It’s a bit like a country within a country here in Snaefellsnes. I could easily spend an entire trip mooching around, trying old stuff and new. Besides the blinking obvious, Kirkjufell and the Black Church of Budir there are waterfalls, beaches with sand in various shades of black, red or even traditional white (take your pick), epic roads across silent fjords, views to the north and the Westfjords, lone buildings, dunes, craters, lakes, twisted lava fields and plenty more. Oh yes, and if you’re lucky and arrive on a clear day, there’s a monstrous brute of a glacier, flanked with a white and blue ice cap that dominates the landscape from almost everywhere you go, reaching up to touch the very heavens. Tog or normal well balanced member of the public, there sure is a lot of stuff to keep you occupied on Snaefellsnes.
In the hostel, we’d got talking to Trevor, a veteran of several visits to the area who complained he’d never seen Snaefellsjokull. Some may ask, “how can you not see an enormous white lump, almost 1450 metres high that’s visible from Reykjavik on a clear day?” And the answer is in the last two words. “Clear day.” I’m sure the locals get to see the beast at regular intervals, but on our previous visit in 2019, the entire peninsula was painted in a drab grey sheet of gloom. Nothing doing. But this time around, on the second day of touring Snaefellsnes in a car with a back seat full of primed and loaded camera gear, we got lucky. Unfortunately for Trevor he’d gone north that very morning in search of the Aurora Borealis in the Westfjords. Mind you he found it, so I think he was happy in the end.
By now, we’d already stopped at two locations and made merry with the conditions. We didn’t get more than a couple of miles further through the day before coming to another unscheduled halt on top of a small mound of scrubby car park when the possibilities in front of us became apparent. No epic light in the middle of the day of course – that would come later – but while some images might work in mono, others seemed to offer themselves up in full glorious technicolour. And then we got to the lone church of Ingjaldsholl, close to Hellissandur at the edge of the map. And look who wasn’t bothering to hide behind the clouds? Yep, all fourteen hundred and forty-six metres of the beast, with a couple of interesting lumps and ridges in between for good measure. Who doesn’t love a glacier cloaked monster after all?
We were probably only here for twenty minutes, moving a couple of hundred yards from east to west over a patch of bare open ground as we tried to line up the elements, waiting for the sun to dapple the scene before us, whilst taking the utmost care not to tread on the moss. They really don’t like you walking on the moss in Iceland you know. It’s right up there with armed robbery and carjacking in the grand scheme of things. Not that we tested that out of course. You can’t take landscape photos when you’re locked in a cell, and when the trip is costing you something north of a hundred pounds a day even though you’re on the most stringent of budgets, you don’t want to be wasting any time being detained at the pleasure of the Icelandic Government.
Once again I found myself wondering at just how isolated so many of these simple and striking Lutheran churches are. Take this one for example, a mile out of both Hellissandur and neighbouring Rif. It’s not even placed directly in between them. I hope that in the days before cars, the locals had sturdy boots for those winter treks to morning prayers. And while Hellnar’s church may be surrounded by a handful of homes amid the tourist accommodation, Budir goes hand in hand with the only slightly less well known hotel of the same name. Not a house or farm in sight. Yet the village of Arnarstapi, a veritable metropolis in comparison to the rest of the settlements on the south west coast on Snaefellsnes, doesn’t have a church at all. Although it does have a fish and chip van, which depending on your belief system may or may not be far more important. At the end of the trip we visited Strandarkirkja, totally isolated by a thin thread of asphalt from the cluster of shacks that didn’t seem to be occupied by anyone at all. Still, they make for good subjects don’t they? And besides being dwarfed by the mighty Snaefellsjokull, this is the only one of them that was supposedly visited by Christopher Columbus. So the story goes (although historians aren’t of one accord on the subject), he spent a winter here fifteen years before his more famous adventure to check out the local intel on crossing the Atlantic. Leif Eriksson had made the voyage several hundred years earlier, and the Icelanders are well known for handing down stories from one generation to the next.
In writing this, I’ve just remembered that one of Iceland’s five prisons is right next to Kirkjufell. Not because I study such things in detail before choosing my holiday destinations of course. But if you take the single track road to the immediate west of the mountain to try and take pictures from another angle, you can’t help but be aware of the signs telling you which route not to follow unless you have plenty of time to spare and a very plausible explanation. I could have pointed the camera out of the window of my cell if we’d been sent there. Although I suppose they’d have confiscated it.
I wonder if Columbus took his resident landscape artist with him and got a sunset canvas of Kirkjufell in front of the waterfalls?
