We camped that night at Stokksnes with the German family, out on the peninsula under the mountain, and spent the next morning there with them.

The mountain is Vestrahorn, and it is the reason people come. It stands four hundred and fifty-four metres straight up off a flat black beach, with sharp jagged peaks, and it is one of the most photographed mountains in Iceland. It is also unusual rock. Most Icelandic mountains are volcanic basalt, but Vestrahorn is gabbro, a different, older kind of rock, which is part of why it looks the way it does. The day was cloudy, so we did not get the whole of it at once. The cloud sat on the peaks and the sun broke through in patches, lighting up one part of the mountain and then another while the rest stayed grey. You take the mountain in pieces on a day like that.

We walked the black sand beaches below it with the family. The sand is dark and flat, and when the tide leaves a thin sheet of water on it the mountain reflects in the wet sand, which is the shot everyone comes for.

Then we went to the Viking village. It is a film set, a cluster of turf-and-timber buildings made to look like an old Norse village, built out here for a movie. The odd part is that the film was never finished, so the village was left standing where it was built, a set for a film nobody saw. It has become an attraction in its own right. While we were walking through it the sun came out properly, more than it had all morning, and lit the buildings and the mountain behind them.