Every design for Tammela

Ever stood at the edge of one of the largest bogs in southern Finland? In Tammela you can, at Torronsuo, one of two national parks in the municipality alongside Liesjärvi. This old Tavastian parish holds a surprising amount of open country for somewhere so close to the towns of the south.

Mustialan maataloushistoriallinen museo, the agricultural history museum at Mustiala, tells the farming side of the story, for the west of Tammela opens into the fields of the Loimijoki valley. The rest is the Tammela upland, a lean, thinly settled country of moraine and drumlins with eskers such as Kaukolanharju in Saari park and Kyynäränharju in Liesjärvi National Park. The village of Tammela first appears in documents in the fifteenth century, a Roman denarius has turned up in its soil, and the industrial community of Forssa belonged to the parish before setting out on its own.

The name is usually traced to the oak, tammi, even though wild oaks barely reach this far north; they thrive here as yard trees all the same. Wear Tammela for the fields around the Mustiala museum and the long, quiet eskers beyond them.