‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’:
the intertwinedness of mobility and stillness in cottage living
MAJA LAGERQVIST
Lagerqvist, Maja (2013). ‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’:
the intertwinedness of mobility and stillness in cottage living. Fennia 191: 2, pp.
92−105. ISSN 1798-5617.
Along with urbanisation and modernisation, the use of second homes has increased in the Western world. This can be seen as part of the increasing mobility of people in society, but also as part of a search for stillness and escape from
modern urban society. Recently, scholars in geography and other disciplines
have argued that mobility and fixity are two sides of the same coin. This paper
aims to explore the complex, manifold and often paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility in practices of dwelling and seeking stillness in
a highly mobile society. It elaborates on how mobility and stillness, in both
space and time, are intertwined and mutually influence each other by analysing
second home usage of old cottages that formally were dwelling houses of poor
tenant smallholdings in Sweden. How do mobility and stillness exist and interact at these cottages and what parts do the cottages themselves have in this? This
is studied through interviews with cottage users regarding their daily life practices and encounters with history and materiality at the cottages. These cottages
are easily thought of as places of immobility where time has stood still. However, the paper shows that these cottages are places that continuously emerge
through entanglements of mobility and stillness and of present and past times.
The practices and experiences of mobility and stillness at the cottage are much
integrated in and directed by the cottages’ specific geography, history and materiality, and the activities and thinking of their users because of these characteristics. The users go to the cottage to be at a place where they, with the help of the
preserved materiality and history of the cottages, can feel rooted and still. At the
same time the cottages offer imaginary time travels and experiences of other
times and lifestyles.
Keywords: Sweden, mobility, stillness, interviews, second homes, materiality,
time-travelling
Maja Lagerqvist, Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, SE
106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: maja.lagerqvist@humangeo.su.se
Introduction
Picture yourself strolling down a small gravel road
in the seemingly uninhabited Swedish countryside. Further ahead, a small one-story cottage is at
the end of the road and you cannot help but appreciate its red painted wooden walls and aged
windows. Scents from the wild flowering garden,
with its roses, lilacs and old gnarly apple trees, fill
the air. The cottage is surrounded by old stone
walls, a small barn and small-scale fields, and fur-
URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa8287
DOI: 10.11143/8287
ther beyond it, the forest and a few more arable
fields and pastures frame the area. It is an old
dwelling-place run down by the hand of time, formerly home to the poor family of a tenant smallholder, a home that lacks hot running water. The
bone-chilling cold of winter and the dewy mornings of spring and autumn are meekly driven away
by the old wood-burning stove in the antiquated
kitchen, sparsely aided by one or two small radiators. Simple electricity has been installed to make
everyday life work. Besides that, the interior is kept
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‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’
old-fashioned and simple, guided by values of
simplicity, patina and heritage and a romantic idea
of the rural idyll, but also by the assets of money,
time and desire. Life at the cottage revolves around
quality time with family and friends, relaxing from
work and urban life and keeping the old, worn and
ever decaying, yet still picturesque, cottage and its
garden in shape. This picture that you now have in
front of you serves as an illustration of the places
where many Swedes spend, or dream of spending,
their summer holidays. Today, these cottages have
strong idyllic connotations and great symbolic values connected to national identity and dreams of
summer holidays, stillness and the “good old
days”.
Along with urbanisation and modernisation, the
use of second homes has increased in Sweden, as
in many other parts of the Western world (Löfgren
1999). The trend can be seen as part of the increasing mobility of people, things and information in
modern society (Sheller 2011) but also as part of a
search for stillness and an escape from that society
(Halfacree 2011). This paper aims to provide a
much needed engagement with the complex,
manifold and often paradoxical interrelationship
between mobility and immobility in practices of
dwelling and seeking stillness in what is often experienced as a highly mobile and rapidly changing
society. This is done by exploring practices connected to movement and stillness at old cottages
used as second homes in Sweden. Two questions
guide the analysis. How do mobility and stillness
exist and interact at these cottages? What parts do
the cottages themselves, with their history and materiality, have in their present users’ practices and
experiences of mobility and stillness? The cottages
in focus here represent a specific type of secondhome in Sweden that originates from the now
abolished historical agricultural system of tenant
small holdings called torp in Swedish. It is in this
particular sense the term cottage is used in this paper; as the dwelling house of a former tenant small
holding that is now used as a second home. As a
consequence of that history, this type of cottage is
usually older than most purpose built houses that
are used as second homes in Sweden. Although
linked to histories of emigration to North America,
local migration and abandonment, these cottages,
like many old rural dwellings, are easily though of
as immobile and fixed places, as historical places
where time has stood still. Looking at the cottage
described above, there are not many signs of mobility or movement, except the wind in the trees,
93
someone having her morning coffee on the steps
in front of the house, the industrious work of someone clearing the land in the garden or re-erecting
an old stonewall, and a car parked somewhere
nearby. However, while these dwellings can be
perceived as immobile or slow places, and are
highly valued for those characteristics, their existence is a much more complex configuration of
various practices of both mobility and stillness
than they might appear at first sight. Thus, this paper provides insights on how places such as these
cottages emerge through entanglements of mobility and stillness and highlights aspects of materiality and the past in the present in this emergence.
Mobility, materiality, time travelling
and second homes
The capacity of built environment and architectural spaces to facilitate, form, constrain, and
channel movement has not, until recently, received much focus in research on mobility. Now,
within what loosely can be termed “the new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller & Urry 2006), a growing literature concerned with this has emerged
among social and cultural geographers and other
scholars, as “[m]obility is always located and materialized” (Sheller & Urry 2004: 2). This growing
interest in the spatial groundings and material infrastructure in research on mobility can be seen in
the works of Adey (2007) and Crang (2002) on airports, Strohmayer (2011) on bridges, Merriman
(2005) on motorways, Saville (2008) on creativity
and movement in architectural spaces and Rérat
and Lees (2011) on gentrification and urban geography. An academic merging of materiality and
mobility can also be found in the growing focus on
non-representational approaches and how human
beings sense and experience places and movements (e.g. Crouch 2000; Bondi et al. 2005; Wylie
2005; McCormack 2008; Doughty 2013, see also
Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller 2011).
Overall, there is a new appreciation of materiality in recent works in the social sciences and humanities. In the history of human geography, material dimensions have often been the focus for both
explanations and consequences (Jackson 2000).
Later on, social constructivist perspectives and the
cultural turn developed and thus great attention
was paid to discourses and representations and
how these influenced people and places (as in
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Maja Lagerqvist
much work that followed Cosgrove & Daniels
1988). The role of materiality in this became fairly
downplayed, perhaps to break with the earlier academic focus and because such influence in many
cases was, and still is, perceived as obvious. Responses to this development can be seen in the
newer, and quite diverse, attention to materiality,
as in the works by Mitchell (1996) on landscape
morphology and labour struggles, Edensor (2005)
on industrial ruins and Cashman (2006) on how
material remains from the past influence present
practices and ideas about the past. The importance
of materiality is also reflected in research on tourism (Haldrup & Larsen 2006; Ramsey 2009) and
human relationships with nature and objects
(Whatmore 2002). In recent mobility research, this
interest in materiality is present in discussions that
highlights the importance of also paying attention
to immobility, stillness and moorings in the world
and to the complex relationships that link mobility
and immobility together (Crang 2002; Urry 2003;
Sheller 2004; Hannam et al. 2006). As a part of
this, several scholars have recently argued that
mobility/movement and immobility/fixity are two
sides of the same coin (see e.g. Rérat & Lees 2010),
recognizing
“stability-within-movement
and
movement-within-stability” (Halfacree 2011:
146). This paper takes this as a point of departure
and elaborates on some of the different ways mobility and stillness can be seen as intertwined and
as mutually influencing and empowering each
other. The dwellings in focus in this paper – the
cottages – can be seen as spatial, immobile and
material moorings. However, while they bring
stillness and continuity to life they also configure,
enable and require various mobilities.
This paper interacts with the increasing amount
of literature that places new emphasis on materiality, while not forgetting the importance of the more
immaterial dimensions of the world we live in and
the togetherness of these two dimensions. In many
studies on mobility, the main concern has been the
movement of people and goods. This kind of mobility is of course crucial in this paper since the
utilisation of second homes comprises human beings travelling from their ordinary, permanent
homes to somewhere else. However, the paper is
also concerned with another type of mobility,
namely the imaginary (even though the imagination has an embodied dimension): that is, the imaginary travelling back in time. Time travel, and
related concepts like re-enactment and living history, is characteristic of how we approach the past
in contemporary society. It has become increasingly significant in tourism, entertainment and education, especially museum and heritage pedagogy (Anderson 1984; Lowenthal 1985; Crang 1996;
Gustafsson 2002; Petersson 2003; Agnew 2004;
Sandström 2005; Westergren 2006; Holtorf 2009).
Archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf defines time travel
as “an experience and social practice in the present that evokes a past (or future) reality” (Holtorf
2009: 33). The emphasis on experiences reflects
the significance of the senses, in mind and body,
which govern time travel. Importantly, what time
travel actually does is that it evokes a pastness
(Lowenthal 2002: 17; Holtorf 2005: 127−129)
rather than the past. Pastness has little to do with
actual age, it is a contemporary quality or condition of being past that comes with the perception
of something being past (Holtorf 2009: 35). In the
words of Hannam et al. (2006: 14), imaginative
travel, like travelling in time, “involves experiencing or anticipating in one’s imagination the ‘atmosphere of place’. Atmosphere is neither reducible to
the material infrastructure nor to the discourses of
representation”. However, material remains are
very effective in providing pastness and evoking
life in past periods through the sensual experiences they afford (Lowenthal 1985; Holtorf 2009).
Second homes
Keith Halfacree (2012: 216) has stated that “[i]n
the era of mobilities, people have not ceased to
dwell but as being changes so do ways of dwelling, and the latter can now incorporate consumption (and production) of second homes”. The usage of second homes can be seen as a kind of temporary mobility (Hall & Müller 2003) and, consequently, most research on second homes touches
upon questions of mobility. Research on second
homes with a specific focus on questions of mobility has for instance paid attention to the bodily
performance of movement in second-home tourism (Haldrup 2004), how practices and ideas of
mobility and land use influence second-home areas (Overvåg 2009) and how second-home migration generates new social groups in the countryside (Müller 1999). Others have dwelled on the
‘home’ aspect, and discussed how the contemporary increase of second homes expresses changes
in our cultural attitudes towards ‘home’ (Ellingsen
& Hidle 2012). Halfacree (2011) has highlighted
that there are different readings of the use of second homes. It can be perceived as an important
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‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’
dimension for achieving a sense of home in times
of frequent house moves and associated uprootedness, but also as a flight from, and challenge to,
the busyness of the urban middle-class everyday
life. This issue is linked to key questions in secondhome research, namely why people have second
homes and what the significance of these homes
in people’s lives, and in society today, can be. The
phenomenon of second homes is quite complex
and diverse. As Zoran Roca states in the anthology
Second home tourism in Europe: “The complexity
of the driving forces across diverse geographic
contexts have resulted in countless types of second
homes – ranging from old to modern buildings and
from modest to opulent dwelling units, from isolated locations to contiguous developments…as
well as in numerous motives to own, purposes of
use and frequency of occupancy of second
homes.“ (Roca 2013: IXX). Second homes can thus
be very different and there are many reasons for
having and using a second home. The more commonly known reasons are based on dreams or aspirations for simplicity, tradition, going back to
nature, and experiencing continuity, roots and
peace and quiet (Cohen & Taylor 1978; Williams &
Kaltenborn 1999). A second home can be an escape from the hectic life in a city (Hall & Müller
2004). It can be a way of experiencing other dimensions of life, living life differently and “temporarily disengag[ing] from a deficient mainstream
everyday life” (Halfacree 2011: 150). It can be
used to revitalize life, which makes the second
home integrated with, rather than separated from,
ordinary life (Overvåg 2009; Halfacree 2010).
Williams and Kaltenborn (1999: 196−197) write
about life at the second home as being an escape
from modernity into something more rooted,
where the emphasis is on the continuity of time
and space and a return to nature and simplicity,
“an escape for home, not just from home” (Crouch
1994: 96). Second-home researchers Kaltenborn
(1998) and Quinn (2004) have argued that people
need to attach to a ‘home’ or have a place to return
to from time to time in a society marked by a highly mobile lifestyle, and that this need can be served
by a second home. On the other hand, a second
home can also be seen as an “extension of modernity” (Williams & Kaltenborn 1999: 197), since
modern life and development have made secondhome mobility possible. Thus, as Williams and Patten (2006) highlight, the use of second homes, and
the second home itself, can represent both a yearning for mobility and adventure and a nostalgic
95
longing for roots. This double-nature of second
homes makes a study of cottages a way to further
the elaboration on the now often stated intertwinedness of mobility and stillness, in particular
since these old cottages allow for such an analysis
to include an extra dimension; the entanglements
of present and past times.
Introducing the cottages: from poor
smallholdings to leisure dwellings
Nowhere in the world is second-home ownership
as common as in the Nordic countries, and Sweden has a long, and widespread, tradition of second homes (Müller 2007). The focus here is, as
already stated, a particular type of second homes
in Sweden. This type consists of cottages that formerly were the dwelling houses of tenant small
holdings (so-called torp). The study is based on indepth interviews conducted between 2007 and
2009 with users of thirteen cottages located in
three different areas (Värmland, Småland and Uppland) in Sweden. These users were chosen based
on the history (as part of a torp) and the present
use (as a second home) of their cottage. The interviews were part of a larger study of the historic
transformation of torp in Sweden (Lagerqvist
2011). Most of the interviews were conducted at
the cottages and included an almost obligatory
cup of coffee and a guided tour of the cottage and
its surroundings. This visiting interview provided
opportunities to observe, and at the same time talk
about, daily life practices and encounters with history and materiality at the specific cottages. For an
example of a cottage, see figure 1.
These cottages are often associated with rural
Swedish summer idylls. Yet, they also have an older and harsher side to their history, a history of
poverty and hard work. Before they started being
used as second homes, e.g. from the 17th century
up until the mid-1900s, they were homes for a
group of rural poor, torpare, that rented a piece of
land and a small cottage from large farms or estates. In a historical sense, a torp can thus be defined as a small tenant holding, like a small farm,
on someone else’s land (Bäck 1992). Due to industrialisation, urbanisation, changes in agriculture
organisation and techniques as well as poor living
and working conditions at the torp, they started to
be abandoned from the second part of the 19th
century, and especially after 1900. Interestingly, as
96
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)
Maja Lagerqvist
Fig. 1. One of the cottages in the study (photo M. Lagerqvist 2007).
the number of various agricultural and industrial
workers grew and the number of torp and torpare
started to decline, idealised representations of
them became visible in a number of novels and
political debates. In these works, the torp was portrayed as an idyllic and good, yet poor, home that
brought up decent, hardworking, faithful and unsocialistic rural Swedish citizens, as opposed to
the unreliable and revolting labourers in the industries (Lagerqvist 2011).1 This positive view existed
among many politicians and landowners. Many of
the users themselves, however, left these smallholdings for better conditions elsewhere if they
had the opportunity (Svensson 2002). Nonetheless, the narrative of the cottage as an idyllic, ideal
Swedish home has prevailed. This has been evi-
dent in media, in particular in writings on second
homes, since the 1960s. Following urbanisation
and increased mobility, prosperity and leisure
time, many torp-cottages have, since the 1950s,
been converted into second homes. Hence, these
dwellings have acquired new economic, functional, social and symbolic values and are in most
cases totally separated from the land that provided
the livelihood for its former users. They are now
associated with leisure, consumption, home-furnishing styles, preservation ideas and national
identity; values which one imagines would have
astonished the former users of the cottages.
The interviewed inhabitants of the cottages were
all aged between 40 and 80. The users consisted
mostly of families with children, or were older
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‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’
couples with adult children. They all lived in urban areas, in houses or in apartments, for most of
the year, and they mostly used their cottage,
whether it was their own or rented, during the
summertime. Those who lived nearby often travelled to the cottage on the weekends during the
rest of the year. In contrast to the former users of
the torp, the large and poor families of tenant
smallholders, the present-day users in this study
show some diversity in regard to socio-economic
status, but display much less diversity in terms of
ethnicity. They were all white Swedes (although
there is a general increase in other northern Europeans as users/owners of second homes in
Sweden, see Müller 1999). Overall, the use of
second homes in Sweden has been quite common and has not only been an elite phenomenon
since the mid-1900s. A large supply of abandoned and unmodern, and therefore accessible
and relatively low-priced, cottages or other rural
dwellings made a rented or purchased second
home an option for large portions of the Swedish
population as prosperity, leisure time and individual mobility increased during the post-war
period (Pihl Atmer 1998; Löfgren 1999). In general, second homes in the Nordic countries have
been interpreted with a stronger focus on their
connections to common traditions and national
identity, rather than on elitism and affluence
(Willams & Kaltenborn 1999; Hall & Müller
2004; Periäinen 2006; Müller 2007; Lagerqvist
2011). However, even in the Nordic cases of second home usage, the presence of issues regarding class and elite consumption are hard to reject
(see Halfacree 2011 for a criticism of the lack of
analysis of second homes as elite consumption
in the Nordic countries). Even though the second
home phenomenon in the Nordic countries
might be distinctive in some ways, many issues
of the cottages that are brought to light in this
paper, such as the entanglements of mobility and
stillness and the significance of materiality and
history, do have resonance in second home practices elsewhere.
Going to and being at the cottage
This part of the paper discusses the empirical
findings from the interviews with the cottage users. It illustrates how the cottage and the practices there are very much produced through both
mobility and stillness.
97
Stillness, continuity and materiality
For many of the users, the cottages contain and
provide continuity and stillness and this is partly
connected to them being old places with an unmodern appearance, something I will return to
later in the paper. The sense of fixity and of the
cottage as a place of stillness is also created in
other ways. Similar to other types of second homes,
the interviews revealed the cottage as a place
where you can belong, stay rooted, relax and experience different dimensions of life. The users
travel to the cottage for peace and quiet, to be
rooted. However, the practices there actually do
not only entail stillness, but also very much involve movement and bodywork. As with most second homes, life at the cottage seems to revolve
around relaxation from urban and work life, meeting or gathering family and friends but also fixing,
renovating and doing garden work. Most users
stated that “there is always something to do at a
cottage” (all quotes are translated from Swedish by
the author). This is a statement that is connected to
cottages often being old buildings built during the
19th century, with less than modern standards in
regard to heating, sewerage and water supply.
They are buildings in “constant decay”, as one
user expressed it. At the cottage, relaxation seems
for many to come from doing actual bodywork:
putting your hands into the soil and working it, removing vegetation and stones in the garden and
having to use your body in order to get water and
fire wood into the cottage. One user explained: “It
is a bit primitive, you can’t take a shower every day
and you have to walk over to the water pump to
get fresh water. It is slower, and that’s how we want
it. These things are what makes it calm and relaxing here.”
Moreover, a large number of the cottages have
been kept within the families for decades. Many of
the interviewed users considered their cottage as
one of the most important places in their lives,
while their permanent homes were just somewhere they lived when they had to work. The cottage is thus often really more of a first home than a
second one. This has also been highlighted in the
second-home literature. Marjavaara (2008) and
Kaltenborn (1998) have both argued that the second home does not necessarily have to be located
on a lower level than the permanent ‘first’ home in
a dwelling hierarchy. Jansson and Müller (2003)
points out that people may change their permanent homes but seem less likely to change their
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Maja Lagerqvist
second home; this is kept throughout the course of
life, and also often within a family. Thus, second
homes provide continuity, across the life course
and across generations (Williams & Kaltenborn
1999: 223, see also Müller et al. 2010).
Beside many of the cottages being kept within
families for longer periods than ordinary residences, the sense of continuity at the cottages is also
enhanced by their history, in that they were homes
in the past. The idea that someone has actually
lived there before, and survived, is strong and often articulated. In the kitchen of her cottage, a user
explained how she sometimes reflects: “When the
lightning strikes, I use to think, well this cottage
has stood here since the 19th century, it’s been experiencing this before, it can take this! So you do
feel the breath of history, there has been people
here for long, living and struggling...and now
we’re here.”
Consequently, many of the users talked about
gaining a sense of rootedness from dwelling at the
cottage. It is perceived as a fixed point in life and
in society. While the rest of life is passing – kids
grow up, workplaces change and generations pass
– the cottage and life there stay (more or less intentionally) the same. The cottages are thus seen as
places of stillness, rootedness, pause and continuity, a continuity that can stem from personal and
family histories as well as from the past of the specific cottage or more general national history.
These qualities are much appreciated and are often compared to the current, fast-changing modern society. The significance of feeling rooted and
connected to the past is, however, not only visible
in the interviews. Rather, it is also an argument for
why modern Swedes need, and love, these cottages that has been strongly present in media discourses since the booming of cottages as second
homes in the post-war period (Lagerqvist 2011).
Media’s descriptions of the cottage can boost these
places with an even more positively charged atmosphere of being fixed and, as described by several users, as being ”something apart from modern
society”.
The sense of the cottage as an immobile and
rooted place is also much connected to its old and
worn materiality. Much effort is put into decorating cottages genuinely and preserving their old
characteristics, and much enjoyment is derived
from the simplicity and pastness of them. The original users’ harsh conditions and the respect of the
“hard work and poverty that made Sweden what it
is today”, as one modern user put it, seems to add
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meaning to the present-day lives there. It makes
the stillness of the cottage today even more accentuated, and valued. The old material forms of the
cottages and their sense of place generates a fixation of time, a sense of time standing still or slowing down (links between materiality and time will
be discussed in more detail later on). Furthermore,
the users’ practices of preservation and their efforts
to keep the cottages simple and old-fashioned reinforce the sense of continuity, stillness and fixity
there. This makes the cottages become even more
“apart” from the rest of the modern, mobile and
fast-changing society. Nevertheless, as much else
in this world, these cottages are not stable, fixed
and durable entities, but are always in processes of
morphing and becoming (Hannam et al. 2006:
10).
Movement for stillness and rootedness in one
place
Simply by being second homes the cottages require a certain degree of mobility in space. All interviewees used cars to get to their cottage. Some
even rented a car for the summer in order to be
able to be there. The cottage therefore requires
mobility simultaneously as being the material base
in a search for stillness and temporal fixity. That the
users have to be mobile to be able to get to a place
where they can be rooted and still illustrates a very
apparent intertwined situation with stillness and
movement. This points at the first half of Halfacrees (2011: 146) recognition of “stability-withinmovement and movement-within-stability”. However, the mobility of the cottages also encompasses
more than spatial and material travelling.
Imaginative travelling, moving bodies
The unmodern materiality of the cottages and the
sense of stillness, continuity and pastness that
they provide, along with the users’ practices of
preservation, provide opportunities for people to
make other trips; imaginative travels into the past.
As one user explained: “I have no need to travel
abroad; I would much rather be still here and
travel in time”. However, in contrast to heritage
pedagogy or leisure entertainment, the time travelling and re-enactment of the past at the cottages are not always so conscious and intentional.
They can happen in a variety of ways and at a
variety of intensities, ranging from just thinking of
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‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’
the past to more or less living as in “the old days”.
The following quotations from two users illustrate
this:
“For me the past is present here, you saw the ruin
down there…and when renovating the shed and
the barn we thought a lot about how they lived
before, how they used these houses and how it
all looked. What kind of animal did they have? It
is not like we have done research, it is just that
these thoughts emerge when we’re here.”
“All these small things, they are the cottage life,
and it is like the old torp living. To go for water
and firewood, that is what we find so cosy.”
The interest in the cottage and its history, that
someone had lived there before, have for most of
the users been triggered by being and living at an
old cottage, and practising life and work there
themselves. A user explained how just being at
the cottage evoked thoughts and emotions; “Everything here has a history, a past… . You just walk
around in the cottage or the garden and just feel
something; it is a lot of emotions and thinking.
Because you know where it all comes from, its
origin, everything has a story to tell us.”
The sensual encounters with the materiality of
the cottage, its small-scaled characteristics and
old, worn forms, the old relics in the surrounding
landscape and all the histories embedded in
them, influence the feelings and practices of the
users. They create gateways for thinking about,
and experiencing, past times. As one user said, “It
is hard not to think of all the lives that have
passed here, when being and living in the same
cottage”. The users talked frequently about the
significant experiences of actually doing the
same things as past users. Many spoke of making
dinner for several people in an old-fashioned
kitchen, fetching firewood and making a fire on a
cold summer morning, moving their feet over the
old and worn wooden floor, bending their necks
when passing through a low doorframe, walking
on old and used paths, growing and eating their
own potatoes, using old materials and tools when
fixing the cottage and repairing or building stonewalls.2
The atmosphere that creates a sense of pastness cannot, as stated by Hannam et al. (2006),
simply be reduced to either materiality or discourse. Yet, the importance of the material infrastructure for thinking about the past (as highlighted by Holtorf 2009) is prevalently articulated in
the interviews:
99
“Well, you always get reminded, it makes you
drift. When the flowers come up in spring, we always wonder: who put these into the soil? It is not
a dead thing, the cottage, it is like it stands here
and waits for you...and it is all part of it: all these
old things, its pastness, all that has happened here
and how you always wonder about it.”
The interviewees often made references to former users of their cottage when they spoke about
life there and, more specifically, what they had
changed or preserved at the cottage. However, references were also made to more general historic
knowledge about torp in the past and to popular
novels and movies about torpare, as ways of talking about how life and existence had been, and in
some ways still were, at the cottage. One user
highlighted the interest in, closeness to and empathy with the past users of her cottage, saying: “Living here and seeing all the remains makes you
wonder how the families lived and carried on here
in the past. All these stones and ditches, such hard
work! There are traces of people everywhere here.”
Likewise, several of the users talked about how
they felt the presence of the past, and the passing
of time, when being at the cottage. See figure 2 for
one example of a user showing the everyday experience of pastness and the closeness of long gone
lives of others at her cottage. The closeness to the
past makes the contrasts between the modern holiday life and the harsh lives of earlier users very
apparent. This seems to add value and meaning to
present-day lives on the cottage. The contrast,
which fascinates the users a great deal, has become an important part of understanding the history of the cottage as part of an old torp as well as
an essential part of its present place identity. As
one user put it: “We have been thinking about
what 19th century users would think of the modernities we have installed here, and vice versa, how
would we cope if we were to go back and live here
in the 19th century?” Accordingly, living at the cottage, and in various ways going back in time,
makes the users think of the present as well as of
the past. One user described it this way: “Being at
the cottage makes us very aware of how lucky we
are today, even if there are some parts of life in the
past that we in a way long for. The simplicity, the
real life...”. Perhaps this feeling of what is good but
also real and important in life is part of why people
are enchanted by these old cottages? They make
their users experience past times, while they simultaneously raise the awareness of the advantages, and disadvantages, of the present time. The
100 Maja Lagerqvist
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)
Fig. 2. Material traces of older lives at the cottage (photo M. Lagerqvist 2007).
idyll today gains significance from the awareness
of the poverty that existed in the same place not
too long ago. Following Crang (1996), DeLyser
(2003) and Cashman (2006), engagement with the
past does not have to be counterproductive and
conservative. It can also be an avenue for a reflexive and critical interpreting of past, and contemporary, times.
Having established the recycling and fixing of the
past at the cottages, a few words should be said on
how this occurs regarding materiality. It is done by
both large measures and small details, such as a preserved wall, renovated old windows, and old materials found and kept, including a dog’s leash, keys,
maps and photographs. There are strong ideas guiding how a “real cottage” and life there should be. A
great deal of time and substantial resources are devoted to saving or reinstating as much as possible of
what is seen as the “original” or “real” cottage, decorating it "correctly" and creating an “an old-fashioned
cottage style”. If some of the “real cottage” characteristics are missing, these are added in order to make
the cottage as it should be (or should have been).
Many of the cottages are thus being recreated with
old, or new-but-old-looking, additions to become
more genuine. This resonates with Umberto Eco’s
(1986) term hyper-reality, where the difference between the fake and the original is engulfed and the
former sometimes even become more real than the
latter. The preserved, or sometimes created, unmodern materiality makes the users think of and adapt to,
but also in many ways value, a more simple and unmodern way of living. To introduce modern technology in the heating or water supply would destroy the
atmosphere of the place and its pastness, many of the
users argue.
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)
‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’ 101
The argument for preserving the pastness and
the simplicity, and not modernising the cottages, is
to a large extent grounded in a respect for past users and for the cottage itself; it “deserves to be
treated with respect and be kept as it was”, one
user told me. A user described the hard, but important, work with the continuous preservation of the
landscape of the cottage by stating “It is a lot of
work! I’m trying to keep the landscape open, and
it is killing me! …But I think it is important to keep
it open as it was.” The practices of preservation
and keeping some selected old ways of living reinforce the experience of continuity at the cottage.
One user described how he and his partner have
tried to keep the past of the cottage while also
making it their own: “We have tried to save all of
the old things and materials that we have been
able to save… although some things have been
moved and reused in new places. You can in a way
follow the history of the cottage in the traces from
the changes that we, and earlier users, have done.”
The saving, or creating, of old characteristics
can be thought of as influencing what environmental psychologist James Gibson (1979) would
have called the affordances of the cottage. An affordance, here explained in a fairly basic fashion,
of something refers to what this something can offer its user, and by that enable or complicate actions in mind or body. For example, a handle of a
tea cup provides an affordance for holding. Hence,
what can the cottages offer its users, besides being
a material shelter for holiday living? One affordance, as pointed out above, is a sense of continuity and rootedness. Another of its affordances
is how the cottage enables time-travelling. The
more effort put into preserving or recreating the
pastness of the cottage and the past life there, the
more likely it seems to be for the users to get the
feeling of the cottage as being part of a different
time, and for them to make that trip in time when
coming to the cottage. Even if the practice of going
back in time was not mentioned as such by all the
users, most of them have put effort into conserving
or creating a certain pastness and keeping the simplicity of the cottage. In this, one can observe a
trip into the past and into a seemingly less complicated life. Imaginative time-travelling is often
based on a longing for times that are considered to
have been simpler (Anderson 1984: 183ff; Petersson 2003: 337). However, the fine thing about imaginative travels is that they can be partial and momentary. Most users were very aware of the hard
times of the past, in particular for torpare, and ap-
preciated living most of their time in the present
and being able to choose what parts of unmodernity and modernity to have and experience at the
cottage.
Here mobility and stillness become very much
intertwined and they mutually influence each other. The users go to the cottage to be at a place
where they, with the help of the preserved materiality and history, can feel still and rooted. At the
same time the cottage makes them think of, travel
to and physically experience other times and lifestyles. To deepen this idea, one can actually speak
of two types of time-travelling. The first one is
looking back and travelling into a non-personal
and, in a way, more general Swedish history. The
past that is travelled into here is often a quite selective Swedish history fashioned by collective national memories of these cottages (and of torp) reinforced by education, novels, movies, arts and
magazines. This trip is also often connected to the
specific cottages of the users, depending on how
much information they have on the history of their
cottage. While talking to the users, it became evident that most of them could refer to the names of
and anecdotes about at least some of the former
users. Many showed me traces of past users with
explanations like “this is where they got their water in the past” and “the path we are walking now
is the old path to the cottage”.
Secondly, the time travels can also be into
family or personal history. Many of the users
have, so to speak, gathered their lives at the cottage, through both objects and memories. Thus,
the cottage becomes a shrine of private or family
memories. “You see, this is our own family tradition”, a user explained to me after giving me a
winding tour at the cottage and its garden. The
tour was full of stories stretching from the old
torpare to his own parents and grandchildren.
Hence, the cottage enables the users to travel in
various periods of the past at the same time,
while also being in the present. The stories and
remainders that can be embedded in the materiality have also been highlighted by Cresswell
and Hoskins (2008: 395); “The material nature
of buildings…means that they endure—not forever perhaps—but for considerable passages of
time. Endurance provides an anchor for stories
that circulate in and around a place. It reminds
us of things”. To sum it all up, being or becoming aware of the past takes the users on imaginary trips. The mind slips away back into history
for a longer or shorter while, although often with
102 Maja Lagerqvist
the person’s own body and own experiences at
the cottage as a starting point for further thinking. Time-travelling at the cottage is therefore
imaginative. It is guided and enacted in the
mind of the users, but it is also often quite practical and corporeal, guided and enacted by the
body and its engagement with the environment
as part of actually living at an old cottage.
Looking back into history: a decrease of
mobility at the cottage?
Historically, as long as these cottages have existed, they have been implicated in contemporary mobility practices. The inhabitants of the
cottage when it was the dwelling of a torp were
constantly changing. Then, users moved to and
from the cottages at a much higher rate than
contemporary users do. When the cottages were
a part of small holdings during the 17th, 18th and
19th centuries, they were homes for the rural
poor sometimes for only a few months, but more
commonly for a few years at a time, depending
on the tenure contracts. After that, the user family moved away and another family replaced
them. A study of the users of over 150 cottages
in Sweden since the late 17th century to 2010
shows a general increase in the number of years
per family, and hence time to, so to speak, grow
roots, after the 1950s. This reflects the time
when the cottages started to be used as second
homes (Lagerqvist 2011). So while these cottages may seem like immobile places, dwellings
with continuity that stretches through history,
they have actually been ever-transforming and
quite fluid places. They have had large changes
in regard to users and conditions over time, even
if the material forms of the cottages in some respects have persisted. This rate of moving and
changing users has only slowed down during the
second half of the 20th century. It was then replaced with another type of movement: the
back-and-forth travelling between first and second homes. Hence, the decades around the
1950s were times of change for these dwellings
in terms of mobility. In a way, their modern history is an account of a decrease of mobility in an
otherwise highly, and increasingly so, mobile
society. Yet, it is also a story of how they became
part of another type of mobility that was enmeshed with strives for stillness and continuity,
as second homes.
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)
Concluding remarks
By its history and preserved appearance, a cottage
can afford an atmosphere of stillness, fixity, continuity and pastness. Simultaneously, as a consequence of these characteristics, it provides several
types of mobilities, such as imaginary travelling in
time, besides the obvious mobility in travelling between homes. The experiences at the cottage described by the users reflect Marcel Proust’s argument in Swann’s way (2003, first published in
French 1913), the first volume of his classic novel
In Search of Lost Time, where the human senses
open up the contact between the past and the present. Proust speaks of how one’s own memories
and past come to life through the experiences of
sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. The pastness
of the cottage is different from Proust’s writing in
that it is not exclusively connected to personal history. Knowledge or memories of a more collective
kind, created by media, education and popular
novels and movies can also be influential. These
can work beside or together with personal memories and present sensual encounters in shaping experiences of the cottages and enabling time-travelling or other practices there. Furthermore, the imaginary time-travelling at the cottage is seldom a
journey taken from a cosy armchair. It is an imaginative trip into the past but, as shown, it is often
guided by a very physical engagement with the
cottage. This creates bodily experiences and activates thinking and drifting. This points to the significance of practical experiences regarding how
places are produced and understood, which also
has been argued for in much recent geographical
literature (see e.g. Crouch 2000; Wylie 2005;
Haldrup & Larsen 2006; Simonsen 2007; Anderson & Harrison 2010).
Drawing on empirical evidence, this paper illuminates the integration and interaction of practices
of mobilities and stillness at one specific, but not
unique, type of second home. This has been done
by highlighting different kinds of mobilities, in
space and time, and how these mobilities are
linked to stillness and perceived fixity and continuity. The cottages are easily thought of in terms of
immobility and fixity, as places of stability and
continuity. At the same time as society is becoming more high-tech, mobile and modern, these
dwellings are kept very simple and seemingly unchanged. They are valued for being the opposite of
the fast-changing urban and modern society and
for providing fixity in life: “the journey to the sec-
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)
‘I would much rather be still here and travel in time’ 103
ond home is also a journey of nostalgic proportions” (Ellingsen & Hidle 2012: 15). Now, one
should not forget that the processes of urbanisation and modernisation and the increasing mobility of people today is the very basis for the possibility of spending all the time and money that people
do at these cottages, and thus for being “rooted”
and still there and enjoying their unmodern simplicity. This point is also made by Williams and
Kaltenborn (1999) when they highlighted that second homes can be an extension of, as well as an
escape from, modern society. The cottage may be
perceived as a fixed, immobile, and perhaps even
conservative place, yet it offers its user opportunities to come closer to and experience the past and
different ways of living. As an old dwelling-place it
enables opportunities to reflect upon, and travel
to, several different histories while still remaining
in the present. Echoing Doreen Massey’s (2005)
argument about places being hybrids of several
places, these cottages can also very much be hybrids of several different times. An understanding
of these places and of the practices of being at
them in the here-and-now is very much about the
here-and-then-and-now.
Conclusively, while these cottages can be perceived as immobile places firmly grounded in the
soil by stone and timber, and are highly valued for
that, the existence of these cottages is a much
more complex configuration of requirements and
affordances of various practices of mobility. This is
also part of why they still exist. These cottages are
places that continuously emerge through entanglements of mobility and stillness and of multiple
times. The practices of mobility at the cottage are
much integrated in and directed by the specific geography, history and materiality of the cottages,
and the activities and thinking of their users because of these characteristics. What we see here is
the significant role that certain places can themselves play in the construction of practices and experiences of mobility and stillness (a similar conclusion is stated by Hoskins and Maddern in their
study on immigration stations 2011). The cottages,
with their materiality and the pastness and symbolic meanings embedded in this, influence the
users’ practices and their possibilities for experiencing mobility and stillness in space and in time.
As such, these old cottages seem to have become
important places in our ever-changing society with
needs for being both still and moving, at least for
those who can afford not just one home, but two.
NOTES
1
The history of torp and the living and working situations for the torpare in Sweden was less affected by
politically radical influences and oppositions compared to the history of torp in Finland (see Peltonen
1992).
2
In connection to this, but outside the scope for this
paper, one can certainly see interesting, but not yet
fully explored, gender aspects of the activities at the
cottages.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work reported in this paper was funded by the
Faculty of Social Science at Stockholm University. I
would like to thank Karolina Doughty, Johan Nohrén
and the two anonymous reviewers for their time and
efforts put into reading earlier drafts and for their invaluable comments. A thank you also goes out to Lars
Meier, University of Munich and Sybille Frank, Technical University Darmstadt who initiated the session
(Im)mobilities of Dwelling at the AAG in New York in
2012 where the idea for this paper started to grow.
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