The sun that wouldn't set

Midsummer in the north is disorienting in the best possible way. I arrived at a lakeside cottage in northern Finland at ten in the evening, in what felt like late afternoon light, and by the time I had unpacked and cooked dinner it was past midnight and the sun was still hanging a hand's width above the trees on the far shore.

Above the Arctic Circle the sun doesn't set at all for a few weeks around the solstice. It simply circles the sky, dipping low in the north around midnight and climbing again without ever touching the horizon. The light at that low point is warm and golden, like a very long sunset that never quite finishes.

I had planned to photograph it every night, and for the first two evenings I did. I rowed a small boat out onto the lake at eleven, let it drift, and shot the sun through the pines on the western shore. Mosquitoes are the honest price of all this: the moment the wind drops, they arrive in clouds. I wore a head net and long sleeves and still came back with bites in places I didn't know were reachable.

What surprised me was how much the light changed through the night even though the sun never left the sky. Around midnight it was orange and low. By two it had moved further east, the colours had cooled, and a thin mist was rising off the water. By four it was full morning light, white and bright, and the birds, which had never really stopped, got louder.

One morning I walked up a low hill behind the cottage to see the mist from above. The valley was full of it, layers of fog lying between ridges of dark spruce with the sun burning through from one side. I stood up there for an hour watching it shift and thin out. It is the closest thing to a mountain view in that flat landscape, and I would happily climb that hill every morning of the summer.

Sleep becomes optional. I slept in short bursts, usually in the late morning with a towel pinned over the window, and spent the nights outside. By the end of the week I had lost track of the days entirely. The woman who rented me the cottage said this is perfectly normal and that everyone does a bit of it in June, then pays for it in August.

If you go: bring an eye mask, a head net and a sense of humour. You won't need much else.