Bornholm

You reach the beach at Dueodde, on Bornholm Island, through a pinewood, along a bleached boardwalk that stretches across reed beds where swallows skim between the pale blond rushes and the visitor is welcomed with a fanfare of gassy croaking from the frogs. The sand is as white as the six mute swans that are gliding past on a sea so calm it glimmers like a sheet of cerulean silk.

The sand here is said to be the finest on the planet and was once exported across the globe to fill hourglasses. When my daughter runs toward the clear water it squeaks beneath her bare feet like a pack of yipping puppies. The beach sweeps along for several miles ending at a hook of land topped by larches. It looks as if Robinson Crusoe might have graced it, though ideas of a tropical paradise end when you step into the sea. A dull ache that builds swiftly to a numb throb is a reminder that if the fishing boat chugging by, a flock of sea gulls bouncing noisily behind it like the tin cans tied to a newly-weds’ car, carried on in a straight line the first landfall it would make would be Kaliningrad in Russia.

In July it can get crowded here, but on a warm summer morning in May we share this great and beautiful expanse with half-a-dozen perambulating Danes and an Airedale terrier. When the dog barks excitedly, the swans rouse themselves and take off. They fly past honking, long necks undulating, wings beating the air with a jerky mechanical rhythm that suggests they may be powered by clockwork. Heading into the northerly breeze they pass so slowly you can see the reflection of the Baltic glinting in their dark, orange-ringed eyes.

Later we take a bird’s-eye view of the beach by climbing up to the top of the 40 metre tall lighthouse. By now the wind has picked up and is whipping in from the general direction of the Curonian Spit where the Teutonic knights once picked amber and is whistling over the tops of pine trees that were planted in the 19th century to put a stop to the shifting sands’ irritating habit of burying coastal farms and villages. As we begin the ascent of the lighthouse’s 197 steps a kindly Danish woman coming down, swaddled in a calf-length tunic of boiled wool, warns my daughter, ‘When you step out on the platform – hold on to your spectacles.’ And then she looks at me and says sternly, ‘And you should hold onto her’.

A plug of magma so small that no point on it is further than 30 miles from any other, it sits in the middle of the southern Baltic more or less equidistantly between Sweden and Germany. Though the island is nearer to Poland than Copenhagen it belongs to Denmark. Once an important Napoleonic naval base it was regularly shelled by the British Royal Navy. Nowadays it is merely bombarded with nicknames: ‘Scandinavia in a nutshell’, ‘the Pearl of the Baltic’, ‘The Isle of Nightingales’, ‘The Mediterranean of the North’.

Bornholm is the sunniest and driest place in the Baltic. The island has a commercial vineyard, figs and almonds grow in sheltered gardens and nightingales do indeed sing from their branches. More than the climate, though, it is the vivid colours that call to mind southern shores.

In the little fishing port of Svaneke half-timbered houses are painted in shades of ochre that mimic the colour of the faience pottery that was once the local speciality and now fills the windows of Bornholm’s many antique shops and lines the walls of Hjorth’s Fabrik Museet in the island capital of Ronne. The church is rich madder [it’s a dark red colour] and a nearby green lane runs between mustard-coloured houses with black timber and sky blue window-frames; burnt umber with dark green wood; pale cerise with black timber all set below pale orange pantiles. Pear and cherry trees, white with blossom, pale yellow of the narcissi sprouting around the bases of the silver speckled trunks huddle at the corners.

For Saturday’s market local craftspeople fill the town square with jewellery and coloured glass, skills that are a legacy of the Vikings. The Vikings - in the form of a local re-enactment society – have their own market in the orchard of a farmhouse near the inland town of Akirkeby. A smell of grilling meat and charcoal smoke waft between the apple trees. Men in baggy pantaloons are blowing glass and hammering silver bracelets. Women in fur-trimmed hats stuff flat sourdough breads with slices of pork and a Norse salad of shredded cabbage, onion, apple and hazelnuts dressed with sour cream and caraway. A blacksmith pounding on the blade of a battleaxe says, ‘Northumberland?’ when we tell him where in England we are from. I mention Lindisfarne and his eyes light up, ‘Yes, I know it. We raided it first in AD720’, he delivers a few more powerful blows to the glowing axe head, ‘though I have never been myself’.

There’s a less martial air to Svaneke’s market. A cream-coloured Victorian omnibus pulled by pale, chunky dray horses from Jutland is parked on the corner near a woman selling felted wool hats that wouldn’t look out of place on the crew of a longship. The acerbic equine niff mixes with the sour smell of mash from the nearby micro-brewery and the scent of cooking. One stall sells fried balls of fish and potato, flavoured with bay and fennel and accompanied with a dollop of sauce made from sour cream and mustard; another has sizzling fritters of apple puree and batter that come dusted with icing sugar and a ladleful of thin strawberry jam for dipping them in.

Inside Svaneke Bolcher, the town’s old-fashioned sweet-maker, a moustachioed Dane wearing asbestos gloves is throwing great coils of steaming yellow and red candied sugar over a steel hook and – sinews straining - heaving it into inch-thick strands. In the shop next door hundreds of different boiled sweets, gleaming like satin and shot through with the town’s symbol of a swan or Viking helmets, or roses, or striped like Regency wallpaper fill the jars that line the shelves. Their delightful appearance conceals a dark secret, however. The Danes have a maniacal –and frankly baffling - passion for salted liquorice with the result that any confection with a black stripe through it tends to taste less like a sweet than something an old-fashioned mariner might rub on his chest in preparation for an Arctic voyage.

Fifty yards away a fishing boat has docked in the harbour. The fishermen, rangy, blond and generally looking like they have stepped straight out of a Helly Hansen advert, load plastic trays of sea trout, dabs, cod and herring onto a mechanical conveyor belt. A big man with a stomach that wobbles like a pillowcase filled with porridge weighs the trays and then dumps shovel loads of ice on top of them. Locals gather round to buy fish and seafood, stretching across the gap between the boat and the quay to hand the fisherman their cash. Twenty kroners gets you a brace of wild Baltic salmon.

Some of the fish goes off to the processing plant at Nexo, Bornholm’s second largest city (population 3,800), but much finds it’s way round the corner to the local smokehouse.

Bornholm once exported so much smoked herring that in Denmark the delicacy is known as a bornholmer. The flask-like black-and-white ovens and chimneys of the smokehouses – most of them now obsolete - poke up all over the coastal villages. Outside the Svaneke smokery giant cannons bear the royal crest of Peter the Great. They point seawards warding off an invasion by a flotilla of eider and ruddy shellducks. Inside it’s part factory, part café. Periodically they open the blackened doors of the smoking chambers to reveal ranks of split and strung fish and send great clouds of woodsmoke billowing out across the serving counter and the coachloads of German pensioners sitting at scrubbed plank tables diligently filleting their herrings.

The fish here is hot-smoked on the day it is landed over smouldering alder logs for no more than a few hours, just enough time to change the skin of the fish from silver to gold. The taste is delicate, the fish – salmon, trout, eel and mackerel as well as the ubiquitous Baltic herring – moist and delicious. Salmon comes with a tangy salad of potatoes and spring onions bound together with dill mayonnaise, lightly pickled beetroot and bread sharp with rye – the classic, fresh, astringent flavours of the north. The herring is served with crunchy radishes fresh from the sheltered garden behind the smokehouse, chives and a raw egg yolk, a dish named - in honour of another fishing village further up the coast - as “Sunrise over Gudhjem”.

The best smoked herring in Denmark come from the island of Christianso a few miles off the cost of Bornholm. You can make a trip to the island from the harbour at Gudhjem on the post boat. The post boat is a red-hulled fishing smack complete with sail. Travelling on it is a reminder that a fishing boat is the nautical equivalent of a bicycle. Just as when you are cycling an apparently flat landscape is suddenly rendered mountainous, so the fishing boat makes you realise that there is no such thing as a calm sea. Even on a cloudless, still day the post-boat dips and pitches and spray flies over the side and delivers an invigorating slap to your cheeks.

Those who don’t fancy such treatment can gaze at the island from the upper floor of Ostelars Kirk a few miles inland. Set in a neatly plotted churchyard of raked pale gravel and yew trees, where the clipped myrtle hedges and pink and purple hebe flowers give off the exotic scant of the Alhambra, Ostelars Kirk is stocky, white and round with a conical wooden roof. Metal pinions stud the sides and there is something of Middle Earth about it.

Part place of worship part fortified stronghold, the building dates from the early twelfth century. The metre thick walls run in three concentric rings to form ramparts and an inner stronghold. The entry hall was once the armoury where those warriors attending mass could deposit their weapons. Inside a medieval frieze tells the story of Christ in a cartoon strip. The devil that watches the crucifixion has the curled horns of a ram and the leering, phallic-nosed face of popular local troll Krolle Bolle, who once brewed up mischief but now apparently spends most of his time making the kind of super-sweet whipped ice-cream (served dusted with drinking chocolate and granulated sugar and a chocolate coated marshmallow) that ensures small children do the job on his behalf.

Look eastward from the firing slits on the upper floor and you can see the round fort of Christanso. Face in any other direction and you are reminded that the scenery is just about the only thing that changes swiftly on Bornholm (the pace of life here is as slow as treacle, the local accent so old-fashioned just hearing it is enough to make other Danes smile). To the south are the wooded hills of the Paradisbakerne, where greylag geese waddle amongst the marshy ponds. Between them and the coast caramel and white cows graze in meadows speckled with daisies, buttercups and dandelions and great fields of yellow rape form a backdrop to the revolving canvas sails of an old windmill that still grinds flour.

Look north and you can follow the rocky coast that leads to the high granite cliffs of Helligsdomsklipperne. This is the site of The Bornholm Kunst Museet, a masterpiece of modern Danish design from the architects Fogh Folner. Intimately proportioned galleries lead off from an airy central aisle of polished granite, dove grey brick and raw steel. The museum carries work by the best of the Bornholm artists, though in truth you hardly need them, since every window you look through on Bornholm seems to frame a beautifully composed and executed scene.

In Svaneke, as in all small Scandiniavian towns, there is one roaring drunk treading the pavement warily as if expecting it too be suddenly tugged from beneath his feet. But on Bornholm even he is weaving his way unsteadily home at sundown, pausing occasionally to hurl a guttural oath at the circling gulls and by dusk the harbour at Svaneke is quiet save for the friendly put-put of the last returning fishing boat. The rest of the town’s small fleet have already returned. Bottle green sails and pale blue hulls, the tawny orange and black marker pennons of the cast nets line the quay. The breeze carries the scent of jasmine, woodsmoke and the sea. The light at the harbour mouth is winking green and across on the promontory to the south the beam of the lighthouse flashes yellow streaks across the petrol blue Baltic.