Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Vemdalen
The road from Åsarna to Funäsdalen is especially worth travelling, crossing the provincial
border back into Härjedalen and following the ancient track used by the region's merchant
farmers through the
Vemdalsskalet pass
. Bound for
VEMDALEN
, the road descends sharply
and offers clear views of another of Härjedalen's mighty peaks: the impressive sugarloaf-
shaped
Sånfjället
mountain (1278m) to the southwest. Back in the 1900s the forest and
fell terrain around the mountain was declared a national park in an attempt to maintain its
delicate ecosystem - with great success, since the park is now a favourite habitat for
Härjedalen's bear population.
The church
Once through the pass and down into Vemdalen, you'll find a stunning octagonal
wooden church
right by the roadside in the centre of the village. Built in Rococo style
in 1763, eight years after its separate onion-domed bell tower, the church supports a
deep two-stage roof and a central onion turret. Inside, the work of a couple of local
craftsmen is proudly displayed: the pulpit, with its bowing cherrywood panels, was
made in Ljungdalen, whilst the altar was carved by a carpenter from Klövsjö.
Östersund
Sitting gracefully on the eastern shore of the mighty
Storsjön
(Great Lake) about
halfway up Sweden,
ÖSTERSUND
is the only large town along the Inlandsbanan (until
Gällivare inside the Arctic Circle, another 750km further north), and is well worth a
stop. Östersund's
lakeside
position lends it a seaside-holiday atmosphere, unusual this
far inland, and it's an instantly likeable place. In addition to the youthful buzz about
town, there's an air of commercialism here, too (lacking in most other inland towns),
since Östersund is also a centre for the engineering and electronics industries, as well as
the Swedish armed forces, who maintain two regiments here. However, it's for its lake
monster
, the Storsjöodjuret, that Östersund is perhaps best known.
8
Brief history
King Gustav III gave the town its charter two hundred years ago with one thing in
mind: to put an end to the lucrative trade that the region's merchant farmers carried
out with neighbouring Norway. Travelling over the mountains, they bartered and
sold their goods in Trondheim before returning back to the Storsjön region.
Although rival markets in Östersund gradually stemmed the trade, it took another
century for the town's growth to really begin, heralded by the arrival of the railway
from Sundsvall in 1879.
Jamtli open-air museum
Museiplan; a 15min walk north from the centre along Kyrkogatan • Late June to late Aug daily 11am-5pm; late Aug to late June closed
Mon • 240kr for a two-day visit •
W
jamtli.com
Most visitors head straight for Östersund's top attraction,
Jamtli
, home to the beautiful
Överhogdal Viking tapestries
and an
open-air museum
which expertly - and enjoyably
- brings to life Östersund from years past. It's full of people milling around in
nineteenth-century costume, farming and milking much as their ancestors did.
Everyone else is encouraged to join in - baking, tree felling, grass cutting and so on.
The place is ideal for children, and adults would have to be pretty hard-bitten not to
enjoy the enthusiastic atmosphere. Intensive work has been done on getting the settings
right: the restored and working interiors are authentically gloomy and dirty, and the
local store, Lanthandel, among the wooden buildings around the square near the
entrance, is suitably old-fashioned. In the woodman's cottage (presided over by a
bearded lumberjack, who makes pancakes for the visitors), shoeless and scruffy
youngsters snooze contentedly in the wooden cots. Beyond the first cluster of houses is
