Not quite midsummer

Christmas and Midsummer are the most important holidays in Sweden. Celebrating the summer equinox involves a family lunch or communal feast where copious amounts of pickled herring is consumed washed down with 'snaps' - a powerful spirit. Each shot is accompanied by a toast and a drinking song praising snaps, the sillier the lyrics the better. Traditionally the feast is followed by dancing all night around a maypole. All very bucolic.

In recent years the date has been set as the as the Friday between 19 - 23rd of June, presumably to ensure the nation's collective hangover occurs over the weekend. The question the holiday posed was for us - is the Swedish 'midsommar' a must see event or something to be avoided? Of course local customs are interesting and we have been accidental onlookers to many in the course of our travels - local saints days, constitution days, ascensions and assumptions, VE day, 4th July, Bastille Day - and so on. A few were really fun, such as the Romera de Bolneovo and Cartegena Carniivale, others were intriguing, in particular July 4th on the Mall in Washington was an unforgettable, if unsettling experience. However, as foreigners some local festivities were just a bit of a pain, shops closed, campsites busy, with noisy celebrations carrying on into the small hours. 

When we visited our Swedish friends Maria cooked us the typical summer lunch. We concluded that unless you were in the company of Swedish people the midsummer festivities were not really going to make much sense, especially as our carousal capacity is pretty limited these days. Even on New Year's Eve we struggle to get past Big Ben's twelfth bong. We decided to leave the Swedes to their snaps and songs about small frogs and arrange to be in Copenhagen on midsummer's eve. The moment is celebrated there too, but to a lesser extent; it's not an official public holiday. Nevertheless, we thought it contingent to book the campsite.

This gave us three days to travel the 200 miles from Kalmar to Copenhagen - we used three marina stellpläts, each markedly different in character.

Hörvick 

We decided to skip past Kariskrona and Karlshamn, both interesting towns according to the guidebook, but you cannot visit everywhere. We had spotted an interesting looking little harbour with a stellpläts near Solvesborg, so we headed there. It turned out to be an inspired choice - a small fishing village expanded by a clutch of Swedish summer houses overlooking the sea.

Laura calls, Gill seems unperturbed by the fish...

The beach and rocky foreshore were backed by pines, not the usual Nordic ones, but maritime pines; it made the coast look somewhat Breton, like Locquirec or the villages on the Crozon peninsula.

The next harbour along, Krokås, has a stellpläts too, they are both lovely, whichever one you choose, it's a nice evening stroll to the other.

A beautiful afternoon melded into an extended Nordic evening. These slow sunsets and persistent twilights really are one of the joys of Scandinavian travel in June. There were a few families staying here, most from the yachts in the marina, and two tweenies in the big Concorde a couple of pitches down.

We sat outside as the sun went down, a gaggle of older kids were playing at the end of a short swimming pier. Their shrieks of delight as they dived and dived again into the darkening sea rang across the harbour. It was a lovely thing to hear, children naturally running free.

Eventually the evening chill drove them homewards. Silence reigned. The luminance of sky and sea sent me walkabout with the Canon. Of course you cannot actually photograph silence, some pictures exude it nonetheless.

Kåseberga

The bulging coastline from Kalmar to Malmö is bigger than it looks on the map. When we entered 'Kåseberga' into the sat nav we were surprised that it would take two hours to get there from Hörvick

After the first hour, as we approached Karlshamn, both the landscape and the vernacular architecture changed. More fields than forests, not every farmstead was painted uniformly rust red. The land undulated slightly, not quite rolling pasture, certainly nothing so overt as a hill, but not dead flat. Most of our trip through the southern half of Sweden had been dead flat, I know this because the van's average mpg. has crept up to 31, whereas in variable landscape it hovers around 28.

As we neared our destination I even had to change down to 5th to top an imperceptible rise while maintaining our preferred steady 55mph. As we headed on smaller roads towards our destination Gill pointed towards a beautiful long low hill at the edge of the sea, it was tree emerald green and treeless. 'Look!' Gill said, 'a chalk ridge,' in a voice as if she was greeting a long lost friend. Of course chalk landscapes for English people are a symbol of home, not just the hackneyed bluebirdless 'White cliffs', but more powerfully the ancestral landscapes of the Ridgeway with its barrows and henges.

Where we were heading has a monument that is the Swedish equivalent of Avebury. Åles Stena is also a significant megalithic monument within a chalk landscape. Where it differs from its English cousin is that it is beside the sea, shaped like a boat not a circle and it is more recent.

In fact over 2500 years separate Avebury stone circle and Åles Stena, the former a product of the late neolithic, the latter, dated somewhat uncertainly between AD500 and 1000, belongs to a fully developed Iron Age culture. Despite the age gap there are striking similarities between the two in their function as centres of communal ritual and the way the stones line up to correspond to the winter and summer equinoxes.

It does lead you speculate about the longevity of belief, myth and cultural practises among Northern European peoples uninfluenced by the Graeco-Roman. civilisation. It is difficult to be certain as most were non-literate  so the only evidence we have is archaeological, and even that has sometimes been rearranged or purposely wrecked by later peoples.

Åles Stena was a a short but steep walk from the stellpläts which occupies  Kåseberga community sports field during the summer months. In Britain there would be a big fuss about having such an important site on your doorstep. If English Heritage owned it you would have had to pay to look at it; in a National Trussed property the entrance fee would have been accompanied by a tea room and a gift shop. The Swedish take on it was stated succinctly and quite beautifully on a small sign.

It was refreshing to be somewhere that has not entirely commodified its past and retains a sense of  common ownership. As I stood among the stones the words of Jo Cox occurred to me, 'We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us." So much of history narrates conflict and division, but some places communicate a sense of common humanity. It was like that here, not just the monument itself, but also the sentiments expressed by the National Property Board of Sweden. 

Kåseberga itself is an attractive village. Like many fishing village in Europe the settlement itself is located inland, a kilometre or so from the harbour. There are a number of reasons for this, it meant that dwellings were sheltered from storms, most communities farmed as well as fished, so the fields were close to where people lived, but the most important reason was one of security. In ages where sea raiding and piracy were commonplace locating villages inland made good sense, giving inhabitants time to hide before attackers landed. The most valuable booty was people; in Viking times enslavement was big business.

We walked through the village on the way to the stones, even now hidden out of sight of the sea in a deep coombe. - today a  pleasant hotchpotch  of the ancient and modern.

When we walked back we came across a steep path down to the harbour. The side of the chalk downs were covered in poppies, a stunning contrast against the blue sky and sea.

A paraglider swooped above the cliffs seeking updraughts, catching a thermal it hung there almost motionless. By pure coincidence its canopy was bright red, shaped like a giant petal.

The location here is great, the facilities less so. The campsite manager collects the fee in the evening. You only pay if you stay between 7pm - 9am, otherwise the parking is free. At 140SEK it is quite an expensive overnight stop especially as electrical hook-up is extra. The sanitary facilities are basically the sports field changing rooms - a Spartan experience! Like many of the places we have stayed there is nowhere to dump grey water, here there is no chemical toilet emptying point either.

Given the prevalence of toilets and showers but lack of draining points at so many stopovers I wonder if most Swedish motorhome owners simply don't use their van's on-board facilities. When I was foolish enough to inhabit various Facebook moho groups it did surprise me how many owners in the UK basically used their van as a bed on wheels, always staying on campsites and using its facilities. One person even posted up pictures of how they had removed the shower and Thetford and converted the bathroom area into a walk-in wardrobe. I thought the whole point of living in a moho was to ensure that you never again needed a clothes hanger or were required to wear a shirt and jacket, and if a frock was essential to your mental well-being, then one of those scrunchy Indian cotton ones that still look great un-ironed would do just fine.

Ystad

We had never heard of Ystad before we watched Wallander. We liked the detective series but it's not our absolute favourite; we are still debating on which is better, 'The Killing' or 'The Bridge'. Nevertheless, for fan's of Nordic Noir, Ystad is a must, so we did. 

Another marina parking beckoned, though in all honesty in Ystad's case it's more of a dockside experience. More about that later.

If you went to the tourist office you could probably find some kind of Wallander the same related themed walk, but the town itself makes no big deal about the TV locations. It doesn't need to, the place is an attractive old port. There are whole neighbourhoods of ancient houses and the place boasts Sweden's oldest, built in the 1470s.

One thing that cannot fail to strike you is the level of civic pride here. One small town-centre park specialised in peonies.

The care it must take to nurture such a specialist plot requires a long term commitment. Back home the local authority closed its municipal nursery years ago to save money. Plants are bought in and Buxton's famous mid-Victorian park is maintained minimally, it is not an embarrassment, but it hardly flourishes.

On the way back to the van we called into a gelateria. There was a conscious effort to use local seasonal flavours. I chose rhubarb and ginger, it worked - not too tart, and packing a good kick of ginger. 

The motorhome parking is at the marina a little beyond Ystad's main docks. The port has regular ferry services to Poland and the Danish island of Bornholm. Every time one disembarked the van shook a little, the low rumble of big marine diesels throbbing night and day. Just to add to the cacophony the railway line is directly over the road from the stellpläts. We seem to be situated at exactly the point where the trains applied their brakes with a screeching sound like fingernails down a blackboard.

There goes another one!

To escape the noise we walked along the coastal footpath for a kilometre or so. It was deserted and we almost had it to ourselves.

As for the parking itself, then like many of the places we have stayed in Sweden it was convenient and clean but not without irritating aspects. Ystad's irritations began straightaway. Every service  in the marina is accessed using a swipe card provided by the authorities, when you arrive you pre-pay about £30 per night, but on leaving you are reimbursed for the card deposit and the cost of any services you did not use. Everything requires you to use a swipe card to access it - the ehu, toilet emptying facility, recycling area, the shower block - not every one has a charge, but constantly having to use the card feels demeaning and dispiriting.

I think the problem comes from the fact that the place is actually set up for yachts and motorhome parking is very much a subsidiary function. 

This becomes blatantly apparent in the shower block. I have concluded that the yachting fraternity must be all a bit jolly hockey sticks, that being cooped up together on a yacht requires you to set aside social conventions an inhibitions. Consequently when you swipe your card and enter the shower block and find yourself confronted by three toilet cubicles, a couple of wash hand basins and four shower heads on a wall you just accept it as normal.

It was mid afternoon and I had the facilities to myself, at least when I entered the cubical. A moment or two later I heard the door open, voices chatting in what I took to be Russian and the sound of sprinkling water.

The vision that faced me as I exited the cubical was, to my right two slightly burly middle aged Russian chaps chatting merrily covered in nothing but shower foam, facing me straight ahead, a svelte youth  somewhat Keatsian in appearance, busy towelling dry his shoulder length hair. I nodded and smiled, he reciprocated, I left hurriedly, reflecting as I returned to the van,.. did any of that actually happen?

This led me to reflect, just how shy and inhibited am I? Something which was put to the test the following morning. If the facilities are empty I will use them I decided, if full of Russians, or indeed men of any nationality, I will use the shower in the van, despite our grey water tank reaching near capacity and the Ystad marina lacking anywhere to drain it.

Luckily I had the place to myself, I hung my stuff on the communal clothes hooks, swiped my smart card on  shower 'A's' meter, my allotted 3 minutes of hot water immediately began to spurt from nozzle 'A' on the adjacent wall, clutching facecloth and shower foam I hopped into the meagre spray. All was well until the opposite situation to yesterday occurred. The main door clicked open and some unsuspecting stranger was confronted with a vision of me covered in soap while he sped towards a toilet cubicle.

Here's the odd thing that I am still trying to figure out. Yesterday I was definitely slightly embarrassed at the sight of the Russian bares, but today I was not really troubled by my own nakedness in front of a stranger. Why was that, I wondered?

Over breakfast I asked Gill, 'What's the set-up in the women's showers, are they communal?

'Well yes, but the showers themselves have curtains,' was the reply.

So much for Swedish commitment to gender equality, I thought to myself. Gill had opted to use our own bathroom. Probably a wise move under the circumstances.