Involution
A Week Out
I’m just back from Cudgel War, a week-long SCA event in Finland. It was excellent, in part because of the event itself, in part because of the site, and in part because of the location and environment of the site. It’s that last bit I want to do some thinking about.
I’ve been in Finland a fair bit; more visits than any country except the UK, and that’s really only ahead because of last year’s travel there. I know its geology and its landscape moderately well, having watched it and read about it. I’ve seen more wildlife there than I have in any comparable time in Ireland. So I do, at some level, know the forests there.
I don’t know, though, that I’ve paid proper attention to them before. I’ve enjoyed them, and remarked on how they’re different to woodlands in Ireland and the UK (which are really not very different form each other, for the most part), but I don’t know that I was really making good comparisons. The fact that it’s very dry there this year does accentuate the differences, admittedly.
So: Finnish forests have bare rock. Granite, usually. Where there are cracks, there are lines of small vegetation growing in them, but there are also expanses of just bare planet sticking out. This is something which is rare in Ireland, and almost never in woodland, where soil generation happens pretty quickly.
Finnish forests are mostly evergreen, with birch, and everything goes straight up. This contrasts strongly with the mostly-deciduous woodlands here, and the frequent sideways motion of branches, the more so in sycamore and oak. Indeed, there are no oaks in Finnish forest, and that seems more and more distinctive to me the more I identify with them. But there are also no beeches, no ash, and only rowans to really represent broadleaves alongside the birches.
There is little undergrowth, except for blueberries, of which there are lots. Few ferns, no briars, not much grass. There are lichens and mosses in vast quantities, some of which look like forests in miniature themselves.
There are ants everywhere, although I’m pretty sure that’s more the case this year than in previous years. Mostly they were the black ones, two to three times the size of those we see in Ireland, and numerous enough to lay down visible trails between their hills and the other places they were interested in.
And you can never see terribly far, despite the clear understorey, because the landscape itself ripples and bumps and dips, so that there’s always another ridge of granite to block the view. Looking out over lakes (and sometimes fields, which are in the flatter areas by necessity) is the only time you get a long line of sight.
That’s a description of the differences I felt most strongly this time. Now to think about them some more.