Take your time to stop where the path passes through the fence. The open spaces are pro-bably the same that you would have seen 150 years ago. Hear the mooing of the cows and the clanging of their bells, smell the scent of newly cut hay...

The whole of the farm and its surroundings are today protected – and classiﬁed as a heritage building and nature reserve. The farm is owned by Lekvattnet Local History Association, which takes care of the buildings and land. Ritamäki is open and provides simple food and drink in the summer.

What does the name “Ritamäki” mean? On the maps, the names “Ritaberg” or “Ritamakk” are sometimes used. The last syllable, “maki”, means “moun-tain”, but what about “Rita”? We can look for the answer in the Finnish
“riita”, which means “conﬂict” or “dispute”. Written sources tell us that this was a hill over which there were ownership disputes.

The western part of the main house is an intact smokehouse. In the eastern part is the kitchen, a ﬁreplace with a chimney and a small bedroom. Here you can see how the smoke oven was constructed. The oven stored the heat and provided a comfortable temperature in the rooms throughout the day. It was only necessary to light a ﬁre once per day, even if it was really cold outside.

Olof Jansson Uotinen lived a hard life at Rita-mäki. He lost his four children and his wife Annika between August 17 and September 12, 1857 to dysentery. This was the same fate that afﬂicted the family at Valli. Olof Jansson had a new family and was grandfather to the siblings Beda and Henning who lived at Ritamäki until 1964.

We now have a kilometre to walk on the wagon path down the hill to the car park at Lomsen.