Key takeaways
- Everything and everybody arrived by boat and then went up.
- A house, a barn and enough grass for a few animals, and nothing else.
- A preserved stretch of the shore path survives at Styvi.
- Abandoned across the twentieth century as the arithmetic failed.
What you are looking at
Somewhere in the first twenty minutes the guide will point at a green shelf partway up a wall, and there will be a building on it.
These are farms. Not shelters, not summer huts, but holdings where families lived year-round, on ledges where a glacier happened to leave a bench of workable ground a long way above the water and a long way below the top.
There is no road to any of them. There never was. The fjord was the road, and the ledge was reached from the water by a path that in some cases needed a ladder to finish.
Once you know what they are, you cannot stop finding them. There are far more than anybody points out, and half of them are visible only as a rectangle of brighter green where a field used to be.
The guide matters here more than anywhere else on the trip. Rock and water speak for themselves; a rectangle of brighter green on a ledge does not, and without somebody to say what it was you would go past it entirely.
How a family lived up there
Grass, mainly, and what grass supports. A ledge farm kept goats and sheep, sometimes a cow, and grew hay to feed them through a winter that ran half the year.
The steepness was the whole problem. Hay was cut on slopes too severe to stand on comfortably and carried down by hand or sledged. Animals grazed ground that would frighten a modern walker, which is exactly why there are still goats on these walls.
Fish supplemented everything, because the fjord was in front of the door. Some holdings kept a boat as their only vehicle, and losing it was a serious event.
And the children went to school by boat, rowed out and rowed back, in whatever the fjord was doing that morning. That detail does more to explain these places than any statistic.
A ledge of green above vertical rock
The old road along the shore
Before roads and engines, this fjord was on the postal route between Bergen and the east, and the post went along the shore on foot and by boat.
A stretch of that old path survives at Styvi, on the eastern shore, preserved and walkable. It is a narrow way cut and built along the waterline, and walking it is the clearest available answer to how people moved through a landscape with vertical sides.
Styvi itself is a farm with a small museum, reachable by boat and on foot along the path from Bleiklindi, and it is the standard destination for people who want to spend a day rather than two hours on this fjord.
From a RIB you pass it. Knowing what it is turns a cluster of buildings into the last surviving piece of the infrastructure that held this place together.
Bakka, and the ones still occupied
Not everything is abandoned. Bakka, a small village on the western shore towards Gudvangen, is still inhabited, with a white timber church that is among the most photographed buildings on the fjord for the simple reason that it is the only building in the frame.
Dyrdal and several other holdings are empty, in the way rural Norway is full of empty: buildings standing, roofs mostly on, fields greener than the forest around them because they were cleared and grazed for centuries.
A few of the ledge farms are used seasonally now, kept up by descendants who come in summer. The livestock economy that justified them is gone, but the buildings and the family connection often are not.
The pattern is the familiar Norwegian one. The population did not vanish; it moved to where there was a road, a school, a shop and a wage.
Undredal, on the Aurlandsfjord side, is the counter-example worth knowing about. It kept enough people to stay a working village, it has a famously small stave church, and it still makes the goat cheese the area is known for. It is what these settlements looked like when they worked.
By boat
Every farm on these walls was reached from the water. Children were rowed to school, and hay was carried down slopes too steep to stand on.
Why they left
Because the arithmetic stopped working, and it stopped working everywhere in rural Norway at roughly the same time.
A ledge farm was viable when a family could feed itself off it and had nowhere better to go. It stopped being viable when there were wages in towns, when fishing industrialised into a few harbours, and when the alternative to carrying hay down a cliff was a job that did not involve carrying hay down a cliff.
The twentieth century emptied these shelves steadily rather than suddenly. Children who went to school by boat took jobs that did not require one, and the last generation on many of these farms simply had no successor.
Standing in an open boat looking up at a green shelf with a roof on it, the honest reaction is not nostalgia. It is that leaving was obviously the right decision, and that somebody's grandmother nonetheless spent her whole life up there.
The buildings outlast the people by a long way in this climate. Cold dry air and hard timber mean a house abandoned sixty years ago can still be standing square, which is why the fjord reads as recently emptied rather than long ruined.
