Never Shot

We came out to the headland in the evening, cooked in the camper on the flats, and stayed.

That turned out to be the single best decision of the trip, for a reason that had nothing to do with the set. The sky went absolutely clear after dark, there is no town within a very long way, and the Milky Way came up over the mountain in a band you could read by. I stood outside in a coat for an hour, tipped my head back until my neck hurt, and did not take a photograph for the first twenty minutes of it because it seemed like the wrong response.

Then at ten past five the light started, and the tide had gone out and left a film of water two centimetres deep across a kilometre of black sand, and Vestrahorn stood in it upside down. Absolutely still. Not a breath on the surface. That mountain is a lump of coarse-grained gabbro that never made it out of the ground as a volcano, and at dawn it goes copper along the top edge while the base stays black, and all of it repeats in the water at your feet.

The village

The set is a few hundred metres along the shore: turf-roofed longhouses, a fence of split stakes, and drawn up at the waterline a wooden ship with a curved stem and round shields hung along the sheer — red and white, blue and white, a painted spiral.

It was put up around 2010 for a film that then didn’t get made, and rather than take it down, it was left. So it has spent fifteen years doing what a real building here does: taking the salt, taking the wind off the Atlantic, going grey, going soft at the corners. Nobody is maintaining it as a monument and nobody is finishing it as a set.

Everything else in this journal was built to be used, and then wasn’t. This one was built to be looked at, and then wasn’t looked at either.

That makes it a strange object, and I stood in front of it for a while trying to decide whether it counts. A fake Viking hall weathering into an approximately real one is not a ruin exactly — but it is not a prop either, not any more. The rot is genuine. The shields have faded in real sunlight over real years.

At sunrise, with the sun coming up the fjord behind it and the whole thing doubled in the wet sand, I stopped worrying about the category.