Saksun

Saksun sits at the inner end of a valley on the northwest coast of Streymoy, the largest of the Faroe Islands, where a handful of turf-roofed buildings look down on a round tidal lagoon enclosed by steep green mountains. The lagoon, Pollurin, was once a natural harbour opening onto the sea, but a violent storm, said to have struck in the seventeenth century, drove sand across its mouth and sealed it. Today the water empties and fills with the tide, and only small boats can reach it at high water; at low tide a walk along the sandy shore leads out towards the open Atlantic between the cliffs.

The village is tiny: in 2006 it had just nine residents. Its heart is Dúvugarðar, a farmstead whose house dates from the seventeenth century and now serves as a heritage museum showing how a Faroese farm functioned, while the surrounding land is still worked as a sheep farm with several hundred ewes. Above the lagoon stands the small white church with a turf roof. It was not built here: it originally stood in Tjørnuvík on the other side of the mountains, and in 1858 it was taken apart, carried over the ridge and put together again in Saksun.

The old route the church timbers travelled survives as a mountain path between Saksun and Tjørnuvík, marked by cairns and crossing a pass at 522 metres. It gives elevated views over the lagoon, Dúvugarðar and the deep valley of Saksunardalur, and shows how isolated these northern settlements were before roads came to the islands.

Getting there

Saksun is about 34 km in a straight line from Tórshavn, the Faroese capital. The nearest airport is Vágar Airport (FAE), about 21 km away. The village is reached by a single-track road that branches west from Hvalvík on the east coast of Streymoy and runs the length of the Saksunardalur valley.