Pathways to the trail – landscape, walking and heritage in a Scandinavian border region

ABSTRACT

Can walking trails be understood not only as routes to history and heritage, but also as heritage in and of themselves? The paper explores the articulation of trails as a distinct landscape and mobility heritage, bridging the nature-culture divide and building on physical and intellectual movements over time. The authors aim to contribute to a better understanding of the geography of trails and trailscapes by analysing the emergence of the Swedish-Norwegian trail Finnskogleden. The trail is situated in the border region spanning the former county of Hedmark in present-day Innlandet County, south-eastern Norway, and Värmland County in mid-western Sweden, a forested area where Finnish-speaking immigrants settled from the 16th century to the early 20th century. Archives, literature, interviews, and field visits were used to analyse the emergence and governance of the trail. The main finding is the importance of continuous articulation work by local and regional stakeholders, through texts, maps, maintenance, and mobility. In conclusion, the Finn forest trailscape and its mobility heritage can be seen as an articulation of territory over time, a multilayered process drawing on various environing technologies, making the trail a transformative part of a trans-border political geography.

KEYWORDS:

• articulation of territory
• environing technologies
• mobility heritage
• trailscapes
• walking trails

Introduction

How do paths and trails come into existence? Through walking, would be a simple, correct, but also unsatisfactory answer. Even if paths are made by the trampling of thousands of feet, human and others, their articulation as a distinct landscape and as cultural heritage depends on more than physical movement. Beyond the here and now of each individual step, some paths emerge as more than local concerns and get elevated to a certain status. When turned into trails, these physical and cultural remains of walking, with their surroundings, get articulated as a landscape genuinely suitable for movement on foot. Drawing on critical geography and heritage studies of landscape, place-making and heritage-making (e.g. Lowenthal 1985; 1998; 2015; Smith 2006; Harvey 2015; Harrison 2015) we argue: (1) that trails are defined and come into being through sociocultural processes, (2) that each trail and trailscape (Fagence 2017) has a history, and (3) that the trail itself is and should be considered heritage.

In this article, we distinguish between paths (in Swedish: stigar) and trails (in Swedish: leder). The former are the result of more or less spontaneous physical mobility (i.e. walking by humans and their co-species) and they appear and disappear organically, depending on local vegetation and soil geography, climate, culture, and practice. By contrast, trails are designed, managed and maintained with the aim to attract and direct walkers, and they are attributed the potential to contribute to tourism, public health, recreation, and other positive outcomes (Timothy & Boyd 2015; Godtman Kling et al. 2019). Whereas a path is an unintended result of walking, walking is one of the intended results of trails. Paths and trails are not mutually exclusive categories, they are similar in many ways. However, for the purpose of our analysis, we intentionally make a distinction between the two concepts.

Our study focuses on the emergence of a Swedish-Norwegian trail called Finnskogleden (lit. the Finn forest trail). It is situated in the sparsely populated border region spanning the former county of Hedmark in present-day Innlandet County, south-eastern Norway, and the county of Värmland in mid-western Sweden. The area that became known as Finnskogen (lit. ‘the Forest of the Finns’), which is also known as ‘the Finn Forest’ in English – is named after the Finnish-speaking immigrants that have populated the region from the 16th century to the early 20th centruy (Bladh 1995). The 240 km Finn forest trail straddles the national border from Morokulien in the south to Søre Osen in the north.¹ Inaugurated in 1992, it was the result of an almost decade-long process involving two nations, several municipalities, and many local and regional organizations and individual driving spirits. Since then, it has been important in both tourism and heritage management. Our discussion focuses on the transformation of local paths into an acknowledged comprehensive system of trails, and its rise to become a local, regional and even international concern. What emerges is a long, historical continuity that we can organize into three distinct phases of ‘uses of the past’ (Aronsson 2005) to understand the current uses and intentions of the trail.

Building from the Finn forest trail, we aim to contribute to a more nuanced general understanding of how some paths evolve into officially sanctioned trails. More specifically, we aim to show how the heritage of on-foot movement is articulated in the formation of walking trails. How is a trail such as Finnskogleden in and of itself articulated as a geographically bound and situated cultural heritage? Which actors are the driving forces in turning paths into a holistic system of landscape trails? While walking is a prerequisite for paths and trails, in this article we do not primarily focus on walking itself but rather on how walking and related forms of mobility contribute to long-term changes in landscapes, both physically and conceptually.

While there is an extensive body of research on walking from geographical, historical, ethnographical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives (e.g. Klepp 1998; Solnit 2002; Ingold & Vergunst 2008; Lorimer 2011; Humberstone et al. 2016; Hall et al. 2017; Österlund-Pötzsch 2018), the same is not the case for the trails on which the walking takes place, even though there has been an increasing interest since 2010. A review from 2017 of nearly 200 academic articles shows that trail research has focused predominantly on vegetational, environmental and managerial aspects (Godtman Kling et al. 2017). The review concludes that ‘there is very little research on recreational trails in a socio-cultural or heritage context’ (Godtman Kling et al. 2017, 501), despite a few examples to the contrary (e.g. Wrede & Mügge-Bartolovic 2012; Moor 2016). There is a growing literature by geographers on ‘linear tourism resources and attractions’ (Boyd 2017, 417), mainly focusing on management and tourism aspects of trails. Within this research, specific attention has also been directed towards heritage trails (e.g. Timothy & Boyd 2015, 17–59. 2; Boyd 2017). The underlying assumption in much of that research seems to be that trails themselves are not heritage, but merely infrastructure that enables transport, access, and mobility between heritage sites. However, some notable exceptions in the form of pilgrimage trails show that trails do have potential as heritage (e.g. Selberg 2011; Saul & Waterton 2017; Øian 2019), including in Scandinavia, where recreational walking has deep historical roots (e.g. Kilander 2008; Ween & Abram 2012). In certain cases with a distributed geography – which Timothy & Boyd (2015, 21) call a ‘zone of thematic interest’ – connecting the points of interest can help entire thematic areas to be transformed into complex ‘trailscapes’ (Fagence 2017), which we argue constitutes an interesting dimension of an ever-richer universe of ‘heritagescapes’ (Garden 2006).

Theorizing trails as environmental trailscapes

While geographical and historical analyses of landscapes has long since been time rich and theoretically astute, bodily movement in landscapes has only quite recently been brought into focus (e.g. Wylie 2005, Merriman et al. 2008, Waitt et al. 2009, Brown 2015). Landscape memory was connected to the strong tradition of nationalism (from a vast literature, e.g. Lowenthal 1985; 2015; Billig 1995; Armiero 2011) and landscape in general associated primarily with visual qualities (Daniels & Cosgrove 1988; Billing 2017). Despite significant critique (e.g. Rose 1993; Mels 1999; Olwig 2005), the iconic and representational approach to landscape has been important to understand the formation of natural and cultural value manifested, for example, in reserves and parks. More recently, the understanding of landscapes as a sophisticated product of bodily movements and other material and immaterial processes has been articulated (cf. Whatmore 2006). Thus, it is possible to approach landscapes as shaped by walking and other forms of wayfaring (Ingold 2000; 2011; 2016; Hastrup 2009; Ingold & Pálsson 2013; Lien 2015) that constitute complex practices of physical mobility, navigation, and knowledge gathering. Hence, the formation of trails from walking is an activity that extends in time and space and it transgresses boundaries between nature and culture.

It is well observed in geographical literature that trails and paths, either historical or recent, play significant roles in place and destination management (e.g. Timothy & Boyd 2015). Trails are part of ‘the creation of tourist space’ (MacLeod 2017) and historical themes make up a significant body of trails around the world, reflecting histories of land use, place attachment, exploration, religion, war, slavery, or just about any possible theme one could think of (e.g. MacLeod 2013; Miles 2017; Best 2017; Lemky 2017, Widawski & Oleśniewicz 2019; Collins-Kreiner 2020). However, history-centred trails are just one part of an ever-expanding continuum of thematic and functional trails that also includes peri-urban trails for walking and exercise aimed at promoting a diverse set of interests, such as liveability, public health and property enhancement (Pries & Qviström 2021). Such trails have been described as ‘portable landscapes’ (Qviström 2013) with distinct elements of reproducibility and standardization, sometimes building on physiological ideas (Åstrand 1958; Svensson 2018) and on a general historical tendency towards ‘sportification’ (Guttmann 1978). Trails and trailscapes can also, as in the case explored in this article, be used as vehicles for transboundary cooperation (Stoffelen 2018).

In recent decades, mobilities research has grown into a productive and dynamic transdisciplinary field, emphasizing the ‘unstable and ever-changing interrelation of places, persons, technologies and natures connected through performances and practices’ (Sheller & Urry 2016, 13). Many geographers have been actively involved in this foregrounding of mobility and movement across a variety of topics and scales (e.g. Merriman et al. 2008; Adey 2009; Cresswell 2011; 2012; 2014; Davidson 2021). While often discussed in connection with transport and communication (e.g. Möller et al. 2018; Müller 2019; Hall et al. 2020), mobility is indeed an aspect that can be, and has been, identified in just about all geographical contexts. Of particular interest for the purpose of this article are the ways in which scholars within and beyond geography have approached the bodily motion and mobility of individual walkers in relation to outdoor environments and ‘nature’ (e.g. Macnaghten & Urry 2001; Edensor 2010; Lorimer 2011).

Taking our cue primarily from the understanding of mobility as formative practices of life worlds and wayfaring, we look at paths and trails as an outcome of a complex social process of environing (Sörlin & Wormbs 2018). Environing, we posit, refers to practices whereby humans enfold nature into society and transform it into hybrid entities. Paths – and trails – are such hybrid entities. They are not pure nature or pure culture; they are environmental, products of combinations of material and conceptual processes that have given them their dual character, and their place in and of the landscape (Macfarlane 2012, 13–14). The creation of a trail is at the same time part of a process of articulation of territory, which essentially is the discursive and conceptual part of the environing work. This approach is used to investigate how a landscape is articulated through written, oral, visual, or physical means as a place for and by certain activities (Pyne 1998; Sörlin 1998; 1999). As distinct from many of the earlier organic and evolutionary processes of path-making, modern articulations are intentional and instrumental, which means that they are often more nuanced, elaborate and standardized. While these analytical concepts – environing and articulation – serve the purpose of unlocking the processes whereby trails gain their significance in landscapes over time and through the engagement of a multitude of actors, we use the concept mobility heritage to characterize the relationship between trails and the broad range of remains linked to landscape movement on foot.

Mobility heritage (or movement heritage) not only includes physical remains in the landscape, but also ideas about mobility as articulated through concepts, literary and artistic representations, scholarly descriptions, maps and place names (Svensson 2018; Svensson et al. 2016). In that sense there is a direct relationship between the articulation processes and the environing technologies at work in shaping what is essentially yet another element of the environment, and the mobility heritage that they inadvertently create, which is now demanding our attention. In this article we apply this conceptual and theoretical framework in a synthetic analysis of what in our time has become the fully fledged Finn forest trailscape, ‘a ‘broad zone of movement’ and within which ‘there are many points of convergence of embedded interest, identity, and meaning’ (Fagence 2017, 455), criss-crossed by hundreds of kilometres of paths and trails. We find the trailscape concept useful because it underscores the distributed character of points of interest. However, we put emphasis on the trails part of the concept, arguing that trails can be more than just infrastructure connecting sites of interest. They do that too, but in the Finn forest case, trails are a key part of the heritage and the trailscape concept highlights the hybrid character of the trail as a linear environmental artefact embedded in a three-dimensional more-than-human heritagescape. These conceptual and theorizing approaches suggest that the historical geography of the trail is much more than a sequence of historical or archaeological layers that can be uncovered in situ. It is rather a continuous interplay between the physical evolution of the path and its supporting infrastructures, and the discursive history of repeated creative articulations.

Methods to trace a trail

To capture the complex pathways that led to the current trailscape, a process of identifying and combining layers and phases is required to get a sense of how to see ‘beyond’ the nature-culture divide (Harrison 2015) and arrive at a more holistic understanding. In approaching this complexity, we used a combination of qualitative methods and sources to deal simultaneously with the material and the discursive dimensions of the environing process.

We used archival sources to analyse the formation of the Finn forest trail in the 1980s and 1990s. The main archives were at the Gruetunet Museum in Kirkenær (Grue Municipality, Innlandet County), Norway, where most of the documentation about the Finn forest trail and its history is stored, and the municipal archive in Torsby Municipality in Värmland County, Sweden. The documents range from internal meeting protocols and maps that show how the modern trail emerged, to information brochures. For the earlier phases of articulation, we used a systematic selection of printed primary and secondary sources.

Extensive conversations with actors either involved in the creation of the Finn forest trail or working in and on the heritage sites and collections have given us additional perspectives and complemented the written sources. Some of these were systematic, semi-structured interviews with seven key individuals active in the creation or management of the trail, which had relations to the historical geography of the area of particular interest. Some conversations were conducted during fieldwork, for example with Gabriel Bladh, who has carried out extensive work on the historical geography of the Finn forest area (e.g. Bladh 1995). At the Finn forest museum (Torsby Finnskogcentrum) in the parish of Lekvattnet, which is a branch of the regional Värmland County Museum with exhibitions and archives, we talked to several employees, including archaeologist Monica Björklund and branch manager Kersti Berggren. In the holiday village of Mattila (Värmland), we talked with the owner Kurt Eide, one of the initiators of the Finn forest trail, whom we later interviewed.

We used field walks as an integrated part of our research process. During a string of visits to the Finn forest area, from 2017 to 2020, walking the trails both with a guide and on our own, we were able to study at first hand how the trails stretch through forest and valleys, and how signs, markings and maps connect different parts of the wide trailscape and the multiple layers of history. We conceive those walking sessions as a version of ‘moderate autoethnography’ (Stahlke Wall 2016), whereby our own physical and mental experiences of walking and engaging with other trail walkers enriched our perception and provided a better understanding of place and scale (Ehn 2011; Bringa & Bendixsen 2016). Our first-hand experiences of the trail and its surroundings have allowed for more in-depth interviews and sensitized us to details about the landscape in the archival sources.

Our methodological approach developed gradually, in close relation with our theorizing of the trailscape as a holistic entity beyond the linear trail. We were able to perceive, quite tangibly in the field how the physical presence of the trailscape manifested, and how it resonated with the more abstract processes of articulation and discursive environing that we encountered in archives and interviews. So, in addition to serving as our empirical sources, the archives, interviews and field walks helped us to recognize the discursive intentions of the past in the physical present.

We used a combination of sources that span more than 200 years of history and articulation in the Finn forest area. Rather than focusing on specific data points and quantitative aspects, we have focused on qualitative interpretation of sources. All material was analysed from a chronological perspective, with the purpose of understanding and connecting the temporal dimensions of the articulation of the Finn forest trail. Through a hermeneutic close reading of sources from seemingly disparate temporal contexts, we have identified how those contexts are connected and have become part of the trailscape. We have specifically focused on the use of history in the articulation process of the Finn forest trail, uncovering heritage-making processes through time.

Much like we argue that the trailscape of the Finn forest is the result of a layered process of articulation and environing, our methodology has been layered too. To connect our methodological process to the trailscape concept, we could frame our data as a ‘sourcescape’ through which we have travelled with our respective disciplinary backpacks, connecting points in space and time, and uncovering how this vast thematic area has emerged. A potential limitation to our methodology is our lack of quantitative data, such as GIS mapping and visitor surveys. Such data could add more detail to how articulation and actual visitor numbers relate and would be worth more attention in future research. In what follows, we start with an introduction to the Finn forest area of Norway and Sweden and the ‘first discovery’ of the forest Finn culture. We then turn to the recent re-articulation of the area since the 1980s with a tourism and heritage focus. Thereafter, we examine the earlier articulations of the forest Finn culture, identifying three main periods, carried by different actors. In a concluding discussion we bring the empirical investigation to bear on the uses of history and geography in the understanding of trails, heritage, and an extended on-foot mobility.

The Finn forest area – a transnational geography

The area known as the Finn forest, once virtually uninhabited, was from the 16th century to the early 20th century populated by Finnish-speaking immigrants. The immigrants were originally from Finland, which was then a part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Finns continued to settle in the forests in the area until the early 1900s (Tarkiainen 1990, 191–201; 1993; Bladh 1995). Over time, the Finnish culture and language became an integral part of the region and it was not until the 20th century that Finnish as a first language disappeared. The Finnish-speaking immigrants brought with them traditions and practices that differed on several points from those in the local Swedish and Norwegian cultures. Typical elements of the Finn forest culture were the slash-and-burn cultivation, which was largely abandoned by the 18th century (Berggren 2017, 22), and the clever ‘human ecology’ (to use an anachronistic term) of landscape and resource use. The refuge continuity of a ‘foreign’ people was often pointed out as an exceptional feature of a political geography that included several empires and nation states: Denmark, Sweden, and from 1905 the new sovereign state of Norway. The Finnish building tradition included the smokehouse (ria), which was a type of wooden house built around a large stone oven and without a chimney; instead a hatch in the ceiling was used. A sauna with similar design was another common feature of Finn forest farms. The practice of slash-and-burn agriculture and sowing forest Finn rye in the ashes yielded crops that were far bigger than conventional agricultural techniques could achieve in the landscape and climate (Bladh 1995; Bladh & Wedin 2005; Welinder 2015). The farms lay far apart in the forest, allowing plenty of space for swidden farming and hunting. This also meant that the Finns had to walk long distances through the forest to get to their neighbours and eventually also churches, schools, shops, doctors, and workplaces. These walking practices produced a rich network of paths in the Finn forest and the network formed the backbone of a cultural heritage of mobility.

During the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century the Finn forest was studied and popularized through the work of Swedish and Finnish scholars and authors (Axelson 1852; 1978 [1852]; Bromander 1901; 1902; Bergendahl 1913). Two scholars stand in the foreground: Carl Axel Gottlund and Nils Keyland. Gottlund (1796–1875) played an important role in the articulation of the Finn forest area as a culturally distinct part of Scandinavia. Gottlund was a scholar at the University of Helsinki and had studied both in Åbo (Turku in Finnish) and Uppsala. He was interested in the history and language of the Finnish people and focused specifically on the Finnish-speaking areas in Sweden and Norway. With two books about the area, he raised awareness in both Sweden and Finland about historical migration patterns and the forest Finn culture that had resulted from these movements (Gottlund 1984; 1986). During trips in 1817 and 1821, Gottlund carried out his ethnographic studies on foot, covering vast distances on small paths (Gottlund 1984; 1986).

A similar role to Gottlund’s was played by Nils Keyland (1867–1924). A folklorist and ethnologist from Bjurbäcken (Arvika Municipality, Värmland) in the Finn forest, Keyland worked tirelessly to supply the national cultural history museum Nordiska museet and its twin institution Skansen, an open-air museum in Stockholm with material from his home region (Hallén 2017). Keyland’s extensive fieldwork in the Finn forest between 1916 and 1920 (Garnert 2010; Hammarlund-Larsson 2017) was made possible by his experiential knowledge of local mobility patterns. In this respect, Keyland fits a pattern among Scandinavian ethnologists and folklorists of the time (Gustavsson 2014). They often had roots in their region of study, realizing its extraordinary culture and heritage only after a longer period of absence from it, for studies or work, and they returned with the added authority of formal expertise won elsewhere that served as their prime instrument of articulation.

Furthermore, the borderland history between Sweden and Norway contributed to the unique character of the area. Centuries of cross-border relations and trade, along with the dramatic rescuing of refugees from Nazi-occupied Norway during World War II had shaped a local understanding of the border as special. Both the breakup of the Union monarchy of Sweden-Norway in 1905 and the wartime relation between the two countries in the years 1940 to 1945 were far from simple. Sweden remained neutral in the war and did not agree to host the Norwegian king, Haakon VII when he and his son Olav sought to escape across the border from Nazi occupation in April 1940 (Haarr 2009). The tensions between the countries that followed could have dampened the sentiments of community and friendship, but they prevailed and are today manifested in the Finn forest trail as it meanders back and forth across the border. One of the key actors in the creation of the trail, Anne Lise Skarderud, used the phrase ‘a border of a different kind’ (en gräns av annat slag) in the title of her book about the Finn forest (Skarderud 1987). As we show in this article, this idea was inscribed in the trail from the very beginning.

A trail is born

In the mid-1980s, Anne Lise Skarderud arrived in Åsnes, a small place in the then county of Hedmark in south-eastern Norway, to work in tourism. Employed by Kongsvinger Municipality (Innlandet County), one of her ideas to attract visitors was to create a trail in the Finn forest along the border. She worked out a detailed plan for how the trail could promote tourism and raise interest for the forest Finn culture.

Shortly after Åsnes’s arrival in Hedmark, another important player stepped in – the cross-border organization ARKO (Arvika and Kongsvinger kommuner; kommuner translates as municipalities in both Swedish and Norwegian), which since its inception in 1967 had expanded to include nine municipalities in the Hedmark-Värmland Finn forest area. Through ARKO, the plans for a trail turned into a project with financial backing and a salaried project leader, Heidi Arild. Arild administered and coordinated the many local enthusiasts and organizations that wanted to contribute to the creation of the trail. Finding and clearing old and new paths, deciding which route the trail should take, and putting up signs and designing maps were only some of the many different tasks that fell on her as project leader (H. Arild, telephone interview 5 September 2019). The trail ultimately included all nine cooperating municipalities. The local authorities in Kongsvinger outlined the purpose of the project as ‘To accommodate the conditions for forest walking along a continuous trail in the border region, so that the Finn forest’s natural resources can be used on the population’s and nature’s terms and form the basis for new experiences and continued settlement’,² and the trail would be 240 km long and for the most part follow historical paths and travel patterns.³

Many of the old paths has become overgrown by the time the purpose of the project was outlined. Kurt Eide, owner of Mattila on the Swedish side, had a background in orienteering and took on the task to locate the paths on the ground and map them in close detail. It proved to be hard work to recover and clear the paths once again (K. Eide, interview 10 June 2019), but not impossible as the paths were there as subtle traces in landscape or as faint glimpses in local collective memory. As Robert Macfarlane puts it in his acclaimed book The Old Ways, ‘old paths rarely vanish […] they survive as subtle landmarks, evident to those who know how to look’ (Macfarlane 2012, 47).

The paths of the local Finn culture were a factor that distinctly joined, not separated, the nations on either side of the border. This way of creating a trail by emphasizing historical paths was very different from how other iconic hiking trails in Sweden emerged earlier in the 20th century, such as Kungsleden (the King’s Trail), established in northernmost Lapland in landscapes that had been shaped by the Sami and their reindeer herding culture for centuries. Even though that trail partly used existing Sami paths and was dependent on the use of Sami guides, it was not framed as a way to raise awareness of Sami culture (Améen 1900, 30). On the contrary, it fostered a nationalist view of the landscape that strongly influenced early Swedish mountain tourism and its main organization, the Swedish Tourist Association (Sörlin 1995, 150; Kayser Nielsen 1997, 87–89). When the King’s Trail was created, there was an official neglect and marginalization of Sami cultural history and landscape use. Counter-opinions that praised Sami culture and promoted their economic rights existed but were far from hegemonic (Nordin & Lundmark 2005). One century later, national minorities had an acknowledged position in Norway as well as in Sweden (e.g. Holmberg et al. 2018), and in the Finn forest case the local Finnish culture was an integral part of the trail project from the outset. Thus, a transboundary and inclusive articulation of territory was possible.

The stakeholders of the Finn forest trail that are mentioned in this section, mainly Konsvinger Municipality and ARKO, described the trail as being aimed for, among others, local inhabitants, school children, and tourists (both domestic and international). From the very start of the trail project there was a strong backing in terms of financial support and commitment to long-term management of the trail. The local municipalities in ARKO supported the project, along with the County Administrative Board (Länsstyrelsen) in Värmland and the Nordic Council of Ministers (see footnote 1). According to the above-mentioned stakeholders, in the build up to the official inauguration in June 1992, the trail was described as a guide through local history, culture and nature. In this sense, the trail itself was not considered heritage but rather a vehicle for it. It was emphasized how the trail had been rediscovered, or ‘made’, through the hard and elaborate labour of finding and clearing old historical paths and small roads and locating them in time and landscape.⁴

Another difference from the early mountain trails was the role of new infrastructure. In both Jämtland County (central Sweden) and Lapland, hiking-based tourism on a bigger scale was possible due to the new railways (Kilander 2008; Sillanpää 2008). In the Finn forest, no major infrastructure investments were made. On the contrary, insufficient road maintenance has been a source of debate in this area and many others like it in recent last decades (Bertilsson 2021).

To summarize, the Finn forest trail gained momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s for several reasons. First, Anne Lise Skarderud had come up with a vision and a thorough plan for the project and she had the knowledge and the network to get it going. Second, there were already institutions in the area that could take responsibility for the realization of the project and eventually also the long-term management. Third, there were historical prerequisites in place: existing paths, existing heritage sites that the trail could connect with, a long tradition of cross-border cooperation, and the opportunity to build on transnational networks.

Finally, the political and geographical context made the municipalities receptive to the type of initiative. Economic problems, unemployment, and a lack of new companies were a reality on both sides of the border in the early 1990s. By framing the Finn forest trail as a way to bolster tourism in a region more or less devoid of such businesses, the project became interesting from an economic point of view, at a time when destination management and place- and region branding were on the rise (e.g. Butler et al. 1998; Morgan et al. 2003; Ek & Hultman 2007). Unemployed workers and local sports clubs were enrolled to clear and manage the trail on the ground (H. Arild, telephone interview 5 September 2019). The earlier, already existing articulations of the Finn forest pathway landscape could be repurposed.

While some trails have run into trouble due to lack of financial and institutional backing, and as a consequence of poor maintenance, such problems have largely been avoided for the Finn forest trail. There have been some ‘bumps on the road’, though. When the trail was launched in 1992, ARKO handed responsibility for it over to the newly founded Finn forest foundation (Stiftelsen Finnskogen) to secure the long-term management. The vision proved overly optimistic. Despite good groundwork and signposting of the trail, the foundation ran into economic trouble in the 2000s and went bankrupt. The equally new Finnskogen natur- och kulturpark assumed responsibility for the Finn forest trail in January 2018. The organization consists of representatives for several Swedish and Norwegian municipalities, as well as the museums Torsby Finnskogcentrum on the Swedish and Norsk Skogfinsk Museum on the Norwegian side. By the early 2020s there were c.20 partners of the park (Finnskogen natur- och kulturpark 2021). Through membership of Norske Parker (n.d.) and the EUROPARC Federation (2021), Finnskogen natur- och kulturpark is connected to a broad network of national and continental protected areas. However, the park in the Finn forest was the first in the Nordic countries that spanned a national border. The organization gave rise to a new optimism about the future, manifested through high-flying plans for UNESCO world heritage status, an ambition that still exists (H. Bragelien and S. Palmquist, interview 2 October 2019).

Environing and articulating the Finn forest

It is evident from our brief historical review that a rich heritage of paths and trails in the forest Finn cross-border region of Norway and Sweden has been identified, evoked, created, and established over a period of c.200 years. It may be useful to look closer at the stages of this evolutionary assemblage of materialities, intentions, and working strategies in order to disentangle and historicize the waves of articulation of territory of the region. The once existing forest archipelago of farms and homesteads and the network of human-ecological paths that connected them and their population of forest Finns from the 16th century to the early 20th century formed the foundation on which the trailscape was built. The articulation process engaged considerable agency and multiple actors, whose practices over a period of 200 years can be regarded as the historically realized ‘pathways to the trail’, which combined led to what has become a movement heritage and a mobility landscape. It is precisely the combinations and interlocking stages of this historical process that comes across as the element important to uncover. This implies that throughout history there has been a creative relationship to the value in the landscape. The element of paths is gaining importance only at a fairly late stage. The Finn forest itself has long been acknowledged as valuable heritage, but has started to become a mobility heritage more recently; it is a still ongoing process wherein the formation of a trail and a wider, complex trailscape is a central move.

When Carl Axel Gottlund and Nils Keyland worked as folklorists and collectors in the area over a 100-year period spanning c.1820 to c.1920, they were part of a wider European movement of identifying the primordial periphery to find the authentic past (Lowenthal 1985; 2015; Frykman & Ehn 2007). Gottlund and Keyland were not alone. Others, with less influence also had reports or travelogues from the explorations of the Finn forest culture published (Axelson 1978 [1852]). The value of that past and its material and spiritual remains was constructed along the lines of then current understandings of what elements of culture were authentic and therefore highly valued for, for example, preservation and display in museums and outdoor culture parks such as Skansen in Stockholm and Bygdøy in Oslo. This primary work of articulation of the values of Finn forest culture proved essential. Having material objects documented by Nordiska museet in the nation’s capital was in itself a sign of recognition, and the building of the Finn forest site at Skansen was an emblematic showcase for the emerging heritage narrative.

As scholars and collectors, Gottlund and Keyland wrote about their results and ideas in comprehensive historical narratives of the Finn forest culture. These were professional, eyewitness accounts written in Swedish. They did not articulate the paths as such very much, although both of them used the paths, especially Keyland on his repeated walks between sites in the area. The two folklorists’ descriptions of the region and culture were detailed and ‘thick’ enough to serve as a solid raw material for later, more activist use of history and heritage construction (Geertz 1973). The century from c.1820 to the 1920s can be seen as a period of ‘discovery’ of the forest Finns, and the work of the folklorists as a primary inventory of their culture and an enhancement of it in its own right. The appropriate methodology for Gottlund and Keyland was collection, documentation, and preservation, and to some extent education as the new appreciative image of Finn forest culture was published and started to circulate in society (Retzius 1881).

After the creative and active first period of discovery and articulation, fuelled by regional nationalism, interest in the region was low for a while, especially after Keyland died in 1924. Nonetheless, the image of north-western Värmland as marked by the Finnish colonization was gradually absorbed into the representation of the then province. The county museum in the regional capital, Karlstad, showcased the forest Finns in a regional commemorative exhibition in 1939, and the Finnish history was included in the permanent exhibition in 1957. When the new museum building, designed by the respected architect Cyrillus Johansson, opened in 1929 it had a large fresco on the atrium façade dedicated to the forest Finns that showed central features of their culture: wooden buildings, slash-and-burn farming, hunting, fishing, and the smokehouse (ria) (Berggren 2017, 14–18).

The second period of articulation coincided with a more general regionalization of cultural heritage and identity in Sweden, with hembygd as a key concept, and the formation of regional museums, such as the one in Karlstad, as an important feature (Sundin 1994; Arcadius 1997). This meant a more comprehensive recognition of the Finn forest people and their culture as part of the official regional identity and its narrative. The second period of articulation also coincided with the terminal downturn of the Finn forest subsistence economy. Keyland’s documentation had the express aim to ‘rescue’ the still living heritage before it was gone from practice and memory. He wrote to the Director of Nordic Museum, Artur Hazelius, ‘I will “come in the eleventh hour”’, as he was about to start his long mission as a collector for the museum: ‘the race is being Germanized, their language dies’.⁵ His words drew on the then common distinction between German or Nordic ‘race’, typically considered as superior, and the Slavic and Fenno-Ugrian groups, including Finns (Ripley 1899; de Gobineau 1967 [1853–1855]. According to contemporary ideas, elevation to the ‘German race’ might have meant a loss of indigenous ‘culture’, including language. The last families left their traditional Finn forest homesteads in the mid-20th century, and the very last from the Ritamäki site in 1964 (Värmlands museum 2020a). In this phase, a new hegemonic narrative took over. The region was now also beginning a downturn in a period of rapid urbanization and modernization. The abandoned Finn forest homesteads were only the most pronounced and terminal loss that many parts of the region and the entire northern parts of Sweden were facing (Sörlin 2019). The loss came early too, heralding structural change that would be inflicted on many marginal communities.

Only in the 1970s and 1980s, a very different set of actors appeared in a third period of articulation. The regional entrepreneurs on both sides of the border did not pursue new scholarly work along the lines of their predecessors. Instead, they identified in this ‘new discovery’ an instrumental value in the forest Finn culture, this time related to its potential for endogenous regional identity formation and economic development. This was in a sense the reverse side of the economic downturn and had many parallels in Europe in the latter half of the century. Self-reliance and tourism were key elements of the development strategies and local, regional and national (later EU) levels of governance worked together to stimulate regional development initiatives (Andersson 1985).

When tourism in general grew, so too did wilderness and recreational tourism, resulting in walks, camping, canoeing, and other outdoor activities. Demand started to grow for creative uses of local assets in culture and nature, preferably in combination and especially if activity and mobility could be part of the usefulness of the heritage that had always been a major component of tourism. The two trends (i.e. the growth in tourism and the growing demand for creative uses of local assets) coincided with an economic downturn in Sweden in the early 1990s and a growing tendency to assign unemployed workers to tasks such as clearing walking paths. Thus, the new discovery of the Finn forest heritage was propelled by external demand but it required a lot of creativity among those that worked with the actual reformation of the old heritage and wanted to turn it into new and meaningful functions and give it a much more lively and energetic communication. The value previously acknowledged in museums and textbooks was now changing places: it was articulated and used in the region itself and experienced and to some extent recognized as worthy of protection by walkers (Klepp 1998). Its institutional form and agency changed, although the previous prestige and the knowledge it rested on remained important as a legitimizing element and a provider of narratives and documentation.

The development was not unique. The 1990s brought a rise of rural-peripheral tourism projects in many countries, and recreational trails were an important part of such initiatives (e.g. Butler et al. 1998). Ironically, the recreational walking trails and outdoor life, not least in Sweden, had grown in parallel to the industrialization of society and partly to counter some of its less beneficial impacts on public health (e.g. Kilander 2008; Svennsom 2018). By the 1990s, industrial decline and rising unemployment in rural areas once again prompted restoration initiatives for recreational walking and trails, although with a much clearer focus on tourism and entrepreneurship than earlier. For the Finn forest trail, such opportunities were seized in the form of European Union Interreg projects and other similar forms of support for tourism development. Even if the individual actors behind the Finn forest trail had their own motivation, they acted in a political, geographical and economic context that helped the realization of their ideas.

Part of the new version of the Finn forest was the mobility landscape that had played a minor role in the first articulation. In the age of physical activity and tourism, trails and places for rest and accommodation became essential. The landscape gained status as having a holistic element that connected the different sites and homesteads. The connections materialized and were now in primarily articulated through the paths, not only connecting past sites of heritage but also offering form, rhythm, and pace to the cultural landscape that could fit with the demands and desires of the growing numbers of visitors. This third and still ongoing period of articulation, which started in the 1980s, put paths and mobility in a much more central position. In this phase, articulation is being carried out through at least two different kinds of work: intellectual work (including inventory, fact finding and/or research, reconceptualization, holistic integration, re-articulation, map-making and narrating) on the one hand, and entrepreneurial work (including assembling of actors and resources, collaboration with, for example, agencies, businesses, and local communities, and communication) on the other hand.

All the activities to articulate the mobility heritage of the Finn forest can be interpreted as a case of environing technologies at work, including elements of environmental protection, conservation, restoration, and learning from settler communities. This third period of articulation might best be understood in terms of a quite efficient method or technology to conceptually, functionally, and ultimately ecologically transform a landscape and a region. Without this kind of articulation, it is likely that other economic and administrative forces would have been and still might be given more prominence in the processes that shape the landscape. Although the Finn forest trail is unique, as it is transnational and unusually comprehensive, the heritage dimensions of trails and walking have been articulated more generally in recent years. In Norway, pilgrimage trails such as the St. Olavsleden (comprised of number of paths) and various historical walking trails are marketed to both domestic and international tourists (Øian 2019; Riksantikvaren 2021). The growth in recreational walking in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. Skriver Hansen et al. 2021) further accentuates the status of trails as part of ambitions to promote public health, tourism and recreation. If heritage status is a signal that something is of importance for society, then such a development could potentially pave the way for a more explicit ‘heritagization’ of the trails themselves.

Conclusions – pathways to the trail

In this article, we have distinguished between paths and trails. We argue that paths are formed through vernacular mobility practices and as such they are dependent on continuous use. A path leading to church or to school will eventually cease to exist if no one walks along it. The Finn forest was, and to some extent still is, full of such paths, many of which were never named, appeared on a map, or were known to visitors in the past. While similar to paths in the very basic meaning that they are lines (Ingold 2016) in the land where people walk, trails are quite different. A trail is not only a manifestation of geographical connectivity but also a beaten track that has been moved by environing and articulation work into a different sphere, through signs, maps and nomenclature, managed and maintained for, rather than by, walking.

Environing can be material or conceptual, or both, which is often the case (Sörlin & Wormbs 2018). Thus, the environed trails and trailscapes will ‘become’ through elaborate processes unfolding in time (Ingold & Pálsson 2013; Lien 2015). With such a perspective, trails are nature transformed into culture – situated in nature, refusing to abandon their belonging in both (or in either). They are also ‘environment’ in the sense of a man-made artefact-nature – the result of environing. Adopting the idea of paths and trails as central to mobility heritage is at the same time an effort to expand on what paths and trails (and signs, bridges, lodges, camp sites, and other trail elements) are. Both paths and trails are made, but not in the same way. While paths are made by walking, trails are constructed and articulated in more complex ways and with strong elements of instrumental intentionality, far beyond the connectivity itself. These can range from fostering nationalism to strengthening local economies and to enhancing public health. Through the environing work, they have become integrated in the realm of human reflection and governance – in essence, a political space and part of a transformative political geography.

To some extent, the phases of articulation and layers of history that we have analysed are reflected in our different types of sources. The first and second phases of articulation were mainly based on publications of and about the leading scholars active in the Finn forest area. The third phase has been analysed based on archival sources from the 1980s and 1990s, in combination with interviews. Our autoethnographic field walks allowed us to analyse how all these phases were articulated along the trail and how they have become manifest in the landscape. Our methodological approach and rather eclectic source material has been a key to identify and analyse these three phases of articulation of the Finn forest as a landscape for walking. We also found that assembled together, these layers form a wider ‘trailscape’ (Fagence 2017), stretching spatially, as well as temporally through the Finn forest area.

The example of the Finn forest demonstrates how paths can become pathways to the past, ultimately turning into trails. The physical inscription of footprints amassed over time has dimensions of ‘territorializing practice’ and influences how a landscape is understood (Brown 2015). The material remains of the footprints function as an archaeology of walking and at the same carry functions and meanings that have been attributed to them throughout their existence. Hence, the past they can guide us to is the situations that occurred when humans used the paths, deliberated over them, or turned them into new modes of existence such as the Finn forest heritage-making process since the early 1980s years. Different aspects of history have been articulated, from the 19th century ‘discovery’ of the Finn forest as a specific geographic and cultural area, via the framing of the Finn forest trail in the late 20th century, to the ongoing attempts to apply for world heritage status. All of them are essential for today’s trailscape. Hence, this trailscape contributes to spatial integration, alongside other types of cross-border mobility such as commuting (Möller et al. 2018), although the latter has been severely challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions. The post-pandemic uses of the Finn forest trail will continue to draw on multiple layers of history, and multiple articulations of it as heritage. Our own effort to argue for the absorption of paths into new ‘uses of heritage’ (Smith 2006), including adoption into the realm of official acknowledgement and status as trails to serve for their maintenance and protection, might add to the articulation of the Finn forest as a landscape for walking. As a conclusion, we suggest that it might be useful to talk and think of trails as ‘continuous heritage’, a layered understanding of the past that is constantly remade. This is not a past reserved for paths and trails only – they are just a useful lead.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) for funding the research for this article. We also express our gratitude to the reviewers and editors of Norsk Geografisk Tidskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Finally, we wish to thank local informants in the Finn forest border region.

Notes

1 Morokulien is an area spanning Eidskog Municipality in Innlandet County, Norway, and Eda Municipality in Värmland County, Sweden.

2 The three co-authors of this article are responsible for all translations of quotations into English.

3 A leaflet titled ‘Finnskogleden’ by Kongsvinger kommune, 1990, seemingly aimed at potential visitors and tourists (source: Finn forest trail archive in the Norsk Skogfinsk Museum, Svullrya)

4 ‘Finnskogleden – en vandring i grenseland’ by ARKO-regionen & Gruetunet museum, 1992 (source: Norsk Skogfinsk Museum archives)

5 N. Keyland’s letter to Artur Hazelius dated 16 May 1898 (source: Nordiska museet archive, Stockholm, Sweden)