The peninsula begins before you reach it. Somewhere east of Búðardalur, the landscape that has defined most of western Iceland — broad glacial valleys, scattered farms, flat-bottomed river plains cut by retreating ice — starts to compress. The mountains tighten on both sides of Route 54. By the time the road swings onto the north shore and the peninsula proper begins, the scale has changed entirely.

Most of the north shore drive is dirt. Not occasionally, not in patches — dirt from the eastern approach and for most of the length of the peninsula, a graded gravel track wide enough for two vehicles to pass carefully, the surface loose in dry sections and packed firm where the road cuts into the hillside. The sea stayed close on the right. On the left, the mountains rose immediately, too steep and close to feel like a backdrop.

The terrain on this side is younger and more abrupt than the farmland to the east. The hillsides carry the dark green of continuous moss rather than grass, and the rock showing through it is rough and irregular in a way that glaciated surfaces are not. Lava doesn’t smooth as it cools. It buckles and folds and freezes mid-motion, and on the north shore you start to see it in bulk for the first time — the pasture giving way to lava field, the moss deepening and the underlying rock taking on the tumbled geometry of flows that cooled unevenly over centuries.

The road stayed dirt the entire way in, through the lava fields thickening on either side, through the first glimpses of Kirkjufell’s wedge shape appearing far ahead. We turned off before reaching any of it, down a short track toward the water, to a working farm that has been processing Greenland shark for nine generations.