Stokksnes

Where it sits. Stokksnes is a headland on the eastern side of Hornafjörður in southeast Iceland, about ten kilometres by road from the town of Höfn. The Ring Road passes through the Almannaskarð tunnel — opened in 2005, replacing a notoriously steep pass road — and a signed gravel track then runs seaward past a farm gate to the beach. The defining feature is Vestrahorn, a mountain massif rising abruptly to 454 metres at Klifatindur directly behind a black sand strand, with the sea on one side and a shallow lagoon on the other. At low tide the flats between the dunes and the water turn into a mirror, and the whole massif reproduces itself upside down in a centimetre of seawater. It is one of the most photographed compositions in Iceland, and it works because the mountain has no foothills: it goes from sea level to summit ridge in under a kilometre of horizontal distance.

The rock is unusual for Iceland. Vestrahorn and its neighbour Brunnhorn are not built of the layered basalt lavas that make up most Icelandic mountains. They belong to an intrusive complex of gabbro and granophyre — coarse-grained rock that crystallised slowly at depth inside an extinct central volcano and was later exposed by erosion, with ages in the region of eight to eleven million years. The practical consequence is visual: the rock is very dark, almost matte black when wet, and it weathers into jagged spires rather than terraces. Brunnhorn, the ridge running out along the spit to the southwest, has acquired the nickname Batman Mountain for the twin peaks that read as a cowl in silhouette.

On screen: a Viking village that was never a village. Behind the dunes stands a cluster of timber and turf buildings with a palisade, a hall, outbuildings and a jetty on the sand — a Norse settlement in appearance and a film set in fact. It was built in 2010 for a feature project by the Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur that was never produced, and it has stood ever since as a photographic location maintained by the landowner. Nothing about it is archaeological: no excavation preceded it, no finds underlie it, and its layout follows a production designer's brief rather than an excavated ground plan. Visitors regularly photograph it as a historic site, and it is worth stating plainly that it is not one. The distinction runs through this whole subject. The History Channel's Vikings, the series that shaped the modern popular image of Norse life more than any other, was shot almost entirely in Ireland — at Ashford Studios in County Wicklow, with Lough Tay standing in for the fjord at Kattegat — and has no connection to this beach. Genuine Norse heritage in Iceland lies in written sources and excavated farm sites, not in film sets, however photogenic.

The other structures on the headland. The tip of Stokksnes carries a radar station, built by the United States Navy in the mid-1950s and later part of the Iceland Air Defence System operated with NATO. It is fenced and closed to visitors, and its road is signed accordingly; the white radome on the skyline in many photographs belongs to it. The land between the tunnel and the sea is privately owned by the farm at Horn, which runs the Viking Café at the entrance. Access is by ticket bought at the café, generally around a thousand Icelandic krónur, covering the beach, the dune system, the lagoon track and the film set.

What the ground is like. The dunes are held together by melgresi, the coarse lyme grass planted across Icelandic sands to stop them moving, and they form low mounds that give foreground structure for photographs and shelter from the wind. The beach sand is fine black basalt, and it holds a shallow film of water for a long time after the tide drops, which is what produces the reflections. Eiders and arctic terns nest along the lagoon in summer — terns will dive at anyone walking near a colony in June and July — and seals haul out on the sandbars of Hornafjörður. In winter the whole headland is a favoured aurora location because the mountain gives a strong silhouette to the north-facing frame and there is no settlement light within ten kilometres.

Getting there and timing. Höfn is fifteen minutes away and is the practical base, with fuel, food and rooms; Reykjavík is around 460 kilometres by the south coast, and Egilsstaðir 240 kilometres to the north. The gravel access track is short and usually fine for a standard car, though the last section can flood on a spring tide. Low tide matters more than time of day for the mirror effect, and tide tables for Hornafjörður are published locally. The site sees its heaviest use at sunrise and sunset in autumn, when photographic tour groups converge; midday in summer is often almost empty.