Dverghamrar
9 July 2019
Dverghamrar just sounds like a cool spot. The name sounds strong, powerful, hard… and as the place is a grassy field with basalt rock towers plunging through the hillside, this small but mighty location lives up to the sound of its name!
The landscape as you drive along the Ring Road near Dverghamrar is breathtaking. On the south side of the road you see perfectly flat farmland land that stretches all the way out to the sea; on the north side of the road, towering cliffs rise steeply overhead, forming a sheer wall of stone. Right before you reach Dverghamrar, you pass by a thin ribbon waterfall plunging from the top of the cliff. Known as Foss a Sidu, this high waterfall is a pretty sight, though it is inaccessible as it is on private land. Dverghamrar is just a few meters further on the road…
There is a little rest stop area that also serves as parking for Dverghamrar, and if the rest area wasn’t there, most would probably miss the basalt columns, as the land around Dverghamrar dips down from the road to a little valley mostly obscured from view. We stopped at the rest area and made our way down the trail into the valley created by the basalt columns.
Just like the basalt columns back on Reynisfjara, these amazing natural stone structures protrude from the ground with their geometric shapes. Not nearly as tall as Reynisfjara, Dverghamrar was still a unique spot stuck right in this grassy field on its own. We climbed along the rocks, made it to the top of the basalt columns to try for a better view of Foss a Sidu, and I even found a perfect basalt troll throne. Most columns were crammed together in a mound, but at one part a column seemed to detach from the rest and lean away from the mound on an angle. It looked like you could just kick it down!
We walked along the basalt valley before the trail passed through a small cluster of trees. An “Icelandic Forest” would be the common joke, as there isn’t much in the way of dense tree cover on the island. As we came out the other side, we saw a group of horses across the road. We watched as the farmers used their trucks to corral the horses, and we scrambled along the basalt mounds to get a better view of the horses running along the roadside to new pastures.
A short stop that you would probably miss if you didn’t know it was there, but a great stop anyway!
PHOTO GALLERY
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