Cast your eye over the modern map of Europe and it is easy to pick out the major highways that are the arteries of continental road traffic. There are the autoroutes that fan out from Paris, the autobahns that link the Rhine valley with the Danube basin and the Po valley, and there are those great international roads that span the entire continent: the E30 to Moscow and beyond, the E40 from Calais in northern France to the Chinese border.
These routes are all quite modern inventions, mere upstarts that have cast into the shadows the primary routes of history. Who now travels to Rome on the Via Francigena?
The Via Regia in central Europe (from the Rhineland to Silesia), England’s Watling Street (from Dover to the Welsh border) and a thousand other highways from history have been cached in our subconscious but count for little in modern cartography. That the ancient Route of St James (El Camino de Santiago in Spanish) still features in our mental maps of Iberia tells more of the power of destination marketing than ever it does about historical continuity.
But look around, and still you will find the odd route from the past. The Ox Road (Hämeen Härkätie in Finnish) is a gem of an ancient route that threads its way across the countryside of southern Finland, linking two great fortress cities: Hämeenlinna and Turku. Both were linchpins in early Swedish settlement in Finland: the cathedral city of Turku, onetime capital of Finland, controlled access to the Baltic, while the castle at Hämeenlinna was important in securing the eastern forests where Sweden vied with Russia for supremacy.
Whether for the movement of garrisons, the spread of Christianity or for the fur trade, the Ox Road was for five hundred years Finland’s principal thoroughfare. It has echoes of the Santiago Camino — the Ox Road was well used by pilgrims walking the trail between the cathedral at Turku and the pilgrimage church at Renko which was dedicated to St James.
The Ox Road skirts the shores of lakes, crosses gravelly eskers, weaves round moraines and links some of Finland’s oldest settlements. Less than two hundred kilometres long, it makes an ideal route for easy cycling through a blissfully beautiful landscape. Most of the route is on minor roads, and short stretches are on well signed tracks. Much of the route can also be driven by car with just a few deviations necessary on local roads where the original Ox Road is only a cycleway.
Of course it is perfectly possible to disembark from the ship at Turku and follow the modern motorway to Helsinki. But we think that, as an introduction to Finland, the old Ox Road is a thousand times better.
