Torshavn & Vestmanna
Having spent the night alongside in the Faroese capital of Torshavn, a compact little town named after the Norse god of war, we awoke early eager to explore. Boarding busses after breakfast we spent the morning visiting the Historical Museum in town before making a journey across the island to Vestmanna while the ship repositioned. A few guests opted to stay on board for what promised to be a very scenic cruise.
The museum was situated on the northeastern outskirts of the town overlooking the wide Atlantic and offered a fascinating insight into Faroese life and culture through the ages. For the historian, perhaps the most remarkable objects in the museum’s collection were the mediaeval carved pew-ends representing the twelve apostles from the church at Kirkjubostolarnir dating back to the early fifteenth century. In the basement there was an interesting collection of traditional fishing-boats and elsewhere a collection of archaeological finds from the Viking age and, inevitably, examples of Faroese knitwear of different periods.
The landscape as we moved across the island was stunning. Marginal for agriculture, the island has been dedicated to pastoralism since the first Viking settlers arrived in the eighth century. Indeed, the name Faroe comes from the Norse for “island of sheep.” On some of the more spectacular overlooks it was possible to discern the traces of the mediaeval field system, where crops of grain – oats, rye or bere wheat - might once have been grown on small terraced plots divided by drainage ditches. In more recent times, potatoes provided nourishment but in all cases the crops were marginal in this cold wet climate and liable to fail periodically. The main food source has always been from the sea, the rich harvest of fish and nesting sea-birds. In the main restaurant in town, I had noted that puffin breast in a raspberry chili sauce was on the menu!
We stopped to look at the church in Kirkjubostolarnir from which the pew-ends had been rescued during the nineteenth century restoration. Beside it was the remains of the great mediaeval cathedral dedicated to St Magnus, the saint whose mortal remains reside in the most northerly of British cathedrals, the red sandstone marvel we had visited earlier in Kirkwall in Orkney. In the group of buildings beside the church, we were privileged to enter a magnificent traditional farmhouse. Snug and windowless, it was a worthy successor to the traditional Viking hall. This remarkable collection of buildings overlooked Brandarsvik, an iconic site for believers in the Brendan Voyage; indeed, one of the traditionally built houses in the village is home to Trondur Pattursson who accompanied Tim Severin for the recreation of that voyage in 1973.
After lunch back on board in Vestmanna, there were a number of options. The breathtaking boat tour beside some of Europe’s highest cliffs proved very popular but both the hike and the fishing party reported favorably on the afternoon. On the subject of fishing, the controversial issue of Faroese whaling, the collective pilot-whale hunt was ably described in an after dinner presentation by Dorethe Block from the archipelago’s Natural History Museum.
