Michael Ridpath's Blog, page 2

Vík: another of my favourite places in Iceland

Vík is a pleasant little town crammed between the beautiful glacier of Mýrdal and the sea, at the southernmost point in Iceland halfway along the south coast.

It has no harbour, just a long stretch of black beach. To the east lies the Mýrdalssandur, the sandy desert created by Katla’s jökulhlaups. Spectacular cliffs rear up to the west, alongside beaches and dramatic rock formations. It’s well worth exploring these.

You can see the rock formations from Vík: a line of tall rock spires just offshore, one of which is purported to be a petrified ship grabbed by a troll (of course).

You can get closer to these stacks, driving out of town and inland around the headland to the black Reynisfjara beach. On one side of the beach a cluster of basalt columns rises like a giant church organ on cliffs crowded at nesting season with birds: kittiwakes, fulmars and puffins. Out to sea, the extraordinary rock formations slosh through the waves as if approaching the land from the Atlantic. And to the west, the spectacular rock arch of Dyrhólaey, Iceland’s southernmost point, juts out into the ocean.

This beach is notoriously dangerous. Medium-sized waves wash against the black sand, and it is tempting to go within a few yards of them to look at the sea and the rocks, even to dip a toe in the water. Don’t. Seriously, don’t. The currents and the undertow are very strong here. But most deceptive are the ‘sneaker waves’, larger waves that very occasionally stretch up the shoreline to suck away the loose sand under the feet of people who are too close. Tourists die here: by my count of the press reports, two died in 2015, two in 2016, one in 2017, one in 2018 and one in 2022.

If you drive back to the Ring Road, go west a few kilometres and then turn off again, you cross a causeway and reach the top of the cliffs of Dyrhólaey.

The views from here are truly spectacular: of the basalt columns and the offshore rocks, but also of the outstandingly beautiful Mýrdal glacier to the north - thick white cream flowing between mountains. And to the east, you can see right along the southern shore of Iceland.

Birds nest here, including puffins, which means it’s possible that the cliffs are closed during nesting season (I didn’t notice any closure when I visited in May at 9 p.m., but perhaps I just missed a sign).

Polar Bears

In November 2016, I travelled to Saudárkrókur, in the north of Iceland, researching my book The Wanderer. As is my habit, I dropped into the local police station to speak to the chief constable. On his wall, I couldn’t help noticing a photograph of a polar bear charging down a hill.

The bear had arrived on Iceland’s shores eight years earlier. It had first been spotted by a farmer’s daughter, who was in the sheep shed when she heard her dog barking and running across a field towards a bear, which was busy eating eider ducks’ eggs. The dog was rescued, the alarm was raised and all hell broke loose. Vets from Denmark were summoned with tranquillizer guns and a cage, but the bear was hungry and it was dangerous.

And no one could see it. The weather had turned foggy, and a hungry predator was on the loose. People from all over Iceland drove towards Saudárkrókur to see the bear. It was spotted by a main road, and a crowd of fifty to sixty people gathered to watch.

The local police carefully approached a hill, behind which they believed the bear was lurking. But not carefully enough: whereas the police thought they were stalking the bear, actually the bear was stalking them. The bear charged down the hill towards the crowd of onlookers, and the police shot it.

The bear always gets shot.

At irregular intervals, bears show up on Iceland’s shores. They are swept out to sea from Greenland on ice floes, and when they are in sight of land, they swim ashore. They are tired and they are hungry and occasionally they are accompanied by a cub. Polar bears are dangerous at the best of times; in these circumstances they are very dangerous. They end up getting shot, usually by the local policeman. The town museums of Bolungarvík on the northwest coast, and Húsavík in the north, contain stuffed polar bears, shot soon after they came ashore.

Bears have been coming to Iceland in this way for centuries. The first was spotted in 890, sixteen years after Ingólfur arrived on the island, by a farmer in Vatnsdalur.

According to a local folk tale, a helpful polar bear once drifted near to the island of Grímsey, which is just off the north coast of Iceland, bang on the Arctic Circle.

One day all the fires went out on the island. It was in the days before matches, and so three islanders had to cross to the mainland to bring back embers to rekindle them. The sea was iced up, so they had to walk across the ice. One of the men got lost and drifted out to sea on an ice floe.

The next morning, the man was cold and hungry and thirsty, but he was still a long way from land. His ice floe drifted towards another chunk of ice, on which there was a mother polar bear trapped with her cubs. The man was scared, but there was nothing he could do to steer his ice away from the bears. Soon they collided. But the mother polar bear didn’t eat the man: she allowed him to suckle her milk with her cubs and kept him warm. When the man had regained his strength, she swam over to the mainland with him on her back. He gathered some embers and then returned on her back to Grímsey, and all the fires on the island could be rekindled. The man was so grateful, he gave the bear cow’s milk and two slaughtered sheep, and the bear swam off back to her cubs.

People like polar bears. Many people don’t like the police shooting them. In Canada and Alaska shooting polar bears is forbidden. Some say it should be possible to keep a helicopter, a cage and a tranquillizer gun on alert to sedate the invading bears and take them back to Greenland.

This is not as easy as it sounds, partly because of the tendency of fearless Icelanders to run around the countryside looking for a bear every time one is seen. The chief of police at Saudárkrókur genuinely regretted having to shoot the bear, but in a number of accounts of polar-bear killings it seems clear to me that the guy pulling the trigger was excited by it, even if he didn’t admit it. I can imagine the thrill of the chase, big-game hunting with a real purpose, namely to protect local citizens. And I can imagine the outrage afterwards. People get really upset about this. Possibly upset enough to kill?

The idea for my novella The Polar Bear Killing was born.

Birds

When you are describing a landscape, it is important to describe movement. Things that move bring a scene alive. And the things that move most obviously in Iceland are birds.

These aren’t birds that sit quietly waiting to be ticked off birdwatchers’ lists. These are birds that do things.

The most common bird in Iceland is the puffin, which looks like a cross between a penguin and a parrot but can both fly and swim. The Icelandic word for them is lundi, but they also go by the rather lovely nickname prófastur, which means ‘provost’ or ‘dean’. They live in burrows, often on cliff faces, in large communities. They arrive in Iceland to nest in April or May. Puffin is frequently found on the menu in Icelandic restaurants - it’s tasty if cooked well.

One of the largest colonies in Iceland is on the Westman Island of Heimaey. In August the eggs hatch, and the baby puffins, known as pufflings, waddle forth. These are extremely cute: grey and fluffy and a little clueless. They often get lost and wander into town, but teams of local children are allowed to stay up late in the evening and rescue them. The children take the chicks home for the night. The following morning they find a spot near the sea and throw them high in the air. The pufflings glide down to the water and swim off. You have to put some effort into the throw, apparently, or the pufflings won’t catch the breeze and will splat into the ground.

I most often associate swans with St James’s Park, or perhaps the River Thames, gliding peacefully in sedate surroundings. In Iceland, you can suddenly happen upon small lakes surrounded by lava, in which up to twenty swans paddle. God knows what they are doing there.

Many Icelanders’ favourite bird is the golden plover. People eagerly listen out for its distinctive and persistent ‘peep’, which means that the plovers have arrived in Iceland and spring is here. It is a fine bird, with a royal coat of gold, black and white, and it lurks in the heather.

The word ‘eiderdown’ comes from the down of the eider duck. The males are black and white and the females dun-coloured. They spend the winter at sea, and then nest close to the shore, often on a farmer’s property. They pluck down from their breasts and leave it out to dry, before lining their nests with it to keep their chicks warm. For centuries, eiderdown was an important source of income for Icelandic farmers, who would watch over nests to keep gulls and ravens away.

There are so many spectacular birds in Iceland, all of them doing something: soaring white-tailed eagles, darting gyrfalcons, dive-bombing arctic terns, paddling harlequin ducks, black cormorants splaying their wings, gannets and fulmars diving into the sea, skuas mugging other birds for food, great northern divers or ‘loons’ gliding over lakes with their eerie cry, ptarmigans strutting their stuff in the heather, geese formation-flying in the evening sky.

All right, I can’t deny it: and chickens, or kjúklingar, as they are rather charmingly known in Iceland. Clucking in ugly metal Eimskip shipping containers in a farmyard.

Ravens

I sometimes think that the ravens own Iceland and humans are allowed to live there only with their permission.

Remember, it was a raven that led Flóki to Iceland in the ninth century. There are loads of them in Iceland. Huge birds that look much like crows, but often act like eagles, they are extremely intelligent. They usually operate in pairs, exclaiming in their distinctive loud croak that can sound like human speech, although ravens produce a wide range of other cries. They seem to be watching you, whether they are soaring high above, or skipping between stones and fence posts. They circle over corpses, of birds, of sheep or of people.

This being Iceland, there are of course plenty of folk tales about ravens. Odin kept two ravens, Hugin and Munin, who served as scouts for him, flying off to gather intelligence. Ravens predict death or weather changes; one even led a girl away from a landslide. Some grandmothers can converse with them.

I visited the town of Saudárkrókur, on a research trip for The Wanderer, in November. There was snow on the ground. The police station is in Church Square, and the whole time I was there, two ravens circled and croaked, often perching on the church tower. They owned the town. I had to put them in the book.

I always show the first draft of my books to an Icelander to weed out the mistakes, and I gave The Wanderer to the author Lilja Sigurðardóttir. The book takes place in August, and Lilja told me that ravens only come into town in the winter when they were hungry. It would be very strange to see them in town in August, but if they were there, the local inhabitants would believe that they were foretelling a death. Which was perfect.

This being one of my books, the ravens were pretty much correct.

Favourite Places – Jökulsárlón

If you travel all the way to Iceland, you want to see some ice. And the best place to do this is Jökulsárlón, literally ‘Glacier River Lagoon’, an astoundingly beautiful lake of icebergs in the far southeast of the country.

It’s a long way from Reykjavík, nearly four hundred kilometres along the Ring Road on the south coast, past the Westman Islands, past Hekla and Eyjafjallajökull, past Vík, and on the other side of that great flood-plain desert.

The lagoon is at the foot of a tongue of the massive Vatnajökull glacier that reaches down towards the sea. It tumbles in extreme slow motion into the lagoon, as large icebergs calve and then drift through the mouth of the lagoon to the Atlantic.

There are tours; there are tourists. But the thing to do is escape them, walk back along the road from the main car park, climb over the high bank and scramble down to the shore of the lagoon. Wear warm clothes, arrange for the sun to be out - not quite sure how you do this - and just sit and watch and listen.

The lake is a bright blue and is crammed with icebergs of all shapes and sizes. They are white, grey, green and in some places blue with varying degrees of translucence, and they drift imperceptibly towards the mouth of the lagoon. Every now and then a loud crack echoes across the water as ice melts, and in the distance, over the mound behind you, you hear the crash of surf on the nearby shore.

But as you sit, you listen to a gentle song of tinkling and dripping. The water is completely still: black with a blue sheen. I caught sight of a fish slithering between icebergs. Behind the lagoon, the tongue of ice rears high up towards the largest glacier in Europe. Stay. Let your mind wander in one of the most soothing, peaceful places on earth.

The ice squeezes through a channel to the sea, where waves crash onto a beach strewn with sweating icebergs, and wetsuited windsurfers navigate around the blocks of ice. It’s tempting to try to climb onto one of the chunks of floating ice - yet another dumb thing tourists sometimes do in Iceland.

It’s a long way to Jökulsárlón, but it’s worth it.

Iceland's Prettiest Volcano

During 2021, Reykjavik was entertained by a small, pretty volcano at Fagradalsfjall, between the capital and Keflavík international airport. It tossed fire safely into the sky like an overgrown firework, grew a new little mountain and spilled black spongeous lava down a mountainside.

It should have been tourist gold, but COVID-related lockdowns made it difficult to reach. I managed to get there in June of 2021. At that stage, the eruption had calmed down, and sadly the day I visited, the new volcano was covered in cloud. I did manage to hike to the foot of the lava flow: black foamy rock in the process of freezing, with red glowing through its cracks, and sulphurous smoke leaking out.

The volcano took a little nap and then reawakened in August 2022 at the nearby Meladalir. Once again, Icelanders and hardy tourists were entertained by spumes of bright red lava. This time, it was a five-hour hike from the road to see the eruption.

It's a difficult hike and many tourists kept the search and rescue teams busy with their poor choice of clothing and footwear. Also, they had to be told not to walk on the lava, on account of the chance of a fiery, excruciating death. Somehow nobody died, but the Icelanders’ suspicion of the woeful lack of intelligence of the rest of the world's tourists was only confirmed.

After a couple of grumpy weeks, the volcano has now fallen asleep again, whether for months or for centuries, no one knows.

While researching a forthcoming book about Iceland during the Second World War, I came across an interesting fact about Fagradalsfjall. Apparently, in May 1943, a US Air Force Liberator called Hot Stuff, which had completed 25 missions bombing in Europe, was returning to America with General Andrews on board when it crashed into Fagradalsfjall in bad weather, with the loss of everyone on board. Andrews was one of the USAF’s most important generals – it is he whom Andrews Air Force Base near Washington is named after.

I've seen the lava, but I have yet to witness an actual volcanic eruption myself. I am sure Iceland will oblige before long.

Two More Volcanoes: Two Towns Half Buried

As you fly towards Iceland from Europe, or as you drive along the Ring Road from Reykjavík to Vík, you see a group of cubic islands, which look like poker dice tossed into the sea by some gambling troll.

These are the Westman Islands, and they contain two volcanoes of note. One is the island of Surtsey, which is the westernmost die. This thrust itself out of the sea to form an island in 1963 in a spectacular eruption that lasted four years.

The island covered one square mile right after the eruption finished, but has already halved in size with erosion. Scientists are trying to keep the island pristine to study how life takes hold on a brand-new chunk of land, but according to the Christian Science Monitor an ‘improperly handled human defecation event’ resulted in a tomato sprouting on the island. It has been removed.

The other volcano takes up half of the biggest Westman Island, Heimaey. The other half is taken up by quite a large fishing port, with a population of about five thousand people - big by Iceland’s standards. There are also a lot of puffins on the island.

In the middle of one night in January 1973, the volcano erupted. The side of the mountain was blown away and lava started oozing down towards the town. Fortunately, forecast bad weather meant that the fishing fleet of seventy vessels was still in port. With an extraordinary display of speed, initiative and courage, the Westman Islanders evacuated the inhabitants and the sheep as the lava flow reached the town. Of 1,350 homes on the island, about 400 were swallowed up, creating a northern Pompeii. Two unfortunate sixteen-year-olds were in bed with each other, unknown to their parents, but they escaped.

Having taken out part of the town, the lava threatened to block up the harbour, which would destroy Heimaey’s future viability as a fishing port. Local fishermen managed to stop the lava by spraying it with cold seawater, freezing it halfway across the mouth of the harbour. It worked: Heimaey now has a very useful breakwater, and remains one of the busiest commercial fishing ports in Iceland.

The town survived, the inhabitants returned and only one man died: an alcoholic who tried to break into an abandoned pharmacy. There is a wonderful museum in the town explaining the event. And thousands of puffins still inhabit the cliffs.

But the most devastating eruption of all was Laki in 1783. Laki is another one of those volcanoes that you can’t really see because it is hiding beneath an ice cap, this time Vatnajökull, Iceland’s biggest glacier, in the south-east of the country.

The eruption took place in the spring. One hundred and thirty-five craters opened up, throwing molten rock three thousand feet into the air. Lava leaked out everywhere. One powerful flow headed for the village of Kirkjubaejarklaustur, a tongue-twisting village of nineteen letters situated on the foothills above the flood plain desert to the east of Vík. (Those of you who counted the letters to check should remember ‘æ’ is one letter in Icelandic).

As the lava reached the village one Sunday, the parishioners gathered in the church, and the pastor, Jón, gave a sermon which stopped the flow. The lava field, two hundred years old now, is of course still very much visible on the edges of the community, not far from the church. Somehow the name of the village, at nineteen letters the longest in Iceland, remained intact.

The lava fires went on for eight months. But the effects of Laki were felt far beyond Kirkjubaejarklaustur, or even Iceland. The volcano tossed huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as ash containing all kinds of poisonous elements. A blue haze cloaked Iceland; pastures were poisoned. This ushered in the ‘haze famine’. First the animals died - three-quarters of the livestock in Iceland. Then the people. Iceland nearly failed: there were discussions of evacuating the whole population of the country, 38,000 people, to Denmark.

The haze drifted across Europe, reaching Bergen, Prague, Berlin, Paris and Britain, creating a thick fog and turning the sun blood red. An estimated 20,000 Britons died that summer. Temperatures soared: the summer of 1783 was the hottest on record in Northern Europe, causing thunderstorms that produced hailstones so big they killed cows.

Then winter came - 28 days of continuous frost in southern England, and a further 8,000 deaths. In North America, the winter of 1784 was the longest and one of the coldest on record: the Chesapeake Bay froze for weeks, and there were even ice floes in the Gulf of Mexico. The eruption and the crop failures following it have been cited as one of the causes of the French Revolution.

Scary. We’ve seen what Eyjafjallajökull can do to twenty-first-century life; another Laki eruption would be much worse. But easier to spell.

Hekla and Katla: Rearranging Iceland over the Centuries

There have been about thirty volcanoes active in Iceland since the Norse settlers arrived.

The island was created only twenty million years ago. It stands on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a chain of mostly underwater mountains created by volcanic activity as the European and North American continental plates rip apart from each other. In Iceland, the volcanoes reach the surface, where they simmer, bubble and occasionally explode.

Let me introduce you to some of them.

We have already met Snaefellsjökull, the prettiest of them all with its almost perfect cone and its topping of ice, that hovers above Snaefellsnes. It is taking a nap at the moment - the last time it erupted was about AD 200.

We have also met the most active, Hekla. This is sited just to the north of Eyjafjallajökull, and can be clearly seen from sixty miles away. It is nearly classically volcano-shaped - a cone with hunched shoulders - but the summit is actually a line of craters covered in snow and ice. The mountain looms over the surrounding landscape, and the closer you get to it, the more evidence you see of its past temper tantrums: devastated valleys and ramparts of frozen lava. It has erupted many times recently, in 1947, 1970, 1980, 1981, 1991 and 2000. Most adult inhabitants of Reykjavík will have driven out to watch it at some time. Nothing since 2000. Hmm.

There were some truly massive eruptions in the early Middle Ages, all the more noticeable because Hekla is close to some of the most fertile land in Iceland. We saw how Stöng was smothered in 1104 in a surprise eruption that was talked about throughout Europe; Cistercian monks claimed that Hekla was the gateway to hell.

In the eruption of 1341, flocks of birds were seen flying into the volcano, which onlookers assumed to be men’s souls. With good reason, Icelanders were scared of it. No one dared climb it, until two brave students reached the summit in 1750. It is possible to climb it today - about three and a half hours from the car park - but it involves walking on snow past sulphurous craters.

Not far from Hekla, and very close to Eyjafjallajökull, is Katla. This volcano slumbers unseen beneath the beautiful Mýrdal glacier.

Since the settlement of Iceland, it has been one of the most active volcanoes in Iceland, but we haven’t heard a peep from it since 1918. It’s bigger than Eyjafjallajökull and more destructive. This is because of the jökulhlaups associated with it, flash floods that periodically trash the land to its south.

The police station I visited to research Meltwater had numerous evacuation plans for when or if Katla erupts: it often erupts soon after Eyjafjallajökull. I visited a farmer near Hella who was worried about an eruption and had made plans. There is a reason why all the farms in that part of Iceland are situated on small hillocks.

But you only really understand the devastation caused by Katla when you drive east along the coast, past the village of Vík. Just out of town the landscape becomes what can only be described as desert. Mile upon mile of sand, empty of all habitation, just the modern Ring Road, which will probably be washed away in the next eruption.

There is a fascinating fishing museum in Vík and a monument to the fishermen of Hull. The debris from Katla stretches out to sea and makes the waters treacherous for ships. Over the centuries there have been hundreds of wrecks, many of fishing vessels from Hull. Tragically, many shipwreck survivors died when they walked along the uninhabited shoreline searching for a village when they should have headed inland towards the hills.

In 2021 Netflix made an eerie series called Katla about an eruption of the volcano that lasted two years and messed not only with the landscape but also with the locals. It was filmed in Vík.

Eyja-something-or-other: The Volcano that Stopped the World

One evening in April 2010 I was on my way to an event in a library in Chiswick in West London to talk about Where the Shadows Lie, which had just been published. I was a little early, so I wandered through a park, running over the talk in my head.

I was at that awkward moment in the book cycle where I had three books in my head: the book I was promoting (Where the Shadows Lie), the book I was writing (66 Degrees North) and the book I was going to write next (?, Magnus III?, Help!). I was searching for a topic for the next one. Like The Lord of the Rings and the financial crash, I wanted it to be something relevant to Iceland, but also of worldwide importance.

My phone rang. It was my wife, Barbara. She was in Beijing and had just been told that her flight back to Britain was cancelled because of a volcano in Iceland. This was the beginning of a fraught week for Barbara, who, after a few days hanging around in Beijing, returned to London via New York, Madrid, Saint-Malo and Portsmouth. But it was good news for me: I had the subject for my next book.

Every volcanic cloud has a silver lining.

The first thing to do was learn how to say it. This is not as impossible as it first seems. There are two things you need to know. The first is that Eyjafjallajökull is made up of three words: eyja (‘island’), fjalla (‘fell’ or ‘mountain’) and jökull (‘glacier’). The second is that ‘-ll’ is pronounced ‘-dl’. So Eyjafjallajökull becomes eh-ya-fyadla-yerkudl. Kind of. If you say that you will be close, and let’s face it, with most Icelandic words ‘close’ is as near as you are ever going to get.

The next thing I needed to do was to set up ‘Ejz’ as Eyjafjallajökull in Autocorrect in Word, so that I could type the word Eyjafjallajökull easily as often as I needed to. It’s still there, in Autocorrect. Eyjafjallajökull. See?

I needed to get over to Iceland to find out more. It was a few months after the eruption by the time I arrived there, but the signs of the destruction were still visible. Dust devils of ash whipped up in the wind beneath the volcano, and the bridge over the nearby river was being reconstructed.

I visited the local police station at Hvolsvöllur and heard all about it. They had been busy.

The eruption had happened in two stages. The first was at a place called Fimmvörduháls, which lies between Eyjafjallajökull and the neighbouring glacier of Mýrdal. This was a pretty event. A line of craters spewed lava up in the air, glowing orange, red and yellow against the white ice of the glacier. A sludge of molten lava oozed down from the craters.

People flocked to see it - arriving by snowmobile, super-jeep or helicopter. The police’s main job was to prevent tourists from doing stupid things, like sticking their toes in the lava to see if it was really hot (it was). But nobody died.

Then came the big one. Eyjafjallajökull itself is a broad ridge under an ice cap. It’s often in cloud, and it was when the main eruption happened. There were rumbles, there were earthquakes, there were explosions, but you couldn’t see anything.

And then the jökulhlaup came - literally ‘glacier run’. When a volcano erupts under a glacier, ice melts quickly. A lot of ice, very quickly. The water tumbled down the north side of the mountain taking boulders and earth with it, destroying everything in its path. Eyjafjallajökull is a few kilometres inland from the southern shore of Iceland, on the eastern edge of the fertile plain I described earlier. The jökulhlaup stormed around the mountain and overwhelmed the Markarfljót river dragging down bridges in its headlong rush to the sea.

Local construction workers were diverted to the bridge of the main Ring Road over the river. There are some amazing pictures of a brave lone digger-driver desperately creating holes in the road around a long low bridge to allow the waters to pass as the jökulhlaup approaches. Another more direct jökulhlaup leaped down the southern slope almost taking out a farm.

The clouds cleared to reveal a continuing eruption throwing ash thousands of feet into the air. Or at least that’s what it looked like from a distance. Near the volcano, the sky had turned black, as if day had been turned into night. The heavier ash particles fell on farmland, covering grass and crops with a thick grey film containing metals poisonous to animals. The farmers herded their livestock into barns and kept them there. Amazingly, nobody died.

The finer ash particles rose higher into the atmosphere and drifted south-west over Northern Europe. Little bits of Icelandic volcano fell on the roof of my car outside my house in London. Much more importantly, flights were cancelled amidst fears that the particles would destroy aero engines. People were stranded all over the world, including Barbara.

By coincidence, Wikileaks was in Reykjavík at the time, editing the video of an attack on Iraqis which had just been leaked to them.

So I had the subject for my third Magnus novel, Meltwater. A group of hackers are editing a video in Reykjavík and they take an afternoon off to go to see a volcanic eruption. One of their number is murdered next to the volcano. None of the suspects can leave the country.

Favourite Places in Iceland - Hotel Budir

The Hótel Búdir is my favourite place in Iceland.

It stands next to its black church alone, halfway along the south coast of Snaefellsnes. It is a spectacular location. To the north rises the wall of mountains that runs along the spine of the peninsula, spouting long white streams of waterfalls. To the east, a golden beach stretches for several kilometres along which horses gallop beside the blue waters of Faxaflói Bay. To the south, the Black Church perches on a low ridge. Looking to the west, you gaze over a treacherous lava field surrounding a raised crater, and beyond that the breathtaking Snaefellsjökull.

The hotel bar is cosy, with a telescope to examine local eagles. The food is excellent - lamb, fish, seafood, samphire - and the dining room faces west towards the volcano. Sunset takes its time in Iceland, and you can spend the whole meal watching the light on Snaefellsjökull turn from yellow to pink to red, until finally, once the sun has disappeared beneath the horizon, it gives the glacier an ethereal yellow halo.

Room 6 contains a desk with a great view of the glacier. Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s most celebrated novelist, used to stay here; I fantasize about spending three months in that room writing a book. Because it is so isolated, Búdir gets very dark at night, and the hotel is a fine place from which to see the Northern Lights. If you ask, the hotel staff will give your room a call if the aurora does its stuff in the middle of the night.

The Black Church stands on a low hill two hundred metres or so from the hotel. The church is small, painted black, with a white door and windows. A little graveyard surrounds the church, enclosed by a wall of neat black lava stone topped with turf, and at its entrance stands a traditional white Icelandic-style lych-gate.

It has become a popular venue for weddings, with the Snaefellsjökull the perfect backdrop to a wedding photo.

If you walk - carefully - through the lava field to the south of the church for about ten minutes, you will find the ruins of the village which it served, once the main trading station for the whole peninsula. This lava field is treacherous, dotted with caves and crevasses, one of which supposedly leads to a jewel-encrusted tunnel that goes all the way to Reykholt, many miles inland.

Unsurprisingly, the place is teeming with elves.