Story
The story of Kirkjufell
Danish sailors once called this peak Sukkertoppen, the Sugar Loaf, and before it got its present name it was probably known as Firðafjall. Today it is Kirkjufell, Church Mountain, a 463 m hill on the north coast of Snæfellsnes near Grundarfjörður, claimed to be the most photographed mountain in Iceland. Game of Thrones fans may recognise it as the arrowhead mountain from seasons 6 and 7. Kirkjufell contains volcanic rock but is not a volcano.
It is a nunatak, a peak that stood above the surrounding glaciers in the Ice Age, built of alternating layers of Pleistocene lava and sandstone with tuff at the summit. The land around it shows unusually clear traces of erosion by glaciers and rivers. Walking around the mountain takes about three hours.
Climbing it has proved dangerous: there were fatal falls in 1945, 2017, 2018 and 2022, and a few months after the death in October 2022, the third in a few years, the landowners decided to close the mountain.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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More highlights in Snæfellsnes
- LóndrangarThe Lóndrangar are a pair of rock pinnacles in Iceland. They are volcanic plugs of basalt, that have been hewn out from softer surrounding rock by erosion.
- RauðfeldsgjáRauðfeldsgjá is a ravine in Snæfellsnes in Iceland.
- Svörtuloft LighthouseA 9.5-metre square concrete lighthouse built in 1931 above the Svörtuloft cliffs at the western tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula.
- HellnarHellnar is an ancient fishing village, a cluster of old houses and buildings situated close to Arnarstapi on the westernmost part of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, Iceland.
- ArnarstapiArnarstapi or Stapi is a small fishing and tourist village at the foot of Mt. Stapafell between Hellnar village and Breiðavík farms on the southern side of Snæfellsnes, Iceland.
- GerðubergGerðuberg is a cliff of dolerite, a coarse-grained basalt rock, located on western peninsula Snæfellsnes and on the western edge of the Hnappadalur valley, 46 km in the north of the town of Borgarnes and 115 km to Reykjavík.