Still building cairns
Jul. 11th, 2009 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI have held forth before (repeatedly and at length) about the compulsion to build cairns. Evidently there are people who cannot see a stone without feeling obliged to place another stone on top of it. And you see an awful lot of stones in Iceland. Things have gone so far that cairn-building, like lighting fires, is explicitly banned in the national parks.
Driving east along Route 1 towards Skaftafell, we were catching glimpses across the plain of shining glaciers and saw-toothed mountains. We pulled in to a picnic area hoping for a better view, and only gradually realised that the parking area was surrounded by more than the usual number of cairns. In fact, it stood in the middle of a sea of the things. What's more, the mound at the far end of the area, with the interesting crenellated skyline? Nope, those are cairns, too.
There's a story, of course. THey're good on stories here, and on noticeboards to tell them. So, a large farm once stood here, called Laufskálar, so rich a building that it had 24 doors on iron hinges. But it was destroyed in 894, in the earliest recorded eruption of the volcano Katla. The lava mound is named Laufskálavarða, Laufskálar Cairn, after the farm, and everyone who passes here for the first time must add a stone to a cairn, for luck. The highways authority has moved a supply of stones to the site, to ensure that everyone can meet this obligation.
As it happened, I had a pebble in my pocket that I'd picked up on the black beach that morning, while we were watching the puffins. It was a wrench to part with it, but that surely makes it all the luckier, doesn't it?
Driving east along Route 1 towards Skaftafell, we were catching glimpses across the plain of shining glaciers and saw-toothed mountains. We pulled in to a picnic area hoping for a better view, and only gradually realised that the parking area was surrounded by more than the usual number of cairns. In fact, it stood in the middle of a sea of the things. What's more, the mound at the far end of the area, with the interesting crenellated skyline? Nope, those are cairns, too.
There's a story, of course. THey're good on stories here, and on noticeboards to tell them. So, a large farm once stood here, called Laufskálar, so rich a building that it had 24 doors on iron hinges. But it was destroyed in 894, in the earliest recorded eruption of the volcano Katla. The lava mound is named Laufskálavarða, Laufskálar Cairn, after the farm, and everyone who passes here for the first time must add a stone to a cairn, for luck. The highways authority has moved a supply of stones to the site, to ensure that everyone can meet this obligation.
As it happened, I had a pebble in my pocket that I'd picked up on the black beach that morning, while we were watching the puffins. It was a wrench to part with it, but that surely makes it all the luckier, doesn't it?
