Since I moved to Sweden, I’ve been admiring the summer farms (mountain pastures, fäbodvall). I haven’t seen anything like them in Finland, I don’t know if they even exist or if I just never came across them. But here, you find them pretty much everywhere, sometimes a lot of them together like around Mittåkläppen, or sometimes quite unexpectedly far away from anything else. And they can be totally rotting down so all you can see are the remains of old meadows and the rocks that the buildings stood on, or they are well kept and still active with livestock and all. And everything in between.
So I’ve been looking at this one mountain pasture marked on the map, Ånnfjällvallen at the foot of Ånnfjället. There’s even a path going there, but I figured it’s an old one and I would find buildings in different stages on decay. But already as I started following the path, I had a feeling that maybe it wasn’t quite as abandoned as I thought – it was really a quad track, not a path. And although I didn’t see any tire prints, I did see a lot of signs of maintenance. Like for example trees that had started growing over the tracks were cut off, probably earlier this summer.
After two kilometres of walking through the forest, the meadow finally opened in front of me and I very nearly stopped in my tracks – it wasn’t just a mountain pasture, it was somebody’s paradise! A flag pole, neat lawn, small pond with water flowing from a pipe, recently renewed turf roofs… I even peaked through the windows and the main cabin looked so inviting that I instantly wished I could stay there overnight. It was absolutely one of the most charming mountain pastures I’d seen. Lucky the people who own it!
