017) keeps the wildest core of it, and the wildness is geological: the ice sheet dumped a chaos of giant boulders across a fissured granite terrain, and the result is the roughest walking in southern Sweden — a forest interrupted every few steps by blocks the size of cottages, cliff-walled fissure valleys, and clear dark tarns in the slots between.

The names carry the folklore. Trollkyrka — "troll church" — is the bare rock dome where tradition places pagan sacrifice long after Christianity held the plains, remembered in a famous folk poem; Junker Jägares sten is a perched glacial boulder with a resident legend of its own; Stenkälla, a spring among the blocks, supplies the park's main entrance with its name. It says something about Tiveden that the map reads like an inventory of superstition.

The forest itself has been recovering from older logging for a century and is well on its way back to gnarled, half-open pine wilderness — and at the park's edge, sandy Vitsand beach gives the rare combination of a wilderness walk that ends in a swim.

What's worth knowing before you go

The park lies between Askersund and Karlsborg, with the main Stenkälla entrance well signposted and Ösjönäs, just outside, serving as the local activity base. Take the distances seriously: five kilometres of Tiveden boulder trail costs what ten cost elsewhere, and good boots are non-negotiable. Early summer and September are ideal; the tarns make swimming-and-walking loops the local art form.

The seasonal pilgrimage is just outside the park: Fagertärn, the little lake where wild red water-lilies — found here and almost nowhere else on earth — flower from late June into July. Picking has been banned for a century; looking is the point.