Lofotr Viking Museum

Where it sits. The Lofotr Viking Museum stands at Borg on Vestvågøy, the broad central island of the Lofoten archipelago in Nordland, about 68 degrees north and well inside the Arctic Circle. It occupies a ridge with a long view over the shallow inlet of Borgpollen, with mountains rising on both sides and the open Vestfjorden beyond. The site is on the E10 highway roughly 14 kilometres from Leknes, which has both an airport served from Bodø and the main road links to Svolvær in the east and Å at the southwestern tip of the chain. The setting matters to the archaeology: Vestvågøy has the largest area of good agricultural land in Lofoten, and in the Iron Age that made it the wealthiest place along a very long stretch of coast.

A plough, and then the largest Viking building known. In 1983 a farmer working a field at Borg turned up sherds of imported pottery and fragments of glass. The excavation that followed, running from 1983 to 1989 under a Nordic research team with Gerd Stamsø Munch of Tromsø Museum directing, uncovered the ground plan of a building 83 metres long and up to nine metres wide — the longest Viking Age house ever found. It had five rooms in sequence: a living area with a high seat, a hall for feasting, a storeroom, and byres at the far end. The structure had a longer history than the Viking Age alone, with occupation running from roughly AD 500 to the mid-900s and an earlier, smaller house beneath it. Among the finds were five gold foil figures — gullgubber, tiny stamped images associated elsewhere with high-status and possibly cult contexts — along with Frankish and Rhenish glass drinking vessels and Tating-ware pottery from the Rhineland. Those imports are the point: a chieftain at 68 degrees north was drinking from German glass, which tells you what the dried-fish trade was already worth.

What was built, and what was found. The museum opened in 1995. Its centrepiece is a full-scale reconstruction of the longhouse, put up on a site about a hundred metres from the excavated original, which is marked out in the turf so that visitors can see the real footprint and the replica in the same view. The reconstruction uses turf walls over a timber frame with a curved roofline, a line of central hearths, and a smoke-darkened interior lit through roof openings and by fire. Inside there is a high seat, looms with warp-weighted weaving in progress, benches along both walls and a feast hall where mead is served. Interpreters in period dress work the rooms. The honest framing is on display: this is an informed reconstruction based on the excavated post-holes and comparative evidence, not a preserved building, and the museum says so.

Ships that float. Down at the water sits a boathouse with Lofotr, a full-scale sailing replica of the Gokstad ship of about 23 metres, and the smaller Vargfotr. In summer visitors row the smaller vessels on Borgpollen with a crew member steering, which conveys more about Norse boats in twenty minutes than an hour of display cases. The site also has a smithy, a bow-shooting range, Norwegian Fjord horses and the old short-tailed villsau sheep grazing the slopes. The Lofotr Viking Festival, held over several days in August, brings craftspeople, traders and combat demonstrations from across northern Europe.

Real site, filmed elsewhere. Borg is exactly the sort of place people expect to find behind a television Viking series, and it is worth being precise about the fact that they will not. The History Channel's Vikings was shot almost entirely in Ireland, using Ashford Studios in County Wicklow for interiors and Lough Tay in the Wicklow Mountains as the water at Kattegat; its sequel series was made in Ireland as well. Norwegian and Icelandic landscapes appear in second-unit and aerial material in various productions, but the halls, the harbours and the villages that audiences remember were built in County Wicklow by production designers. Borg's hall was built by archaeologists from the evidence in the ground, which produces a different-looking building — lower, darker, longer and more domestic than screen halls, with animals housed under the same roof.

Getting there and timing. Lofoten is reached by air to Leknes or Svolvær via Bodø, by the car ferry from Bodø to Moskenes, or by the long drive north on the E6 and west on the E10 across the Lofast link. The museum is open year-round, with the full living-history programme from roughly June to August, when the midnight sun keeps the site light through the night. Winter visits are quieter and colder and the hall's fires make more sense; the northern lights are frequent from late September to March. Allow two to three hours for the site, more if the boats are running.