Under Grass

You park, you walk through a gate, and for a moment you can’t find the building.

That’s the trick of it. Hofskirkja is built the way everything in this country was built before imported timber and corrugated iron arrived: turf, cut in blocks and laid in herringbone courses, packed against a wooden frame, with more turf on the roof. Grass on top, grass on the sides, grass all around. From the back it is a green swelling in a green field. Only the gable end is recognisably a church — dark boards, a small white window, a modest cross — and even that is half sunk into the mound.

It went up in 1884, which makes it late. Iceland had already started building in timber and sheet metal by then; this is one of the last of the old turf churches, and it has been looked after as a monument for most of a century rather than left to slump, which is what turf does the moment nobody maintains it.

The churchyard around it is the other half of the thing. The graves are not marked with stone but with turf: low humps in rows, grassed over, so the whole yard ripples. On a bright afternoon with the old tree throwing shadows across it, the ground looks like water that’s stopped.

Everything here is made of the field it stands in, including the graves.

I have spent years photographing buildings made of concrete that will outlast the states that poured them. This is the exact opposite argument — a building made of the cheapest, softest, most temporary material available, which has lasted a hundred and forty years because people keep re-cutting the turf. It survives by being repaired, not by being strong.

Vatnajökull is up there behind the ridge somewhere. We got back in the camper and drove on to the lagoon.