Surrounded by small wooded islands, we worked our way over deep clear water, swallows swooping low and hungry over our laden canoe. We considered two tree-covered gems before settling on our temporary home. An hour later, tent up and dinner bubbling gently over a healthy fire, an ambition had been fulfilled—canoe camping in one of the last great wildernesses in Europe. 

For British canoe campers, like my wife and myself, there are two problems: access and wilderness. Specifically, the lack of either. Though beautiful, our ever-manipulated countryside is busy making a living for someone and guarded jealously. Just to step off the roadside risks confrontation. Fields and woods are tough enough to enjoy, while our rivers and lakes are often all but unapproachable. Canoeists in overcrowded England and Wales can paddle on only three river miles in a hundred. It’s enough to make a paddler cry.

Camping is no easier. While limited opportunities do exist on crowded formal sites, to pop a tent up elsewhere, and close to water, is next to impossible. It’s the same story across much of Europe. The farther east or north you travel the better the wilderness opportunities, but one area stands out, combining beauty, space and unique access arrangements—Scandinavia. Mind you, if you want to use your own canoe, it’ll take some getting to. 

To reach our island escape, we’d driven across southern England, caught the Dover ferry to Dunkerque, and glimpsed France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark before finally crossing Öresund Bridge to Sweden. After pushing our canoe-crested, red van hard through a European tour, we were tired, but nothing could remove the grins from our faces. 

Our cheery anticipation was well founded. With a gorgeous coastline, 100,000 lakes and scores of beautiful rivers set within that vast amount of wilderness, we were in paddlers’ paradise. Adding to the glory is Sweden’s allemansrätten, literally translated to mean, “all man’s right.” 

This glorious institution, effectively a constitutionally protected right to roam, is enshrined within the very identity of Scandinavian countries, and offers some of the most mature attitudes to access found anywhere in the world. As long as you’re not causing damage, you’re free to walk, bike, ski or camp almost anywhere. 

The aim of the trip was simple. To head north along the central E45 that cuts through the heart of Sweden and experience far-flung Scandinavia for ourselves, paddling and camping as we went. The unaccustomed freedom felt good. With no need to worry about reservation schedules or plan routes in advance, we could paddle and pitch a tent wherever we liked. Few places in the developed world offer such a positive and invigorating outdoor experience.

Where do you paddle when you can go anywhere? Only to the most stunning landscapes, of course. Dropping from the jagged mountains that form an impressive natural border, we left Sweden to meet our first Norwegian fiord. Outside of Canada’s Newfoundland province, North America doesn’t offer paddling like this.

With vast towering cliffs diving deep into the ocean, these fiords also offer protection from bad weather, meaning an expedition beneath their craggy precipices is far too good to miss. We set about touching our canoe on as many fiords as we could, covering miles of spectacularly twisty Norwegian coastal roads in the process.

When we’d had enough of the coast (I suppose that’s possible), we turned back to Sweden, a landscape rich in heritage, where much of the roadway is accompanied by the flash of water between birch. 

Laisälven River soon caught our eye, at times narrow and swift, more often broad and serene. Struggling upstream one evening at the edge of a lively flow, we called it quits as our bow approached a low, bank-wide waterfall. Tired, we found the only flat land available for our tent, at the corner of a plot near a rare house. Days later, and still feeling guilty, I mentioned this suspected trespass to a fishing shop owner. He seemed surprised by my concern. 

“Allemansrätten,” he reminded me. I asked if we could really camp so close, mentioning that we must have been no more than 200 meters from the empty-looking house, technically in their garden. 

“No problem,” he replied, “even if lived in.” Pondering for a moment, he added that if the house was inhabited, perhaps anything less than 20 meters might be too close.

A long paddle upstream the next evening found us searching again. Flanking a gentle flow, the forest cover was so dense, the bank so boggy, we could find nowhere to place a tent for miles. Shoulders aching, we eventually came across a tiny space on firmer ground. Pulling ashore amidst a large shoal of hungry trout we pitched our tent, overlooked by towering conifers. 

It was only after striking camp next morning, rolling our tent away, that we found ourselves in a ring of stones. These marked a space cleared for a small Sami katta, a traditional tipi-like tent, and had just room enough for our own more modern version. It was hard to tell when the tiny clearing might last have been used, maybe not for decades. It left us with a sense of connection with the original Scandinavian inhabitants. 

Lake Sädvajaure, just short of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, offered an encounter with a more recent Sami home. We’d camped on a small island, our tent pitched on a narrow gravel beach amidst swathes of bleached dry firewood. The hours around midnight brought a stunning sunset, followed almost immediately by a clean, bright dawn. Not wishing to miss anything, we’d left the tent flap open, and as sunlight nudged another beautiful summer day across the groundsheet towards us, we set out across the lake to explore a waterfall that had roared like a distant jet engine through the brief night. Alongside the cascade, the bare poles of a modern katta sat hidden amongst the silver birch, awaiting the return of its owners with their easily transportable canvas or hide cover.

With the day already advancing fast, our eyes were now fixed on the horizon. Easing our canoe away from the shore, we left this simple home to its peaceful solitude, thoughts turned to the next lakeside camp of our own.

Freelance writer and photographer Tim Gent is a wilderness enthusiast. Living close to the sea, much of his canoeing takes place along protected sections of the English, Welsh and Scottish coast. facebook.com/t.h.gent. 

This article first appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

• You might crave it, but can you handle it? The longest anyone can bear Earth’s quietest place, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, is just 45 minutes. The chamber holds the Guinness World Record for world’s quietest place. 
• In social animals, silence can be a sign of danger. Some scientists suggest this is why people feel comforted by humming, talking to themselves or having the radio on when alone. 
• A silent note in a song is called a rest. Ironically, Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 hit, The Sound of Silence, features none. 
• After viewing the The Silence of the Lambs thriller, Martha Stewart broke up with actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, who played Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter. 
• Monks in some Buddhist traditions may opt to take vows of silence. Talking during sleep isn’t ground for dismissal. 
• Acoustic ecologists estimate that there are fewer than a dozen outdoor spaces in the United States where you can spend 20 minutes during the day without hearing noise from human activity. 
• Natural silence is hard to find. Breath is barely audible to the human ear at 10 decibels, rustling leaves are 20 decibels and birds chirp at about 45 decibels. The loudest thunderclaps can reach up to 120 decibels. 

This article first appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

It’s always fun when something old and floaty turns up in someone’s barn or boathouse. It’s so much better when it looks like it might be the missing link—a fabled canoe that will connect the heritage of canoes and kayaks perfectly. Just like evolutionists, any good canoe museum curator is always curious about a possible missing link. And a few months ago, I thought we had it.

When Graham Mackereth from Pyranha Mouldings in the U.K. wrote me with news of what he thought might be an Inuit-style kayak made out of birch bark, I was intrigued. The only boats related to what he described are Gwichin-style canoes from the Mackenzie River Delta, more kayak than canoe, with long bark decks at one or both ends.

From his little museum in England, Mackereth took photos of his curious craft and sent them along as proof of what he had. It was nothing like the canoes from the Mackenzie Delta, or anywhere else I knew for that matter. I wrote back suggesting that this could be the missing link we’ve been searching for.

Upon examining the photos, it was clear that this was not the bark of the paper birch, if it was bark at all. After years in the boating world, the heritage of most canoes that I come across is easy to recognize. This one had me stumped. On the strength of questions raised about its history, I decided to involve a few others in the quest.

Ken Lister, of the world-famous Royal Ontario Museum, was first to chime in. He observed that the rib ends of this hybrid craft are sandwiched between the inner and outer gunwales, which made him conclude that the boat was not Native-made. 

“This is a craft that celebrates the creative mind and proves migration theories,” Lister said. “It reminds me a little bit of the Piltdown Man, with the exception that this one is actually real and quite serviceable,” he added, referring to the early-twentieth century hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human.

Kayak aficionado, Vernon Doucett, joined the conversation next to say that, in his estimation, the boat was not made of bark, but maybe birch plywood. He suggested it might be built on a Ken Littledyke design, a British shop teacher who produced designs in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Ex-pat British canoe and kayak guru, Alan Byde, added his voice, arguing that the mystery vessel reminded him of a chap in the U.K. who used two thick sheets of marine plywood to make a kayak a bit like this. “My guess is the mystery craft was built by someone who knew the Bob Vardy method. Definitely not a Ken Littledyke,” he asserted.

Which brought Mackereth back into the conversation—he’d discovered that the boat is made of a veneer made to look like bark. Based on comments from the curators and on closer examination, he’d found screws and other decidedly non-Inuit features. “Now that I know for certain that it’s from my side of the pond, I’m left with the significant question of why,” he wrote.

One mystery solved and another created. The search continues.

James Raffan is the director of the Canadian Canoe Museum. For a full version of the comments from the international curators, and for more on the hunt for the missing link, see his blog at www.jamesraffan.ca.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.