SHARE TRAVEL NEWS: January 2018

The High Coast is a world heritage site for its unique and scenic land and seascape and its distinctly red Nordingrå granite cliffs and rocks.

From the sea shore, the path had been rising steadily up the hillside, twisting and turning through thick forest, when suddenly it opened up on to a vast clearing of cobble-sized stones. I had spent the previous hour sweating up the mountainside, yet it felt as if I were back on the coast, staring across a rocky beach at low tide.

I wasn’t too far wrong: this was in fact an ancient seabed, one of many bizarre features of the Swedish High Coast – in the Gulf of Bothnia, the topmost part of the Baltic Sea, 500km north-east of Stockholm. It’s a wild and largely unsettled landscape of flat-topped mountains, dense evergreen forests, lakes and inlets that is, quite literally, on the rise.

During the most recent ice age, this region was crushed by a 3km-thick layer of ice. But when this began to melt 9,600 years ago, the land began to rise in a process called isostatic rebound. It has been growing at a rate of 8mm a year ever since, leading to an ever-evolving archipelago gradually emerging from the sea. It was declared a Unesco world heritage site in 2000. ....... keep reading ..... http://bit.ly/2DEnaUV