Disorientation: Walking Through Fire Places

I didn’t know what was happening at first. The ground shook and I heard a deep, low, rumble from beneath my feet. I moved quickly beneath a tree, thinking somehow it might offer me safety. I was, I thought, quite alone in this isolated patch of forest, walking in the early Sunday morning after a night spent in a forest cabin. This was a forestry area, so I reasoned it must have been a logging truck thundering down one of the forest roads that criss-crossed the landscape. But the incident startled me. I suddenly felt disorientated, as if all the assumptions I had about this place were now wrong. A few hours later my boyfriend messaged me and asked if I had felt the earthquake, its epicentre not too far from my location.

The earthquake brought two things into sharp relief: one, that expectations of what a place is can easily be shattered by the arrival of the unexpected; two, that things happen underground that we often cannot see,[1] but they are just as much a part of a place as the things we can. Visible landmarks are key aspects of place: they lodge themselves in our memories and allow us to navigate, to orient ourselves within it. This is particularly important when walking through a forest of identical spruce or pine, which I had been doing that Sunday morning for fieldwork within my project on prescribed burning in Nordic forests. Plantation forests produce ecosystems of very low biodiversity, and the culture of fire suppression modern forestry pursues means that species that need fire to survive are absent. Prescribed burning seeks to return fire to the forest in a controlled way, and Norway’s first experiment with the practice took place in Finnskogen in 2025. My own return to Finnskogen on a sunny but cold April weekend in 2026 was not to monitor the success of the experiment, but rather to think about what a narrative of fire as biodiversity would do to Finnskogen as a place, and what other understandings of place might be supplanted as a result. To adequately reckon with Finnskogen’s tangled patchwork of material and cultural traces,[2] I developed a method of disorientation as a way of understanding place[3]and my walk through Finnskogen put this method into practice.

Finnskogen’s Cultural Fire History

Disorientation is not merely a directional response; it is also an epistemological one, in which a different story of fire emerges through Finnskogen’s cultural history. In the sixteenth century, a group of people from Finland moved to the west of Sweden, at the time covered in a dense forest that was not considered valuable. They were called Skogfinner, or Forest Finns, and they practiced a type of slash-and-burn agriculture called svedjebruk.[4] Svedjebruk involved clearing a patch of forest, burning it, and then sowing a type of rye whilst the ashes were still warm. This rye, called svedjerug, was extremely prolific, and the Forest Finns were able to settle in the Swedish forest and incrementally spread into Norway. But as the burgeoning forestry industry began to value the forest for timber, and Forest Finn culture and language were suppressed, their way of life dwindled. Svedjebruk was banned in 1647, and although it continued illegally into the 1900s, it was no longer a viable farming strategy. Forest Finns, over time, became fully Norwegianised, and the forestry industry remains responsible for the vast tracts of forests that spread across Finnskogen. 

The cultural history of Finnskogen is retained in some visible landmarks: old forest farms, some of them incredibly well preserved, still dot the landscape, whilst place names betray a Forest Finn heritage – Mellombråten (between the burn), Samualsbråten (Samual’s burn), Barkebråten (the bark burn), Brennberget (the burn hill), and so on. But there are other traces of a Forest Finn history that are not so visible. If you were to dig down into the soil, perhaps at Mellombråten, you would likely find charcoal and pollen. It would not be possible, without scientific analysis, to find out what exactly that charcoal and pollen was, but it would not be a stretch to imagine this was charcoal from svedjebruk, and that the pollen was an indicator of svedjerug.[5] It is similarly likely that charcoal and pollen such as this can be found all across Finnskogen, layered over with perhaps centuries of soil, but destined to remain there for centuries more (pollen and charcoal do not degrade). These more invisible elements of Finnskogen’s fire history are just as important as its visible elements when it comes to understanding place.

What becomes classed as cultural heritage tends to be tangible, visible, and anchored to a particular date and time period: something that can be placed in a museum. These cultural heritage forms orient Finnskogen’s history of slash-and-burn agriculture to a particular place and time, and as such relegate it to the past. 2025’s prescribed burn in Finnskogen does not aim to ignore the region’s cultural history of burning, but it necessarily overwrites it by promoting the idea that there is a particular way a forest should look. Often this idea comes into conflict with other ideas; that of the forestry industry, for example, that values the forest as an economic resource. Mostly, however, it sits awkwardly alongside other aspects of place that are less easily quantified or made visible as heritage forms. Recognising other fire histories – such as that of the Forest Finns – as enduring and living aspects of the forest requires becoming more attuned to these less visible traces: a process of disorientation made possible by walking.

Disorientation as Praxis

My walk began on a trail called the Finnskogleden: a hiking route of 240 km that periodically veers into Sweden and back into Norway, representing the cross-border nature of the area. Whilst I had originally planned to complete the trail, in practice my journey was a collection of piece-meal walks, diversions, circling back on myself. I switched direction and went off the path if there was something on the map I wanted to see, or had been recommended to me to visit by the people I would frequently divert my journey to meet. This way of walking requires abandoning preconceived notions of hiking stages, distance, trail maps, and accommodations. It reacts to environment rather than moving seamlessly through, or atop, it.[6] It requires letting go – at least a little bit – of the fundamental rule of walking: that you should always be able to orient yourself.

Disorientation does not require getting lost; rather, it is an invitation to resist linear progression, be that the gradual layering of soil or the chronology of time, or even the movement through space. Disorientation is not merely something that happens to you, it is a response and a relation with environment, and this can only occur through the slow and embodied process of walking. Checking maps when you have lost the trail reveals the Finnish place names that still characterise hills and valleys; you must sleep in an abandoned farm you have recently learnt is haunted; a clearing of trees makes you wonder if it had once been a rye field. It is through becoming disorientated that normally hidden aspects of place come into view, and overwritten histories are made legible.

Another disorientation: as I was walking along yet another logging road with no discernible landmark, I saw a paw print. This paw print was deep and large, bigger than my palm. There were no accompanying human footprints, nothing to suggest this was just a large dog. Wolves in Norway have been systematically persecuted for centuries, but their last remaining stronghold is the forests of Finnskogen. Forest Finns believed it was bad luck to call a wolf by its name, so gave it nicknames: gråtass (greypaw), gråbein (greyleg), Hiisis (the forest god of wild animals) hund (Hiisi’s dog). Whilst I knew that actually meeting a wolf was unlikely, the paw print made me suddenly hyper aware of my surroundings, the silence of the forest, and my possible status as prey: a sense of disorientation that realigned my perception of Finnskogen. Once again, as with the earthquake, I moved off the path deeper into the forest, and took a different direction.

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[1] Rachael Squire and Klaus Dodds, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Subterranean Geopolitics,” Geopolitics 25, no. 1 (2020): 4–16.

[2] Jon Anderson, Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces (Routledge, 2021).

[3] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006).

[4] Per Martin Tvensberg, Svedjebruk (Grue Finnskog: Norsk skogfinsk museum, 2010).

[5] Ingun Holm, “The Forest Finns of Norway and Sweden and their use and conception of the landscape,” in Utmark. The Outfield as Industry and Ideology in the Iron Age and the Middle Ages, eds. I. Holm, S. Innselset Innselset, and I. Øye (Department of Archaeology, University of Bergen, 2005), 171-179.

[6] Camilla Brudin Borg, Hanna E. Åberg, Roger Norum, Suzanne Österlund-Pötzsch, and John Martin, eds., One by Walking: Transdisciplinary Mobilities and Methodologies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).

*Cover image: Looking out over Finnskogen. Photo by author, 2026.

[Cover Image description: A large expanse of spruce forest taken on a sunny day.]

Edited by Enaiê Mairê Azambuja; reviewed by Evelyn Ramiel.