We left the Vikar campground this morning and drove for Gjógv, a village at the far northeast tip of the island of Eysturoy. Eysturoy is the second-largest of the Faroe islands and one of the most rugged, a place of steep peaks and two long fjords that nearly cut it in two. Slættaratindur, the highest mountain in the country at about two thousand nine hundred feet, stands on this island, and you feel the height of the land the whole way across.

The road out of Vikar was single lane for much of the way, running through a string of small villages set along the water. It passes close by Fossá, the tallest waterfall in the islands, which drops in two long steps down the mountainside beside the road, and past smaller falls coming off the high ground all along the route. We were heading out mid-morning, against the flow, and met a fair amount of tourist traffic coming the other way, cars driving in as we drove out, so there was a good deal of pulling into the passing places and waiting our turn on the narrow stretches.

Most Faroe driving runs through tunnels, and after them the road brought us along the fjord to the village of Funningur, tucked down at the water. At Funningur the road forked. One branch carried a sign that read “Heimi í Túni,” and I took it for the name of a tunnel, some route named Heimi that cut on through the mountain, so that is the way I went. It was not a tunnel. Heimi í Túni is a Faroese place name. Túni is the home-field, the enclosed grassy land around a house or village, and the whole name means something close to “home in the field.” The branch led down into the streets of Funningur itself, and the streets narrowed until there was no way forward and no room to turn the truck. The only way out was back. We reversed something close to half a mile, up the way we had come, to the fork where we had gone wrong.

The other branch was the road to Gjógv, and it climbs. It bends up the mountainside in a long series of hairpins, tight and steep, and for stretches it narrows to a single lane with pull-outs, the same kind of road we drove in Iceland.

One thing we have come to appreciate about driving in the Faroes is how calm the roads feel. There are far fewer visitors here than in Iceland, so on these narrow single lanes you are mostly sharing the road with people who drive them every day, locals and drivers who carry visitors for a living. Everyone knows the etiquette without thinking about it, who pulls into which passing place, who waits, how to pass without any fuss. It makes the hard roads easier for everyone on them. Single-lane roads take a little learning, and where a place is busy with people meeting them for the first time, it takes more care from everybody. Here the rhythm was easy, and we were glad of it going up that single lane mountain road.

The road brought us over the top and down to Gjógv, where we found the campground and left the truck. We walked into the town on foot.

Gjógv is worth every bit of the road to reach it. The village is named after the thing that makes it: a gorge, which is what the word means, a long narrow cleft in the rock, about two hundred metres of it, running from the village straight down to the sea. Long ago it served as the village’s natural harbour, boats hauled up inside the cleft out of the swell. You walk out to it from the houses and stand at the edge, the rock walls dropping away on both sides and the sea working in and out at the foot.

The village sits in a bowl of green with steep mountains behind and the open North Atlantic in front. There is a small church, plain and white, from the last century. The houses are few now. A place like this held over two hundred people in living memory and holds a fraction of that today, the young gone to the towns.

We are camped at Gjógv for the night. There is another European rig parked next to us. We saw them on our first night in the Faroe Islands. The tourist crowd that came through earlier in the day has gone, back to the towns or the ferry, and the village and the trails around it have fallen quiet. That is the best hour in a place like this, when the visitors leave and the village settles back into itself, and you get the gorge and the green and the sea nearly to yourself.