Hjörleifshöfði

Where it sits. Hjörleifshöfði is a 221-metre inselberg standing alone on the black plain of Mýrdalssandur, about 15 kilometres east of Vík í Mýrdal on Iceland's south coast. It is made of palagonite — móberg, the crumbly brown-grey rock formed when basalt erupts beneath ice or water — and its shape gives the story away: steep on all sides, flat-ish on top, with wave-cut features around its base. This was once an island in the Atlantic, and later a coastal headland. The sea reached it until repeated glacial floods from Katla filled the surrounding plain with sediment and pushed the shoreline several kilometres south.

The story behind it. The hill is named for Hjörleifur Hróðmarsson, foster-brother of Ingólfur Arnarson, the man Icelandic tradition treats as the country's first permanent Norse settler. Hjörleifur is said to have wintered here in the 870s and to have been killed by his Irish slaves, who then fled to the Westman Islands; his burial mound is traditionally placed on the summit. A working farm survived on the hilltop into the twentieth century, abandoned in 1936, and the ruins of its buildings and the small graveyard are still visible up there. Living on Hjörleifshöfði meant farming an island of grass surrounded by a desert of flood debris, cut off from neighbours by rivers that changed course.

The cave everyone photographs. On the northern flank, a short walk from the parking area, is Gýgagjá — a wide, low cave mouth whose silhouette, seen from inside looking out, is startlingly like the head of Yoda. This is why it is known online and on tour itineraries as the Yoda Cave. It is worth being precise about it, because the internet is not: no Star Wars scene was ever filmed in this cave. The resemblance is a coincidence of erosion, and the name is a nickname invented by visitors. The cave is genuinely striking regardless — a broad sandy chamber cut into soft palagonite, with light raking across ripple-marked walls.

On screen, properly. The real Star Wars connection is outside on the sand. When Rogue One: A Star Wars Story filmed in Iceland in September 2015, crews worked the flats of Mýrdalssandur between Hjörleifshöfði and the neighbouring hill Hafursey, building the Erso family's farmstead on the planet Lah'mu for the film's opening sequence. The hills themselves give the plain its scale in those shots. Nothing of the set remains.

Walking it. A loop of roughly five kilometres climbs the hill from the northern side, steeply at first on loose volcanic sand and grass, then more gently across the grassy summit plateau to the farm ruins, the cross marking the old graveyard and the traditional site of Hjörleifur's grave. Allow about one and a half to two hours. The reward is a view that explains the whole landscape at once: Mýrdalsjökull and the bulk of Katla to the north, the black plain running east and west, the surf line to the south, and Hafursey standing on its own out in the sand. Wind on the top is usually strong and there is no shelter anywhere on the route.

The wider setting. Hjörleifshöfði sits inside the Katla UNESCO Global Geopark, which covers the volcano, its ice cap and the flood plains it has built, and the hill is one of the clearest teaching examples in it: a sea cliff stranded ten kilometres inland by its own volcano's debris. Three kilometres south lies Kötlutangi, the point of new land thrown up by the 1918 flood and now the southernmost tip of mainland Iceland. Sand and pumice have been extracted commercially from parts of the plain nearby, so heavy vehicles occasionally use the tracks.

Getting there. A short gravel track leaves Route 1 about 15 kilometres east of Vík and runs to the parking area beneath the cave. The track is sandy, rutted after rain and can be impassable to low cars; a higher-clearance vehicle is safer. The land is privately owned and a parking charge applies, collected on site — this is legitimate, and it funds the track and the facilities. There are no shops, no café and no water; toilets are basic and not always open.

Timing. May to September is the practical season, with June and July giving light late into the night. Autumn brings the most dramatic skies, and low winter sun angles straight into the cave mouth, which is when the Yoda silhouette photographs best — but winter access depends entirely on the state of the track and the weather on Mýrdalssandur, where sandstorms and driving snow can close the whole area. The site is popular enough that midday in July can mean a queue at the cave; early morning is markedly quieter.