Day 4 Part 1 - En route to Skaftafell

[I have a short disclaimer before beginning this post. As you may have noticed by now, I have not been posting every day, but I am recording each day in sequence. So, I might post a few days at once, because I am unable for some reason to make a post that day. When I use the word "today" I mean the day that is being talked about, not the day that blogspot.com tells you it was posted. Hopefully no one is confused!]

Today we left Vik and headed for Skaftafell, at the base of the largest glacier in Iceland, called Vatnajökull (meaning "Glacier of Lakes"). On the way we made a stop at Núpsstaður, a farm in the Icelandic countryside. It's famous for its church, parts of which date back to the 17th century, and its sod-roof buildings.

I made some sketches of the buildings and their interiors, trying to compose their roof construction and making note of interior details.

The roof is surprisingly complex in terms of the forces involved. From my observations, it appeared that the the roof itself is made of wood beams, overlapping thin slate stone and straw, sod and grass. The roof is supported by beams that have been cut to overlap each other and sit on top of the column. The sheer mass of it all keeps the system in place and is built to last any weather condition. But the materials are easily accessible and it seems like the most effort was put into hewing the wood beams and columns.

The church was fascinating as a social building. Simply put, it is tiny. It was obviously built for the scale of the farm and the farm always stayed the same size.

The church is the sod-roofed building with the peaked roof behind the stone wall. I included all of the background and foreground information for scale. It is a tiny building!

This was assembled from two images, and one of them was blurry. I also forgot to put a person in the shot for scale, so here's my two interior elevation sketches of the inside:

From the outside, the peak of the roof is straight, but you see when you get inside that the front part of the church uses some of the roof space for storage. Then the building opens a bit and the full roof height is used. It's a humbling space.

We left the farm and continued on to Skaftafell. We stopped once more at a monument to the 1996 eruption of the volcano Katla which flooded the surrounding countryside with melted glacial water at a peak rate of  two million cubic feet per second. The floodwaters also famously tore a bridge out of its holdings, twisting metal and carrying it kilometers downstream in some cases. The monument is a piece of that bridge. It's really heavy!

I'll end the post here for now, since lots more happened when we arrived at Skaftafell, so I will finish up with Day 4 later. Thanks for reading!