Nittedal

Where it sits. Nittedal is a long, narrow municipality in Akershus county, immediately north-east of Oslo, running for some thirty kilometres along the valley of the Nitelva river. Forested ridges close it on both sides: the Nordmarka plateau, Oslo's enormous recreation forest, to the west, and the Romeriksåsene to the east. The settlements string along the valley floor from Hagan in the south, closest to the city, through Slattum, Rotnes — the administrative centre — Åneby and Grønvoll, to Hakadal at the northern end. The name is old: Nitjudalr, the valley of the river Nitja, with the meaning of the river name itself lost. This is commuter country with a working forestry economy behind it, and the municipal arms, granted in January 1987, encode exactly that — two silver bands standing simultaneously for the road and railway through the valley, for ski tracks, for felled logs, and for matches, since one of Norway's oldest match factories was founded here.

On screen. Nittedal supplied the opening of No Time to Die (2021), and it is one of the more atmospheric location choices in the whole series. In March 2019 a second unit filmed the frozen-lake sequence at Langvann, a forest lake in the hills above Hakadal. The scene is the childhood flashback of Madeleine Swann: a masked Lyutsifer Safin arrives at a snowbound lakeside house, kills her mother, and pursues the child out onto the ice; she shoots him, the ice gives way beneath her, and she is pulled from the water. Nothing about the setting is theatrical — a small dark lake, spruce forest to the waterline, low winter light — and that plainness is what makes the sequence work against the operatic Bond material that follows. The shoot was harder than planned: an unusually mild winter thinned the ice much faster than the schedule allowed. The rest of the film's "Norway" is not Norwegian at all. The woodland car chase later in the story was shot around Aviemore and the Cairngorms in Scotland in July 2019, while the driving sequence on the Atlantic Ocean Road, on the far west coast, was filmed that June.

What the valley is actually like. Visitors arriving expecting fjords will not find them; Nittedal is inland, and its landscape is water, spruce and granite rather than cliffs and sea. The Nitelva runs slow through farmland on the valley floor and drains south into Øyeren by way of Lillestrøm. The valley sides rise a few hundred metres to plateau forest cut with logging roads that double as ski trails in winter and cycle routes in summer. Elk are common enough to be a genuine driving hazard at dusk; beavers work the river; and the forest holds blueberries in late July, cloudberries in the bogs, and chanterelles from August, all of which Norwegians harvest under the right of public access that lets anyone walk, camp and pick on uncultivated land.

What there is to do. Varingskollen at Hakadal is the local alpine hill, a modest ski centre with floodlit runs that serves the northern suburbs of Oslo and sits within a short walk of the railway station — a rare thing in ski terrain. From the same valley, marked trails climb west into Nordmarka towards the lakes and lodges of the Oslo forest, where the Norwegian Trekking Association runs staffed cabins serving waffles and coffee; the network runs for hundreds of kilometres and links through to Sognsvann on the city's northern edge. In summer the same paths carry mountain bikers. Langvann itself is a local swimming lake with a small beach, unremarkable to look at, which is exactly the point when standing on the shore where the film's opening was staged. Nobody should test the ice on any Norwegian forest lake without local advice; the production learned that lesson on this one.

Getting there and timing. The Gjøvik Line, which reached the western side of the valley in 1902, runs from Oslo S through Hagan, Nittedal, Åneby and Hakadal, and the journey from the capital takes between twenty and forty minutes depending on the stop, making this the easiest deep-forest access from central Oslo without a car. Route 4 runs the same corridor by road. Winter is the season the valley is built for, with snow usually reliable from January to March and floodlit trails against the early dark; September and October bring gold birch among the spruce, cold clear air, and the emptiest trails of the year.