Iceland Off the Bus

Back down the chain and forty minutes west, still under a volcano but a bigger one, Keldur is the oldest farmhouse in the country and it has a tunnel. The turf-built manor sits at the foot of Hekla, its old hall framed with timbers reckoned to date from the twelfth century, and it turns up in Njáls saga as Ingjaldur's farm before becoming a thirteenth-century stronghold of the Oddaverjar; Jón Loftsson, foster-father of Snorri Sturluson, is thought to be buried here. Beneath the floor runs a jarðhús, an underground escape passage of the exact kind the sagas describe for times of feud, rediscovered in a 1998 excavation (the sort of detail that rewards reading the story before you turn up). People lived here until 1946; the National Museum keeps it now, and its cluster of grass-roofed buildings sits on Iceland's tentative UNESCO list. You'll spend about an hour inside, a good part of it stooping under the low doorways and stepping over the raised thresholds, built for keeping the heat in, not for you.

An hour and a half further west, out where the land flattens to a treeless plate against the sea, Strandarkirkja is the church Icelanders still pay for miracles. It stands alone on the Selvogur coast facing the open Atlantic, and for centuries it has been the country's votive church, people posting donations in hope of good fortune or an answered prayer, not tourists turning up for the architecture. The legend goes that sailors caught in a storm were guided safely to shore by a mysterious light and built the church where they landed; the bay beside it is still called Engilsvík, Angel's Bay. The present timber church dates to 1888, and the offerings have at times made it one of the wealthiest churches in the country relative to its tiny parish. You come for half an hour and spend it standing in the wind coming straight off the water, long enough to understand why a light in it once looked, to a drowning man, like an angel. Then point the car north-west. The soft part of the trip is over.

The three hours or so north-west from Strandarkirkja are the trip changing gears: the south-coast farms give way to the long body of Snæfellsnes, and you climb up onto the peninsula toward Stykkishólmur, where Helgafell, all of 73 metres, turns out to be one of the most storied places in the sagas and yet barely visited. In pagan times it was so sacred to Thor that, per Eyrbyggja saga, no one was to look at it unwashed and nothing living was to be harmed on it. Later it held an important Augustinian monastery and became the last home and reputed grave of Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir, the tragic heroine of Laxdæla saga. Folk tradition says a first-time visitor who climbs from Guðrún's grave in silence, without looking back or speaking, and faces east at the top, may make three wishes that come true (provided they're kept secret, which rules out our telling you whether it works). It's a short, steep, unbarriered walk of about three-quarters of an hour up and down, and the view over Breiðafjörður at the top is the ordinary reward stacked on the strange one. Sleep out at Ólafsvík near the tip; tomorrow the peninsula gets stranger.

The tip of the peninsula is another hour and a half west, past Ólafsvík, and Djúpalónssandur is a black-pebble beach that used to be a fishing station and never quite tidied up after itself. You reach it on foot through a lava field of jagged rock inside Snæfellsjökull National Park, and the sand itself was once Dritvík, one of Iceland's busiest fishing stations. Four lifting stones, from 23 to 154 kilograms, still lie there from the days a man had to hoist one to prove he was strong enough for a boat crew, try the lightest, then quietly revise your opinion of yourself. Rusted iron wreckage from the British trawler Epine, lost here in 1948, has been left in place on purpose as a memorial rather than cleared away, rusting among the pebbles where the sea put it. You'll spend maybe forty-five minutes reading the beach as the open-air museum it is, which is all the sea allows: swimming is banned for the dangerous currents and rogue waves, so keep to the pebbles and the stones and don't turn your back on the water.

This is where the guide stops pretending. From Djúpalónssandur it's close to four hundred kilometres and the better part of six hours up into the Westfjords, a day handed almost entirely to the windscreen, and the last stretch is a steep gravel mountain road down to Rauðasandur past Patreksfjörður, the last town with a pump and a shop, so use both. What you've driven all that way for is a ten-kilometre beach that came out the wrong colour: gold, ochre and red instead of the usual Icelandic black, the shade coming largely from pulverised scallop shells, facing Breiðafjörður below steep mountains. It reads as idyllic right up until you learn what happened at the eastern end. There stood the farm of Sjöundá, site of a notorious 1802 double murder by Bjarni Bjarnason and Steinunn Sveinsdóttir, who were sentenced by the king and executed in 1805; the case became Gunnar Gunnarsson's 1929 novel Svartfugl. You'll want an hour and a half down on the sand, watching the light move the colours around and a resident seal population work the shallows. The emptiness here stays strange in a way the south-coast beaches gave up on long ago.

The next day is the mirror of the last: another haul, well over four hundred kilometres and a bit over six hours, back out of the Westfjords and along the north coast to Skagafjörður. Everything in you will want a hot soak at the end of it, and Grettislaug is exactly that, tied to the most famous outlaw in the country. It sits on the shore at Reykir, near the boats out to Drangey, and takes both its name and its story from Grettis saga: Grettir the Strong is said to have warmed himself in a spring here after swimming across from the island, one of the feats that made his legend. The old springs were wrecked by a storm in 1934 and the present pool rebuilt in 1992, so what you lower yourself into is a rustic, local-feeling soak rather than a polished lagoon, slippery stones, sea-cold air on your shoulders, hot water below, no lifeguard within shouting distance. Sauðárkrókur down the road has the beds and the food; the two hours you spend in the pool first, watching Drangey sit black on the water where Grettir swam from, are how you earn them. Come for the saga and the raw setting, not the amenities, because there aren't any.

Just over three hours east along the north, the tour buses reappear, but they cluster down at the pseudocraters and lava fields around Reykjahlíð and skip Vindbelgjarfjall. This 529-metre tuff cone stands on Mývatn's north-western shore. Its marked path crosses a working farm, so close the gate carefully behind you. The route stays gentle until a steep final push opens a panorama over the lake, its islands and craters. Local folklore puts the outlaw Víga-Skúta in a refuge on the eastern slope at features still called Skútahellir and Skútaskriða, although the story never entered the medieval sagas. The round trip takes roughly two hours, but allow closer to three if you want time at the summit.

The last three hours run east off the Mývatn plateau and down into the green of Fljótsdalur, past Egilsstaðir, to finish on the grimmest story of the route. Skriðuklaustur, founded around 1493, was the last monastery established in Catholic Iceland before the Reformation dissolved it in 1554. A dig between 2000 and 2012 uncovered a cemetery of some 300 graves, and the bones told a different story: infections, birth defects and long-term illness, evidence of a place that also worked as a hospital for monks and local people. Allow an hour and a half for the marked paths around the excavated foundations. The quiet setting gives the evidence room to land.