20.07 – Lake Vättern
27 August 2020 | Picture: Egret at Vadstena Castle
Our convoy was due to cross Vättern the following morning and continue down the canal, but we and Stormhatt had opted to spend a couple of extra days on the lake. We spent the first night next to Karslborgs Fästning (fortress) at Stenbryyggans Gästhamn, named after the old stone jetty that protects it. The marina is privately run by a club and has limited facilities, but there are a few spaces for visitors and payment is taken in the chandlery. It is in a superb location, and there is a supermarket 10 minutes walk away.
Sweden had ceded Finland and Åland to Russia after a war in 1909 and was worried about the vulnerability of its capital Stockholm. It spent most of the following century building the fortress here as a second line of defence, an alternative seat of Government and home for the royal family. It is monumental in scale and, although it was outdated by the time it was finished, it is still in use as a training establishment for the army. Much of the grounds are free to walk around by the public, and a museum and chapel can be visited for a fee. It appears that nothing was stinted on the architecture and construction of the stone, brick and timber buildings. Apart from the 678 m long Reduit, these include officers' quarters, depots and a hospital. There is even a building constructed in 1840 using the "experimental method of stone and lime mortar cast in timber moulds". (I presume they mean in-situ concrete.) If you follow the woodland walk around the peninsular beyond the barracks you will encounter the King's Villa and Vanäs Lighthouse. The latter was built in 1892 as an eight sided timber pyramid. At all of 11m high, it is the highest on Lake Vättern.
Lake Vättern is considerably deeper than Vänern at up to 98 m, about the same length but only 20 km wide. On a chilly, overcast afternoon, wearing Guernsies, oilies and sea-boots, we set off across the lake against a moderate but extremely shifty easterly breeze. Dark rain clouds swept across the lake both to the north and south of us. Playing the shifts and several tacks later, the wind died, so it was back to the engine. As we got closer to the ancient city of Vadstena, we could make out spires, towers and expansive roofs projecting above the ordinary buildings. We berthed that evening in a moat! Yes, that's right, the moat of a castle, which is connected to the lake and used as the gästhamn for the local town. We have parked Egret in some exotic places, but this was definitely a first for her.
Vadstena is a picturesque medieval town with cobbled streets and old timber buildings. There had been a royal palace there in the 13th century, but by the end of the 14th century it had been handed over for use as a monastery and convent. The abbey church is still in use but the other buildings have either been repurposed or left as ruins. A notice-board next to the lake shows the bathing temperature over recent years, and this August it was 20.6ºC, the highest for that month on record and 3º more than the average for the previous decade. July temperatures however have stayed pretty constant at around 18º over the same time, apart from an all-time high of 21.8º in 2018. I wonder if the nuns and monks went swimming, and what the temperatures were like then.
King Gustav Vasa ordered the construction of Vadstena Slott as a defensive castle in 1545, but his son, Johan III, remodelled it as a fine renaissance palace featuring large windows and ornate gables. Despite its use as a grain store and linen mill from the mid 1700s through to the 1800s, much has been preserved through recent sympathetic restoration. Part of the main building was taken over by Sweden's Provincial Archives in 1899, which has since been expanded into new wings cleverly built into the ramparts between the courtyard and the moat. Palace rooms open to the public feature original detailing and decorations, and contain an eclectic mix of artefacts ranging from carefully chosen pieces of period furniture and pictures to costumes and accoutrements from recent performances of opera held there. After our enjoyable day exploring the town and its buildings, we set off aboard Egret again and motored 8 miles up the coast to Motala, where we made fast between narrow finger piers in the Gästhamn above the next lock of the canal.
The headquarters of the Göta Kanal is at Motala, and I was pleased to see a plaque beside the front door commemorating the link with Scotland's Caledonian Canal and Thomas Telford. In the morning we walked down one side of the canal as far as Borenshult slussar, the flight of five locks that we would have to negotiate later in the day. We passed Motala Verkstad, the great engineering works that had been set up to build mechanical equipment for the canal. It went on to become the largest manufacturer in Sweden, producing bridges, ships, steam locomotives and much more. The company is still in business, operating out of several sites around Sweden. There are streets of company houses for employees with names such as Foremen's Terrace and Stamp Mill Terrace. Behind them is the Motala Ström, the river that drains Lake Vättern and flows beside the canal and through the same lakes for most of the way to the Baltic Sea.
After being somewhat daunted by the tier of locks, we stopped for an ice-cream at the only café not closed for the winter. The proprietress engaged us in a long discussion about the problems of covid in Sweden and the UK while the ice-creams melted in our hands. Heading back along the other bank, we passed a large dry-dock and, on a prominent site, the mausoleum of Baltzar Von Platen, the driving force behind the construction of the canal. During the course of our walk we noticed several clumps of weed in the water, and made a mental note to keep a look-out once we got under way. Little did we anticipate what a problem this was to become.