Where to go in June, when the sun forgets to set

In the British Isles, midsummer is a pleasant event with a long evening attached. A few hundred miles further north, it is something else altogether: a season in which night stops happening. June is the month to go and see that, and to see the north at its most generous, when the snow has retreated, the birds have returned to the cliffs and whole countries stay up late to celebrate the light.

Up to Svalbard, under the midnight sun

Longyearbyen, the main settlement on Svalbard, lies at about seventy-eight degrees north, far closer to the North Pole than to Oslo. From late April until late August the sun there does not set at all; it simply circles the sky, lower at midnight and higher at noon. It does peculiar things to the body clock. Travellers tend to find themselves on deck at one in the morning, wide awake and slightly bewildered, looking at mountains lit as if it were teatime.

Fred. Olsen's fourteen-night Svalbard, Arctic Norway & the Midnight Sun sails from Newcastle in June, and the route up the Norwegian coast is itself a procession of oddities: Torghatten, the mountain with a hole clean through it, which legend explains with a troll, an arrow and a hat; the Seven Sisters range; the crossing of the Arctic Circle; Sortland in Vesterålen; Hammerfest, which has long claimed to be the world's northernmost town. Then comes the open sea to Longyearbyen, before Tromsø and Kristiansund on the way home.

Midsummer on the Baltic

Across the North Sea, the Baltic countries treat the midsummer weekend of 23 and 24 June as one of the high points of the year, with bonfires, singing and very late nights. Even without the festival, June is the Baltic's best month: long, light evenings, warm but rarely hot days and old towns that seem built to be walked about in the sunshine.

Fred. Olsen's Discovering the Baltic with the Kiel Canal leaves Rosyth in June for eleven nights. It calls at Gdańsk, where the Second World War began at Westerplatte in 1939 and the Solidarity movement began in the shipyards in 1980; Ventspils and Riga in Latvia, the latter with one of the finest collections of Art Nouveau buildings in Europe; Saaremaa, Estonia's largest island; and Tallinn, whose medieval walled town is one of the best preserved in northern Europe. The way home is through the Kiel Canal, which opened in 1895 and cuts across the neck of Denmark's peninsula between the Baltic and the North Sea. Sailing through it, with fields and cyclists on either side, is one of the stranger pleasures of cruising.

Iceland and the puffins

Iceland in June has long days, green valleys and seabird cliffs in full occupation. Atlantic puffins come ashore to breed from late spring to late summer, and there are few more reliably comic sights in nature than a puffin coming in to land. Ambassador's eleven-night Natural Wonders & Wildlife of Iceland leaves Liverpool in June, calls at Belfast, then at Runavík in the Faroes, and works round Iceland from Seyðisfjörður in the east to Akureyri in the north, Ísafjörður in the Westfjords and finally Reykjavík. The east and the Westfjords in particular are areas that most visitors to Iceland, sticking to the south, never see.

The Alps in flower

For anyone who prefers dry land, the mountains are at their best in June too, when the snow has left the meadows and the flowers have not yet been cut for hay. Travelsphere's Highlights of Austria runs from June to September and is based at Niederau in the Tyrol, flying to Munich. The days include Innsbruck, the Achensee, the largest lake in the Tyrol, the small glass-making town of Rattenberg, and Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace and, for better or worse, the city of The Sound of Music. Several days are at leisure, which in the Alps in June is not a hardship.

Make the most of the light

The difficulty with June is that it is so good a month in so many places that you have to choose. My advice is to go as far north as you can bear. You can see the Mediterranean in October; you can only see the sun at midnight now.