Vopnafjordur
Millybrown
Mark Hillmann
Sun 22 Jun 2008 23:40
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This is a small fishing village. No,
that description sounds wrong; the housing is modern Icelandic, colourful and
all well sized. It is spread over a good area with
some houses having English garden style trees and fencing and others more
Scandinavian "houses in grassed area".
Most houses have a 4x4 or two
parked outside. With this much snow around in June these seem
sensible vehicles. Anyone serious has a
large 4x4 pickup with a 4-door cab, tows a trailer and has small wheels
with large balloon tyres. Real Jeremy Clarkson stuff.
There is a large fish processing plant (it may be
anything, I cannot read Icelandic) at the quay. There are three
breakwaters between us and the arctic ocean at the end of the
fjord and a lifeboat clearly bought from the RNLI. So village in
population, but no "English village" character and a stunning view across the
fjord.
 I like the Icelandic houses. They are the
same as the Faroese ones, concrete walls and corrugated steel roofs.
In the same way they use extensive cladding over the concrete and colourful
paint on the steel sheeting to make them look a higher standard than the
brick walls and tiled roofs of many English houses. The
in-situ concrete walls will also be very wind and earthquake resistant. In
an earthquake, English housing (our own clay house in particular) is
only one step up from the three little pigs straw house.
Near Milly in the picture, one of the boats had a
man changing the engine oil. His boat did not have much fishing gear,
only three of the motorised reels for traditional hook and line fishing at
depth. I asked him what he did and he said they "went to an island for
birds". I fetched my bird book and we soon established that they
collect eider duck down "only after the bird has finished with it". There
are plenty of eider duck families swimming around the harbour, so they do
not decimate the population whatever method they use.
He told me that it is also collected in Greenland
"but not such good quality", I could not establish why.
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