Finding a human settlement, dead but not yet buried is comparable to discovering an uninterred corpse. How did it come to be here and how did it die? What drove people to settle this place and why did they trail ‘out through the mist to try their luck elsewhere’? The abandoned farms of Iceland are but the tip of an historical iceberg. A mere thousand  years separate these denuded soils and mire-filled  basins from a land that once had forest to the water's edge. The bogs of the  North Atlantic isles have within them endless "households and fiefdoms laid down in the dirt." Buried landscapes that testify to the hopes of Norse settlers that set out from their sheltered fjords over a thousand years ago, west over the ocean to wrest a living on oceanic islands from the Hebrides to Iceland. What did they seek? Was it green pastures, where spring came early and where in favoured places sheep and cattle could winter outdoors? Or was it the freedom of new-lands, where pioneers could stake out holdings according to their needs. They all must have shared hopes of a better land as they migrated to the seemingly benign bays and dales of the Atlantic seaboard.

All were successful for a time, especially when herds of milking cattle could be over-wintered. Making cheese and butter doubled the energy and protein that meat alone provided from a single beast. Populations grew, and  demanded meal which also could be grown, thanks to the hardy bere-barley that flourished on the hillsides despite the Atlantic storms. Not that farming was easy. In the isles of the North Atlantic the coming of spring was always uncertain. Summers were doubtful, and when Hekla erupted  harvests failed for years, all the way from Iceland to the Hebrides. The warmth of the ocean that gave them their winter pastures, also brought the rain that washed their soils for twelve months in the year, rendering them ever poorer in nutrients. The forests that once clad the hillsides soon vanished and with them the thin soils  eroded to deserts of stone and gravel. For these farmers their endeavours, their "registries of blood abandoned to the depths, time without end, with all that might have been, could they have stayed"

A people whose population has so often risen, then plunged to the verge of extinction and back, do not readily disappear. They may at times " have trailed out through the mist to try their luck elsewhere" but they still survive. Their hardiness and tenacity to the land with their farms, perched between the mountains and the sea is an awe-inspiring model of human resourcefulness and courage in maintaining a light in the darkness of the boreal night.