The English language has spawned some cracking opening lines, from Jane Austen’s “a truth universally acknowledged” to Orwell’s “clocks striking thirteen”. And now another has been added to the canon: the opening gambit of an info board on Sweden’s Biosphere Trail. “Every village,” it declares, “was required by law to dig its own wolf trap.”
It was only our second day on the trail, but we’d already been so enchanted by the scenery – the placid lake, the bright welcoming woods, the picturesque rural cottages – that it came as no real surprise to find we’d stumbled into a fairytale.
Opened last summer, the 85-mile Biosphere Trail skirts the southern shores of Lake Vänern, Sweden’s largest and Europe’s third largest lake. The route is named after the Lake Vänern Archipelago Biosphere Reserve, designated by Unesco in 2010. I confess I’d not really come across biosphere reserves before but there are 738 of them worldwide, all promoting “solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use”. There was certainly a good deal of conservation going on, for we seemed to be continually entering one nature reserve or other. And we’d arrived by train from the UK (a pleasant trundle through France, Belgium, Germany and Denmark), which we hoped would bolster the “sustainable use” bit.
We started our walk at Mariestad, the town that marks the trail’s eastern extremity. It possesses one of Sweden’s best-preserved historic districts, so we had a wander through streets of what looked like giant doll’s houses, all decked out in bright pastel shades. After a shufti round a cathedral with fossils embedded in its stone floor, we set off along the shore, armed with maps that the frequent waymarkers made all but redundant. Very soon we saw our first wildlife: a statuesque heron, a rather busier woodpecker, followed by kestrels, butterflies, deer and lapwings.
