Västra Götalands län

The region changes character with every few kilometres of road. The coast is bare rock, polished smooth by ice, with narrow inlets where the houses are painted in the old Bohuslän reds and ochres and the boats sit low on their moorings. Gothenburg, the county's great port, is a different kind of place: a wide, windy city of trams, canals and brick warehouses, where shipyards and textile mills have given way to museums, cafés and apartments without quite losing their working edge. Inland, the land loosens. Around the great lake Vänern and across Dalsland the forest closes in, the roads become quiet, and small farms sit between stands of birch and spruce. Further east, the plains of Västergötland open up, with the flat-topped hill of Kinnekulle rising above fields and old stone churches, and the Göta älv falls at Trollhättan thundering through a town built around its power.

A good day can start in Gothenburg, with coffee in the old wooden quarter of Haga and a walk along the river before the traffic builds. From there the coast road runs north, and the landscape begins to change in the windscreen: first the scattered skerries, then the bare granite, then the sudden cluster of houses at a harbour. At Fjällbacka the streets climb steeply from the quay, and the smell of tar and diesel mixes with salt. Lunch might be a shrimp sandwich eaten on a wooden jetty, with gulls watching from the railings and the fishing boats coming in one after another. In the afternoon, turn inland. The road to Kinnekulle passes orchards and wide grey fields, and from the top the whole of Lake Vänern lies below, so big it looks more like sea than water. Evening light turns the lake pewter and then copper, and the only sound is wind in the grass.

What stays with you is how quickly the county moves from salt to fresh water, from city to forest, and how each place keeps its own pace. You leave thinking less about what you have seen than about the way the light lies on the granite, or the sound of a lock gate closing on a canal at dusk. The wish is simple: to go back, to take another road north from Gothenburg, and to let the coast, the lakes and the old towns in between keep unfolding at their own speed.