A country of forest and water with almost nothing else in it

What the country is made of

The geography of Finland is characterised by three things: its northern position, its landscapes of intermingled boreal forest and lake, and its low population density. It is the northernmost country in the European Union.

The land divides into three areas. Archipelagos and coastal lowlands along the Baltic, the Gulf of Bothnia and the Gulf of Finland; a slightly higher central lake plateau; and uplands to the north and north-east. Most of the population and almost all the agricultural resources are concentrated in the south, and northern and eastern Finland are sparsely settled.

The composition of the surface is the striking figure. Of the total area, 10% is water, 69% is forest, 8% is cultivated land, and 13% is everything else, which means roughly four fifths of Finland is trees and lakes.

Finland borders Sweden to the west, Norway to the north and Russia to the east, and the last two are outside the European Union, which makes Finland the union's north-eastern frontier as well as its northernmost member, and gives a country of five and a half million a strategic position it did not ask for.

How many lakes there actually are

Finland has approximately 168,000 lakes larger than 0.05 hectares, and 57,000 larger than one hectare, and the National Land Survey has run a research project to clarify what should count as a lake and therefore how many there are.

That a national mapping agency needs a project to define the word is the most Finnish fact available about Finnish geography. At the scale at which water and land interpenetrate here, the boundary between a small lake, a pond, a bog pool and a widening in a river is a matter of definition rather than of observation.

The lakes are shallow and irregular and they connect. They sit in depressions left by the ice sheet rather than in tectonic basins, which is why they are broad rather than deep, why they are strung together into systems that can be navigated for hundreds of kilometres, and why the shorelines are so complicated: an enormous perimeter for a modest volume of water.

The archipelago off the south-west coast is the extreme case of the same pattern. Tens of thousands of islands and skerries between the mainland and Åland form a maze that is navigable only by people who know it, and it has functioned as a defensive barrier, a smuggling route and a summer landscape at different points. The ferry chain that links the inhabited islands is treated as a road rather than as a service, and it runs year round.

The practical consequence is that Finnish settlement, transport and recreation all organise around water. Towns sit on lake shores, timber moved on lake systems before it moved by road, and the summer cottage on a lake is the standard Finnish domestic institution rather than a luxury, with several hundred thousand of them for a population of five and a half million.

What the ice and the shield left

The bedrock of Finland belongs to the Baltic Shield and was formed by a succession of mountain-building episodes in Precambrian time. The oldest rocks, of Archean age, are found in the east and north, and they are chiefly granitoids and migmatitic gneiss.

That is very old rock, very hard and very flat. Whatever mountains those episodes raised were worn away hundreds of millions of years ago, leaving a shield surface that the ice sheets of the last two million years then scoured it and covered it with their own deposits.

Everything visible at the surface is glacial. The eskers, long sinuous gravel ridges left by rivers running beneath the ice, are the most distinctive form, and they are used as road routes and as sources of drinking water. The drumlins, the erratic boulders, the smoothed rock outcrops and the entire lake system are all products of the same process, and Finland is one of the best places anywhere to see what a continental ice sheet does to the ground it passes over, because nothing has happened since to obscure it.

The land is also still rising. Freed of the weight of the ice, the crust is rebounding, fastest around the Gulf of Bothnia, which means the coastline is emerging: new land appears, harbours silt, and villages that were once on the sea find themselves inland. Finland is a country that is measurably getting larger.

What the climate does

Finland is far north and considerably milder than that position implies, because the Atlantic and the Baltic moderate what would otherwise be a Siberian climate at the same latitude.

The seasons are extreme in light rather than only in temperature. North of the Arctic Circle the sun does not set for weeks in summer and does not rise for weeks in winter, and even in the south the difference between a June day and a December one is around thirteen hours of daylight. That variation shapes the working year, the holiday calendar and a substantial part of the culture described elsewhere on this site.

Winter is long and reliable, particularly in the north and east. Snow cover lasts for months, lakes and parts of the Baltic freeze, and the infrastructure, the vehicle fleet and the buildings are all specified for it, which is why a Finnish winter causes very little disruption while a comparable one further south would stop the country for a week.

Summer is short and warm enough, and intensely used. The country empties into the countryside for July, and the compressed growing season means Finnish agriculture works with varieties bred for speed rather than yield, and farms this far north exist because of policy as much as because of climate.

What lives here

The forest is boreal, dominated by pine, spruce and birch, and it is worked almost everywhere. Finnish forest is a managed resource rather than a wilderness: stands have ages, plans and owners, and the country's largest environmental argument is about how much of it should be left alone.

The wildlife is northern and includes large mammals that most of Europe lost. Brown bear, wolf, lynx and wolverine all survive in the eastern and northern forests, and elk are numerous enough to be both a genuine road hazard and a managed hunting resource with a season and a quota.

Reindeer are semi-domesticated animals belonging to a herding economy in the north practised by Sámi and Finnish herders under a legal framework that gives grazing rights across a very large area. That system is the reason parts of Lapland are managed as pasture rather than as wilderness despite appearing to be neither.

The waterways carry the other half of the ecology. Migratory fish, the birds that use the coastal and lake wetlands, and the bog systems that cover a large share of the country make wetland the part of Finnish nature with the widest reach, and drainage for forestry in the twentieth century removed a great deal of it, which is now being partially reversed.

How the country is settled

Finland's density figure means very little on its own, because it averages a populated southern coastal strip against a north with almost nobody in it.

The population concentrates around Helsinki and the southern coast, along the western coast towards Oulu, and in the lake district cities. North and east of that, settlement follows rivers, roads and single industries, and a municipality in Lapland may cover an area larger than a small European country with a few thousand inhabitants in it.

The pattern has been consolidating for a century. Internal migration from the countryside to the towns and from the north and east to the south has run continuously since the war, accelerated by the loss of Karelia in 1944, which displaced a large population that had to be resettled elsewhere in the country.

What holds the periphery together is infrastructure that a market would not build. Road, rail, air, health and school provision across a very thinly settled territory are maintained as policy, on the argument that a country which allows its north to empty loses the ability to use it. That argument carries more weight since the eastern border closed, because an empty border region is a security question as well as an economic one.

What the bogs are for

A large share of Finland is peatland, and it is the least photographed and most consequential part of the landscape.

Bogs form where drainage is poor, rainfall exceeds evaporation and the ground is flat, all of which describe post-glacial Finland exactly. They accumulate partly decomposed vegetation over thousands of years, and the resulting peat is both a carbon store of enormous size and a fuel that Finland has burned.

Twentieth-century forestry drained an enormous area of it. Ditching bogs to grow trees converted peatland into forest across a substantial share of the country, which increased timber production and released carbon that had been locked up for millennia, and restoring drained peatland is now a live area of Finnish climate policy.

The remaining intact bogs are protected and are ecologically distinctive: acidic, nutrient-poor, and supporting plants and birds found in few other habitats. They are also, for anyone walking across one, an extremely effective obstacle, which is why Finnish military history is partly a history of terrain that armies could not cross and defenders could.

Where the borders have moved

Finland's present shape is not its historical one. After the Continuation War it lost major land areas to the Soviet Union under the Moscow Armistice of 1944, including Karelia in the south-east and the Petsamo corridor that had given the country an Arctic Ocean coast.

Finns describe the outline of their country as a figure of a one-armed human, and the national personification, the Finnish Maiden, is identified with it closely enough that the country can be referred to by her name. The north-western projection between Sweden and Norway is called the Arm even in official contexts.

After 1944 the figure was said to have lost her other arm, along with a hem of her skirt. That is a national loss expressed as a change to a body, and it is a more direct statement of what the territorial settlement meant than any figure for square kilometres would be.

The border that resulted runs 1,300 kilometres, and it is the longest external border the European Union has with Russia. Its closure has changed the economics of eastern Finland completely, and a frontier that was a trading and transit route for decades is now a line with almost nothing crossing it, and the towns that lived off the traffic have no replacement for it. Finland: history takes up how it came to be where it is and Finland: economy what the closure has cost.