Every design for Ruukki

Ruukki is known as the oldest industrial village in northern Finland. The story starts with Pietari Brahe, who set up a potash factory beside the rapids of Ruukinkoski, using birch ash carried down the river Siikajoki. A sawmill and a brewery followed, and the river spent generations carrying logs to the mills.

Today Ruukki is the administrative centre of the municipality of Siikajoki, and industry is still its backbone. Sawmills and timber firms, engineering workshops and an insulation maker share a business park, and the Ruukinkoski hydropower plant turns the rapids into electricity. What makes the place unusual, though, is its pair of riveted iron bridges, one on each side of the municipal office, left over from the building of the Ostrobothnia railway. Trains between Oulu and Seinäjoki still stop at the station, and in summer families head for the beach at Hietamaan uimaranta.

The older of the two bridges now carries walkers and cyclists and goes by the name Huokausten silta, the Bridge of Sighs. Stand in the middle on a spring evening and you hear the rapids below, the same water that has powered Ruukki since the very beginning.