Our second stop of the day took us from a mystery to something solid, from caves nobody can date to a farm you can walk through. Keldur is one of the oldest turf farms in Iceland, a little north of the road, and it is one of those places that shows you how people actually lived here, not the kings and the sagas but the ordinary hard business of getting through an Icelandic winter.

Turf houses are the old Icelandic way of building, walls and roofs of cut turf over a timber frame, warm against a hard climate and made from what the land gave. But the turf houses of the south are rarer than the ones in the north, and they are built differently. We had seen a northern one earlier, at Glaumbær, and those are made almost entirely of turf, great thick walls of it with barely a stone. Glaumbær has a story we have told already: its first church was built by the man we wrote about before, the the first European ever born in the Americas, who came home, settled there, and raised a church for his peregrin mother. Keldur is nothing like Glaumbær. It is not made of turf alone.

The farm sits by a spring that never freezes, and in a country like this a source of water that stays open all winter is not a small thing. It is most of the reason a farm could be here at all. There is also an old underground passage at the site, dug long ago.

The part that stays with you is how recent all this is. It is easy to look at a turf house and file it under ancient history. But Icelanders lived in houses like this, turf houses, right up until the Second World War and in some places after it. This was one of the poorest countries in Europe until well into the twentieth century, a nation of farmers and fishermen in turf and stone, and the leap from that to the modern country happened astonishingly fast, within a couple of generations. We have written about that jump before, in our Primer on the Icelandic Economy, and Keldur is where the abstract becomes concrete. This is not a museum of the distant past. This is how people here lived within living memory.

And Keldur has a church of its own. It has been a church site for centuries, the old Catholic ones here dedicated to the apostle Paul, and the small church standing now was built in 1875. So there is a thread running from one turf farm to another, north to south, both of them church farms as much as working steadings. At one the church was raised by a man born across an ocean; at the other it stands beside a never-freezing spring in the shadow of Hekla. Two ends of the same country, and the same quiet joining of farm and faith on the same patch of ground.