Goðafoss

Where it sits. Goðafoss drops out of the Skjálfandafljót river in Þingeyjarsveit, northern Iceland, immediately beside the Ring Road at Fosshóll — roughly 45 kilometres east of Akureyri and 50 kilometres west of Mývatn. The falls are modest in height, about twelve metres, but they carry a broad glacial river over a crescent-shaped lip some thirty metres across, split by a basalt knuckle in the middle so the water arrives as two curved sheets meeting in a single plunge pool. Skjálfandafljót is Iceland's fourth-longest river at around 178 kilometres, rising in the highlands north of Vatnajökull and running the length of the Bárðardalur valley before reaching the sea at Skjálfandi bay.

The name and the conversion. Goðafoss means waterfall of the gods, and the name attaches to one of the most quoted moments in Icelandic history. At the Alþingi around the year 1000, with the country split between pagans and Christians and civil conflict a real possibility, the lawspeaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði was asked to arbitrate. He withdrew under a cloak for a day and a night and then ruled that all Icelanders should be baptised, with private pagan observance tolerated for a time. According to Kristni saga, written more than two centuries later, Þorgeir rode home to Ljósavatn — a farm a few kilometres from these falls — and threw his carved images of the old gods into the water. It is a good story and a late one: no archaeology supports it, and historians treat it as a literary flourish built onto a real legal decision. The falls themselves may well have carried the name before the episode was ever written down.

What you actually see. Both banks are open and they give completely different pictures. The western side, reached from the car park by the Fosshóll guesthouse and fuel stop, offers the classic head-on view across the crescent, with paved paths and railed platforms close to the parking. The eastern bank, entered from a larger car park on the far side of the Ring Road bridge, drops on stone steps to a ledge almost at the level of the lip, where the noise is physical and the spray reaches you in any wind from the north. A footbridge downstream links the two sides for walkers. The rock is columnar basalt, and in low summer water the hexagonal jointing shows clearly along the rim. A second, smaller cascade, Geitafoss, runs a few hundred metres downstream and is usually deserted.

Colour and season. Skjálfandafljót carries glacial flour from the highlands, so the water runs pale grey-blue rather than clear, and the plunge pool takes on a milky turquoise in strong light. Volumes peak with the summer melt in June and July and again after autumn rain. In deep winter the flanks build up in ice shelves and the spray freezes onto the surrounding rock, narrowing the flow to a dark channel between white walls; the northern lights are frequently photographed over the falls between September and March because the site faces broadly north and has no light pollution.

A river that was nearly dammed. Skjálfandafljót has been repeatedly proposed for hydroelectric development, with schemes drawn up for the Bárðardalur reach upstream. Under Iceland's national Master Plan for Nature Protection and Energy Utilisation, the river reach around Goðafoss has been assigned to the protection category rather than the utilisation one, and the falls now sit within a designated natural monument. The debate is a live part of Icelandic politics rather than settled history, and it explains why a site this accessible still has no visitor centre building over it.

On screen, and the Ireland question. Northern Iceland's landscapes appear constantly in international productions, and the Mývatn district half an hour east has hosted several. Goðafoss itself is more often seen in advertising, music videos and documentary sequences than in feature drama, and it is a useful corrective to a common assumption: the television series that most shaped the popular image of the Viking Age, Vikings, was filmed almost entirely in Ireland. Goðafoss offers the reverse — an unspectacular-looking legal decision that actually happened in this valley, at a waterfall no production department invented.

Getting there. The falls sit directly on Route 1, with two signed car parks and no admission charge; the western car park has a fuel station, café and toilets. Buses between Akureyri and Mývatn stop here in summer. Winter access is generally reliable because the Ring Road is a priority route, but the stone steps on the east bank ice over and are best avoided without traction devices.