![]() ![]() "What looks simple to build now was a skilled art, fine-tuned over centuries. "They are straightforward enough to restore wrongly, but harder to do with historical accuracy," Sigurdson said. Where there was no need to maintain them as part of a residence, authorities rebuilt some for tourism purposes, prettifying them rather than faithfully reconstructing them according to original techniques. ![]() That said, many turf dwellings across Iceland have been modified. Partly as a result of having been used so recently, torfbæir offer unique historical insights into turf house-building techniques and the living conditions of their occupants. The last-known occupancy of a turf house as a home here was 1992, and many are still used as farm outbuildings, so these buildings are part of our recent collective memory." "My grandfather lived in a turf house many Icelanders did until well into the 20th Century. "For us, it is still a living, breathing history," Thorsteinsdottir said. But Iceland's stand out from these for a number of reasons: they were in use for a significantly longer period of time, they were used by all classes of people, they served as everything from sheep pens to churches and they are generally better preserved today. She explained that there is a history of building turf dwellings in similar latitudes as Iceland's – notably in northern Norway's Sámi settlements, on the Faroe Islands, in Greenland and Newfoundland, and even as far south as Scotland's Outer Hebrides. "Turf was all that stood between our ancestors and perishing! It was also what settlers knew: they came from places already accustomed to building with this material." "We had nothing else," Sigurdson told me, wryly. Driftwood was possibly available on shores several miles away otherwise, you could build only with what you carried in or cut from the bare ground beneath your feet. They invited me to imagine travelling in the freezing cold centuries ago and needing to urgently erect shelter without much timber or workable stone. Though these homes are synonymous with Iceland's rural idyll, life here, each stressed, was difficult and carved out of precious little. I was being shown around by renowned Icelandic turf house expert Sigridur Sigurdadottir, museum director Berglind Thorsteinsdottir and Helgi Sigurdson, a turf house builder specialising in restoring old turf buildings. Apart from the painted fronts, each structure's exterior – from the steeply pitched roofs to the walls – is made of turf. There is a front row of six buildings, each sporting a narrow yellow-and-white-painted wood facade, and a passageway connecting the remaining seven structures leads to the living quarters at the back of the complex. ![]() The main complex's 13 buildings were huddled together like turf terraced housing, the walls of one touching those of the next. Built and enlarged over the 18th and 19th Centuries, and used as a priest's house as well as a farmhouse, Glaumbær is Iceland's most extensive and intact group of turf buildings. There are especially good examples open to the public at Glaumbær in the north-west, Laufás in the north and Keldur in the south.Īs I arrived at Glaumbær Farm & Museum in the northern fjord of Skagafjordur, the golden evening light tinged the homes' grassy rooftops. Today, they can still be found across the country, sticking out of the landscape grass-side up like tussocky tents. These dwellings were built around basic timber frames, with blocks cut out of turf (grass and the soil up to 1m thick) arranged over a base layer of rock and packed in to form the structure's walls and roofs. ![]() That they did can be attributed to one factor above others: torfbæir (turf houses), which were used for shelter since the days of the first Nordic settlers until the late 20th Century. With limited timber, materials for building houses were hard to come by, especially since the island's basalt rocks were difficult to hew.Īll things considered, it's surprising Iceland's settlers even survived. When Norse sailors first spotted the island, Iceland was roughly 30% forested, a low coverage compared to elsewhere in Scandinavia at the time. The predominantly rocky nation never yielded the fecund land other European nations did: just one-fifth of it, mostly in the Northwestern Region, is cultivatable to this day. There were sub-zero temperatures and thick snow cover even on lower-lying ground throughout much of the year. Settling Iceland, even for the hardened Norse, was tough back in the 9th Century CE. Across much of the island, the utter remoteness is striking, and that's especially true in the far-flung Northwestern Region, where I had come to learn about how Icelanders were able to settle one of the least hospitable and most volcanically active places on Earth. With its lonely lava fields, sheer bluffs and stark boulder-strewn plains, Iceland is one of Europe's most barren countries. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |