The west of Iceland round the Snaefellsnes Peninsula reminds me of the desert in a
wet kind of way. I know this does not make sense.... It has been raining
constantly since we’ve been here, everything is totally soaked, the ground
sodden, our clothes and feet are wet, waterfalls and creeks are everywhere yet the
area still reminds me of a desert. It is the visibility of the folds in the
land, the hollows, valleys, dips and ridges. Despite the obvious rain, the
vegetation is grasses, not bush and certainly not trees. It clings
so close to the land. It makes it feel like the desert, in that you can really
have contact with the underlying land formations.
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| Baejarfoss waterfall |
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| Lava shapes near Buoakirkja Black Church |
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| Raudfeldsgja Gorge |
And yet there
are far more colours than the deserts I’ve seen: reds, ochre, yellow, orange,
green, lime green. The patterns are innumerable, I see so much colour in so
little space. The land itself is volcanic black and red. There are often rocks
with lichen growing on (well it looks like lichen) and moss. These things would
seem to make it less like the desert and yet perhaps they add to that sense?
The other
way the west part of Iceland reminds me of the desert is that it is bleak and
harsh. While we see outcrops of houses and tonnes of fat sheep, it still feels
inhospitable, a difficult place to live and make a living. There are lone
churches, small and neat but they remind me of the people’s need to look to
something else to elevate them from the physical world. The grandeur of some of the churches certainly speaks of this. The panels on the
places we stop talk of exploits of trolls or half giant half humans, Norse gods
and folk tales of betrayal and killings. Seems to me people want to be drawn
elsewhere to the spiritual or the imaginative to free them from the harshness
round them.
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| Stykkisholmskirkja |
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| Stykkisholmskirkja Church |
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