Chapter 1 part 2

When I visited Skúvoy to research this book I took the direct ferry one morning from Tórshavn and had most of the day ashore and walked the walk up to the highest point of the island. There I found a pile of dark rocks deposited in the ice age which in my, or a childs, fantasy could be a fort or a castle tower looking out over the north atlantic. If a longship or a knarr, a broader beamed trading ship, appeared I could imagine the boys rushing down to alert the village where 68 people live today. There was always a danger from pirates and slave traders so some villages built refuges to hide in high in the hills and out of sight from below. Going down hill on a faroese island is like running down a house roof, I was lucky enough to learn rock climbing in my teens in the Clifton Gorge

and knew the basic survival rules for this kind of terrain. What you do is a sort of controlled fall by making giant strides in slow motion, then landing on two feet every so often in order to check your momentum and keep the speed under control. Boy's games.

1423/ 50 000