We booked a house in Sweden more or less at random. We knew we wanted to be somewhere north of Vimmerby, and within a couple of hours of Stockholm. The house we found by the Järleån river was about halfway between the towns of Nora and Lindesberg, less than an hour’s drive north of the university city of Örebro. We made that drive for the first time through driving rain, the windscreen wipers working overtime to keep the street ahead somewhat visible. What we could see, through the blurred windows and the spray of passing trucks was a landscape of thick forests, the occasionally rocky outcrop, and the knowledge that somewhere, amongst the trees, were hundreds of lakes, great and small.
What was not immediately clear was the influence on the landscape of centuries of mining, of forestry and iron production, that made this region – known as the Bergslagen – the resource-rich heart of Swedish industry. The Bergslagen is a place where Alfred Nöbel had a dynamite factory, with three-metre thick walls to survive an accidental explosion of the product, and which was used to excavate the earth. In the eighteenth century a quarter of all of Europe’s iron production came from hundreds of small foundries in the region. We met an English guy who is working in the region, and he told us that mines and mining remain an important industry, although the number of employees needed is down from its peak and many of the mines have been long abandoned and the scarred landscape returned to some form of nature.
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Under a Grey Sky 
