Best served raw
I’m standing in a cloud of puffins. They’re whirring, hushing and flapping all around me. There must be dozens of them, if not hundreds. And beyond the ones circling around my head are an uncountable number of black puffin specks out at sea.
My Faroese guide’s eyes are alight with pleasure. ‘Today would be a good day for catching puffins,’ he says as plump bodies career over our heads.
He mimes surprising the tabloid-toned birds with a poled net before breaking their necks and throwing them in a sack on his back. ‘It would be a large sack today,’ he adds with a mischievous smile. ‘Plenty of puffins. I haven’t seen this many for years.’
We’re standing on a clover-padded cliff top on Mykines in the Faroes, a group of 18 Danish islands located half way between Scotland and Iceland in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Puffin hunting is largely on hold here because numbers have decreased throughout the North Atlantic, but other wild foods, such as whales and gannets, are still being harvested by the islanders. These harvests are some of the last remnants of a traditional Viking culture that would once would have been practiced throughout Iceland, northern Scotland and Scandinavia.
Sky lawns
As you travel around the Faroes, one of the first things you notice are the grass roofs: on boat houses, smoke houses and quite a few residential homes. ‘That’s how the Vikings would have built roofs when they first settled here more than 1,000 years ago,’ says ex-city architect Gunnar Hoydal as we sit in his modern, grass-topped house in the Faroes’ capital, Tórshavn.
‘They brought the tradition with them from Norway,’ he continues. ‘It was a cheap, effective way of weighing down the roofing materials. At first, straw would have been used [as a base], but later it was birch bark, which is surprisingly waterproof.’
The city’s oldest buildings still have grass roofs and the material is now making a resurgence. ‘It’s environmental and a way of referencing our past,’ says Hoydal. Today, plastic is used rather than birch bark, but the roofs still provide good insulation, flood control and air filtration, and they proved to be more resistant than many modern roofs to the Faroes’ recent storms.
Surviving a storm of another sort is the islands’ non-commercial whale harvest, known as the grindadráp or grind, a practice in which the whole community takes part. When a school of pilot whales is spotted around the islands, it’s tracked by local boats before being driven up onto one of 23 designated whaling beaches and slaughtered.
It’s a controversial activity, and during my visit, the anti-whaling vessel Sea Shepherd can be seen patrolling Tórshavn harbour. Hundreds of whales can be slaughtered at any one time, turning the surrounding water a ghastly shade of red – a scene that doesn’t make for pleasant viewing on YouTube.
But locals believe that it’s no worse, and arguably more humane, than raising farm animals for food. ‘This is not an agricultural society, it’s a marine society. The seas are the Faroe Islands’ fields,’ says Professor Dorete Bloch of the Faroese Museum of Natural History in Tórshavn. And everyone is keen to stress how sustainable the hunt is.
‘Environmentalism isn’t something that we learn in college; we’ve been living in harmony with nature for thousands of years,’ says grind participant and CEO of Atlantic Airways Magni Arge. ‘Here in the Faroes, we’re very aware of where our food comes from. We haven’t been disconnected from nature as other societies have. I think that sort of knowledge is going to become increasingly important for modern civilisation.’
Natural appeal
The Faroes’ tourism department is hoping that this connection to nature in all its rawness will draw visitors. The nascent tourism industry, which was born during the 1980s, now contributes about six per cent of the Faroes’ GDP. Currently, between 40,000 and 50,000 people visit the islands annually, and Sigmundur Ísfeld, director of tourism, believes that the number could double within the next decade.
‘What we have to offer is very much in tune with the current trends in travel,’ he tells me. ‘People no longer want to fly to a beach for cheap food and beer. They want something more interesting, based on nature and culture, and that’s exactly what we have here.’
Among the attractions currently on offer are night trips to see the world’s largest storm petrel colony; excursions to some of the more isolated islands, such as Koltur, which hosts an old Viking settlement; and opportunities to see the circle dances once used by the whalers to dry off while waiting for their meat allowance, as well as the 1,000-year-old ballads that accompany them. There’s also a growing art scene, a countryside that bursts with wildflowers in the warmer months, and an awful lot of quiet.
The Faroes’ economy is currently largely dependent on fish, and although oil prospecting is taking place, few islanders believe that it will result in local wealth. Tourism, on the other hand, is welcomed because it spreads money equally among communities, particularly through initiatives such as the homestays and home-kitchens that are becoming increasingly popular.
Home alone
Olga Biskupstø, head of the Outer Islands Association, is hoping that some of the money that tourism brings in will make it to the outlying islands, such as Stóra Dímun, which is home to just one family, and Kalsoy, where around 150 people live. While these islands possess a wild bucolic beauty, life there can be tough; there’s no popping to the shops, limited access to public service, and winter storms can leave residents cut off from civilisation for weeks at a time.
The populations of these islands have been steadily diminishing since the 1960s, when a centralising fishing industry sucked many young men into the Faroes’ larger towns. ‘Some islands have as little as one family living on them now,’ says Biskupstø. ‘In order to preserve the islands’ cultural heritage, I would like to see populations remain at current levels or maybe even grow slightly.’
For island life to continue, women need to be encouraged back out to the Faroes’ margins. While there are plenty of men in their mid-30s on the islands, similarly aged women are in short supply. And when island men do fall in love, it’s often with a woman in the central Faroes who isn’t interested in living on a remote island.
‘We need work for these women to show them that outer-island life is possible,’ explains Biskupstø. ‘There’s plenty of work for men on the islands – farming, manual labour – but little work for women. Tourism could fill that gap, encouraging them to stay on the islands and raise their families there. That’s vital for the future of island life.’
Biskupstø is setting up a network of so-called économusée schemes to safeguard local skills and provide supplementary incomes for the islanders. Her first project is a blacksmiths run by local farmer Mikkjal Joensen on the island of Kalsoy. It’s located in a tiny hamlet called Trøllanes – a handful of wooden houses on a grassy clifftop.
Despite the area’s pastoral appeal, few tourists used to make it out here, but now a steady stream visit the workshop, even though it isn’t officially open yet. ‘It’s such a good start,’ says Biskupstø. ‘If this project is a success, it will help us raise funds for other similar projects.’
There are already plans for a spinning factory to make products from 100 per cent Faroese wool (‘Currently half of it is thrown away by local farmers,’ says Biskupstø), and a rope-making centre on Skúvoy, where the residents once watched their grandparents weave ropes from wool, horsehair and other materials. The tradition was particularly strong on Skúvoy because residents used (and still use) ropes to climb down the cliffs to harvest the sea birds.
And, as we hurtle back through the tunnels cut through the mountain rock, Biskupstø answers a call via her Bluetooth earphone. ‘We were given an old tea-bag machine a little while ago, and that was a girl calling to say she would like to use it to create a collection of herbal teas from Faroese plants,’ she explains later. ‘People are just bursting with ideas. It’s very exciting.’
Local revolution
Meanwhile, back in the capital, Leif Sørensen, the chef at Koks, is already demonstrating what can be achieved with Faroese ingredients. He’s one of a group of chefs who have banded together to show that fine dining in Scandinavia can mean local rather than French food.
‘I’ve spent four or five years searching for ingredients,’ says Sørensen as we sit in his restaurant, which looks out over Tórshavn harbour. ‘Very little grows here, but the fish is the best in the world. I don’t really know why, maybe it’s the cold water; it’s just so firm, even the cod.’
The result is a menu that almost has you believing you’ve personally tramped across the islands from beach to hilltop. Highlights include a langoustine tail smoked at the table by a burning piece of spruce and eaten with your fingers. It leaves me feeling (and smelling) as though I’ve enjoyed a campfire meal deep in a Scandinavian pine forest. Dessert consists of a dense lovage parfait served with caramelised seaweed and a sort of sorrel ice slush. The result is creamy, bracing and utterly Nordic.
Sørensen’s revolutionary food forms part of a wider revolution taking place on the islands. ‘Tourism is changing Faroese society,’ says Ísfeld. ‘It’s making it better for the Faroese. We have better restaurants, better flight connections.’
But Arge warns that it’s going to take time. ‘It can take years to see returns from some markets,’ he says. ‘We are a nation of hunters, and we want to go after the big whale, but this is a different sort of catch. It’s going to take time to do it and do it right.’
Harvesting the wind
One of the biggest threats to life on the Faroes is the rising price of fuel. Currently, nearly all domestic heating and hot water relies on imported oil, which costs each household about a month’s average salary every year.
A group of people on Nolsoy, an island with about 250 residents, are trying to wean their communities off hydrocarbons. Their plan is to use the wind to supply all of the island’s hot water needs. The company they’ve set up, Nólsoy Energy, has bought a second-hand Danish wind turbine and hopes to start supplying 35 houses with hot water by the end of the year.
‘It’s an ideal form of energy for the Faroes because it’s at its peak during the cold winters, when houses need the most warming,’ says Bjarti Thomsen, chairman of Nólsoy Energy. ‘And the Faroes has some of the highest wind levels in Europe.’
The company also has a partial solution for the problems that arise from the constant fluctuations in wind power. ‘Our oil heating systems already use energy to heat water tanks,’ says Thomsen. ‘We will use the electrical energy generated from our wind turbine to do the same thing.’
The company has calculated that a 2,000-litre tank of water per house should keep the hot water flowing, even when the wind stops. ‘Because the energy can be stored, it’s a way of overcoming the erratic nature of wind power,’ says Thomsen. ‘We aren’t aware of anyone else in the world who is doing this.’
The Faroes co-ordinates
When to go
The Faroes receive 280 days of rain each year, so wet-weather gear is essential year-round. But from mid-June to late August, temperatures are mild (averaging around 11°C in July) and many of the region’s sea birds come ashore to breed.
Getting there
Atlantic Airways (www.atlantic.fo, +298 34 10 00) flies direct from London to the Faroe Islands from early June to mid-September. Individual islands not accessible by road can be reached via boat or the reasonably priced helicopter service.
Further information
For an overview of the islands, visit the official tourism website: www.visitfaroeislands.com. To find out more about the islands’ flora and fauna, visit this site put together by a Danish biologist: www.jenskjeld.info.
October 2011
My Faroese guide’s eyes are alight with pleasure. ‘Today would be a good day for catching puffins,’ he says as plump bodies career over our heads.
He mimes surprising the tabloid-toned birds with a poled net before breaking their necks and throwing them in a sack on his back. ‘It would be a large sack today,’ he adds with a mischievous smile. ‘Plenty of puffins. I haven’t seen this many for years.’
We’re standing on a clover-padded cliff top on Mykines in the Faroes, a group of 18 Danish islands located half way between Scotland and Iceland in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Puffin hunting is largely on hold here because numbers have decreased throughout the North Atlantic, but other wild foods, such as whales and gannets, are still being harvested by the islanders. These harvests are some of the last remnants of a traditional Viking culture that would once would have been practiced throughout Iceland, northern Scotland and Scandinavia.
Sky lawns
As you travel around the Faroes, one of the first things you notice are the grass roofs: on boat houses, smoke houses and quite a few residential homes. ‘That’s how the Vikings would have built roofs when they first settled here more than 1,000 years ago,’ says ex-city architect Gunnar Hoydal as we sit in his modern, grass-topped house in the Faroes’ capital, Tórshavn.
‘They brought the tradition with them from Norway,’ he continues. ‘It was a cheap, effective way of weighing down the roofing materials. At first, straw would have been used [as a base], but later it was birch bark, which is surprisingly waterproof.’
The city’s oldest buildings still have grass roofs and the material is now making a resurgence. ‘It’s environmental and a way of referencing our past,’ says Hoydal. Today, plastic is used rather than birch bark, but the roofs still provide good insulation, flood control and air filtration, and they proved to be more resistant than many modern roofs to the Faroes’ recent storms.
Surviving a storm of another sort is the islands’ non-commercial whale harvest, known as the grindadráp or grind, a practice in which the whole community takes part. When a school of pilot whales is spotted around the islands, it’s tracked by local boats before being driven up onto one of 23 designated whaling beaches and slaughtered.
It’s a controversial activity, and during my visit, the anti-whaling vessel Sea Shepherd can be seen patrolling Tórshavn harbour. Hundreds of whales can be slaughtered at any one time, turning the surrounding water a ghastly shade of red – a scene that doesn’t make for pleasant viewing on YouTube.
But locals believe that it’s no worse, and arguably more humane, than raising farm animals for food. ‘This is not an agricultural society, it’s a marine society. The seas are the Faroe Islands’ fields,’ says Professor Dorete Bloch of the Faroese Museum of Natural History in Tórshavn. And everyone is keen to stress how sustainable the hunt is.
‘Environmentalism isn’t something that we learn in college; we’ve been living in harmony with nature for thousands of years,’ says grind participant and CEO of Atlantic Airways Magni Arge. ‘Here in the Faroes, we’re very aware of where our food comes from. We haven’t been disconnected from nature as other societies have. I think that sort of knowledge is going to become increasingly important for modern civilisation.’
Natural appeal
The Faroes’ tourism department is hoping that this connection to nature in all its rawness will draw visitors. The nascent tourism industry, which was born during the 1980s, now contributes about six per cent of the Faroes’ GDP. Currently, between 40,000 and 50,000 people visit the islands annually, and Sigmundur Ísfeld, director of tourism, believes that the number could double within the next decade.
‘What we have to offer is very much in tune with the current trends in travel,’ he tells me. ‘People no longer want to fly to a beach for cheap food and beer. They want something more interesting, based on nature and culture, and that’s exactly what we have here.’
Among the attractions currently on offer are night trips to see the world’s largest storm petrel colony; excursions to some of the more isolated islands, such as Koltur, which hosts an old Viking settlement; and opportunities to see the circle dances once used by the whalers to dry off while waiting for their meat allowance, as well as the 1,000-year-old ballads that accompany them. There’s also a growing art scene, a countryside that bursts with wildflowers in the warmer months, and an awful lot of quiet.
The Faroes’ economy is currently largely dependent on fish, and although oil prospecting is taking place, few islanders believe that it will result in local wealth. Tourism, on the other hand, is welcomed because it spreads money equally among communities, particularly through initiatives such as the homestays and home-kitchens that are becoming increasingly popular.
Home alone
Olga Biskupstø, head of the Outer Islands Association, is hoping that some of the money that tourism brings in will make it to the outlying islands, such as Stóra Dímun, which is home to just one family, and Kalsoy, where around 150 people live. While these islands possess a wild bucolic beauty, life there can be tough; there’s no popping to the shops, limited access to public service, and winter storms can leave residents cut off from civilisation for weeks at a time.
The populations of these islands have been steadily diminishing since the 1960s, when a centralising fishing industry sucked many young men into the Faroes’ larger towns. ‘Some islands have as little as one family living on them now,’ says Biskupstø. ‘In order to preserve the islands’ cultural heritage, I would like to see populations remain at current levels or maybe even grow slightly.’
For island life to continue, women need to be encouraged back out to the Faroes’ margins. While there are plenty of men in their mid-30s on the islands, similarly aged women are in short supply. And when island men do fall in love, it’s often with a woman in the central Faroes who isn’t interested in living on a remote island.
‘We need work for these women to show them that outer-island life is possible,’ explains Biskupstø. ‘There’s plenty of work for men on the islands – farming, manual labour – but little work for women. Tourism could fill that gap, encouraging them to stay on the islands and raise their families there. That’s vital for the future of island life.’
Biskupstø is setting up a network of so-called économusée schemes to safeguard local skills and provide supplementary incomes for the islanders. Her first project is a blacksmiths run by local farmer Mikkjal Joensen on the island of Kalsoy. It’s located in a tiny hamlet called Trøllanes – a handful of wooden houses on a grassy clifftop.
Despite the area’s pastoral appeal, few tourists used to make it out here, but now a steady stream visit the workshop, even though it isn’t officially open yet. ‘It’s such a good start,’ says Biskupstø. ‘If this project is a success, it will help us raise funds for other similar projects.’
There are already plans for a spinning factory to make products from 100 per cent Faroese wool (‘Currently half of it is thrown away by local farmers,’ says Biskupstø), and a rope-making centre on Skúvoy, where the residents once watched their grandparents weave ropes from wool, horsehair and other materials. The tradition was particularly strong on Skúvoy because residents used (and still use) ropes to climb down the cliffs to harvest the sea birds.
And, as we hurtle back through the tunnels cut through the mountain rock, Biskupstø answers a call via her Bluetooth earphone. ‘We were given an old tea-bag machine a little while ago, and that was a girl calling to say she would like to use it to create a collection of herbal teas from Faroese plants,’ she explains later. ‘People are just bursting with ideas. It’s very exciting.’
Local revolution
Meanwhile, back in the capital, Leif Sørensen, the chef at Koks, is already demonstrating what can be achieved with Faroese ingredients. He’s one of a group of chefs who have banded together to show that fine dining in Scandinavia can mean local rather than French food.
‘I’ve spent four or five years searching for ingredients,’ says Sørensen as we sit in his restaurant, which looks out over Tórshavn harbour. ‘Very little grows here, but the fish is the best in the world. I don’t really know why, maybe it’s the cold water; it’s just so firm, even the cod.’
The result is a menu that almost has you believing you’ve personally tramped across the islands from beach to hilltop. Highlights include a langoustine tail smoked at the table by a burning piece of spruce and eaten with your fingers. It leaves me feeling (and smelling) as though I’ve enjoyed a campfire meal deep in a Scandinavian pine forest. Dessert consists of a dense lovage parfait served with caramelised seaweed and a sort of sorrel ice slush. The result is creamy, bracing and utterly Nordic.
Sørensen’s revolutionary food forms part of a wider revolution taking place on the islands. ‘Tourism is changing Faroese society,’ says Ísfeld. ‘It’s making it better for the Faroese. We have better restaurants, better flight connections.’
But Arge warns that it’s going to take time. ‘It can take years to see returns from some markets,’ he says. ‘We are a nation of hunters, and we want to go after the big whale, but this is a different sort of catch. It’s going to take time to do it and do it right.’
Harvesting the wind
One of the biggest threats to life on the Faroes is the rising price of fuel. Currently, nearly all domestic heating and hot water relies on imported oil, which costs each household about a month’s average salary every year.
A group of people on Nolsoy, an island with about 250 residents, are trying to wean their communities off hydrocarbons. Their plan is to use the wind to supply all of the island’s hot water needs. The company they’ve set up, Nólsoy Energy, has bought a second-hand Danish wind turbine and hopes to start supplying 35 houses with hot water by the end of the year.
‘It’s an ideal form of energy for the Faroes because it’s at its peak during the cold winters, when houses need the most warming,’ says Bjarti Thomsen, chairman of Nólsoy Energy. ‘And the Faroes has some of the highest wind levels in Europe.’
The company also has a partial solution for the problems that arise from the constant fluctuations in wind power. ‘Our oil heating systems already use energy to heat water tanks,’ says Thomsen. ‘We will use the electrical energy generated from our wind turbine to do the same thing.’
The company has calculated that a 2,000-litre tank of water per house should keep the hot water flowing, even when the wind stops. ‘Because the energy can be stored, it’s a way of overcoming the erratic nature of wind power,’ says Thomsen. ‘We aren’t aware of anyone else in the world who is doing this.’
The Faroes co-ordinates
When to go
The Faroes receive 280 days of rain each year, so wet-weather gear is essential year-round. But from mid-June to late August, temperatures are mild (averaging around 11°C in July) and many of the region’s sea birds come ashore to breed.
Getting there
Atlantic Airways (www.atlantic.fo, +298 34 10 00) flies direct from London to the Faroe Islands from early June to mid-September. Individual islands not accessible by road can be reached via boat or the reasonably priced helicopter service.
Further information
For an overview of the islands, visit the official tourism website: www.visitfaroeislands.com. To find out more about the islands’ flora and fauna, visit this site put together by a Danish biologist: www.jenskjeld.info.
October 2011
|
FIND OUT WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT ON TWITTER:
| |
 |
