YTTRE TISTLARNA

The lighthouse on Yttre Tistlarna was built in 1906 and is the last of the former generation of manned lighthouses on the west coast. It stands on an old channel which was once one of the most important in Northern Europe. The mariners of older times kept to the coast, preferably inside the islands.

As long as three thousand years ago they already had good navigation marks there to sail and row by, the Bronze Age burial mounds that stood out against the sky. They are so well positioned that over the years many of them have been improved and made sharper and higher.

Cairns and beacons are the oldest seamarks in Sweden. When the big fat Hanseatic cogs of the Middle Ages found their way up towards Norway, they had to look for deeper water, sometimes outside the islands. The beacons and fires of the night were few and far between: Falster from the thirteenth century, Kullen, Anholt and Skagen from the sixteenth and Nidingen from the seventeenth.

In bays and sounds where there was enough depth and a bottom for an anchor they waited for the dawn, or for the storm to blow itself out or the fog to rise. Such places became internationally known. These harbours were indicated on charts and in the maritime literature of the sixteenth century by the great Dutch seafarers.

Today the hostelries, pilot stations, chapels and landing stages have gone. But the iron rings to which ships were moored, the dates, ownership marks, place names and, above all, compass roses are still there on the bare rocks. The compass roses could give the direction to the nearest harbour.

The Blue Skagerrak Route begins at Yttre Tistlarna. Follow it and make landfalls in history all the way up to Tjurholmen.