Pyhämaa is mostly islands, and several of those islands are no longer islands. The ice sheet that once pressed this coast down melted thousands of years ago, and the bedrock has been rising ever since. Channels shoal. Straits silt up and turn into meadow. Villages that early settlers could only reach by boat — Kammela, Kuivarauma, Pitkäluoto, Kukainen, Ketteli, Kursila, Heinänen, and Edväinen, which people here call Erväne or Ärväine — now sit on continuous ground.

The main island held out longer than the rest. Not until 1891, when a bridge was carried across the Katarauma strait, could anyone reach Pyhämaa dry-shod. When the municipality's books closed for the last time at the end of 1973, they recorded 73.6 square kilometres of land and 848 people living on it.

From outside, the old church at Pyhämaa reads as a red-boarded barn with a weathervane on the west gable. It was built between 1647 and 1652 — a wooden long-church, rectangular, closed at the altar end on three sides, with no tower whatever — and it counts among the best-preserved seventeenth-century churches in Finland. The red boarding is a modern modesty, added in the 1960s. Underneath, the walls are logs.

Step through the door and the plainness stops. In 1667 the entire interior was painted in glue-bound distemper, probably under the direction of a master painter named Christian Wilbrandt, and nobody has since scrubbed it away. Scenes from scripture run across the log walls like hung tapestry. Overhead, on the shallow barrel vault, plump angels float inside wreaths of flowers, with garlands and clusters of fruit crowding the spaces between them. The pulpit dates from the 1640s, the pews from the eighteenth century. Tradition on this coast holds that the first church here was raised by Franciscan brothers who left Rauma when the Reformation dissolved their friary.

By 1804 the old church had decayed far enough that a new one was built beside it, close enough that the two share a churchyard. The older building was reduced to a storehouse. Over the following century it lost its sacristy, its weapons porch and its bell tower, all pulled down piecemeal; the new church, meanwhile, acquired its present bell-tower profile in a renovation of 1908.

Then in 1935 somebody looked properly at what had been sitting under the dust, and the old church was restored and brought back into use. It is known as the uhrikirkko — the votive church. Finland kept one of its most complete seventeenth-century painted interiors largely by neglecting it rather than improving it, which is not the usual way heritage survives.

Pyhämaa spent centuries arguing about which parish and which municipality it belonged to. It broke free of Laitila to become a parish in its own right in 1639. A chapel community at Rohdainen followed in 1688, displaced Pyhämaa as the parish centre in 1782, and finally separated altogether in 1908 under a new name — Pyhäranta, a coinage credited to a skipper from the village of Hirslahti named Kustaa Aaltonen. More territory arrived from Kalanti in 1942.

The last change was not negotiated. At the start of 1974 Pyhämaa was folded into the town of Uusikaupunki against the wishes of its residents, partly because Neste Oy intended to put its third oil refinery on municipal ground. The refinery was never built. A community that had defended its own boundaries for three hundred years surrendered them to an industrial project that never broke ground. The village carries on regardless, and still runs its own school for grades one to six — twenty-seven pupils in the 2022–23 year.

At Pamprinniemi, on the north-western tip, the parish of Pyhämaa maintains a protected nature area with a marked trail four and a half kilometres long. The walk explains the place more efficiently than any archive: low granite scoured smooth, wind-cropped pine, water on three sides, and a horizon running west across the Bothnian Sea without interruption.

Whether the medieval mind read this shore as consecrated ground or simply as the outer edge of the known world, the sensation it produces has not changed much. Paasio was almost certainly right about the etymology. Standing on the last rock with the sea going on and on, you can also see exactly why the other story was the one people preferred to tell.