Skageflå
Encyclopedia
Geirangerfjord
The Geiranger Fjord is a fjord in the Sunnmøre region of Møre og Romsdal county in Norway. It is in the municipality of Stranda. It is a long branch of the Storfjord...
in Stranda
Stranda
Stranda is a municipality in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. It is part of the Sunnmøre region. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Stranda....
, Møre og Romsdal
Møre og Romsdal
is a county in the northernmost part of Western Norway. It borders the counties of Sør-Trøndelag, Oppland and Sogn og Fjordane. The county administration is located in Molde, while Ålesund is the largest city.-The name:...
county, Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
. Skageflå lies approximately 250 metres (820.2 ft) above the fjord
Fjord
Geologically, a fjord is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created in a valley carved by glacial activity.-Formation:A fjord is formed when a glacier cuts a U-shaped valley by abrasion of the surrounding bedrock. Glacial melting is accompanied by rebound of Earth's crust as the ice...
. The farm is a 2 to 4 hour walk from Geiranger
Geiranger
Geiranger is a small tourist village in Sunnmøre in the municipality of Stranda in Møre og Romsdal county, in the western part of Norway. It lies at the head of the Geirangerfjord, which is a branch of the Storfjord. The nearest city is Ålesund...
, and can also be reached with help of a local sightseeing
Tourism
Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes".Tourism has become a...
boat (M/S Geirangerfjord). The boat takes passengers to a spot on the fjord just below the farm, from which point they face a very steep half-hour climb. Coastal Odyssey, a sea kayaking company, runs guided kayaking tours to the farm with interpretation. Directly across the fjord is the old Knivsflå
Knivsflå
Knivsflå is one of a handful of farms along the sides of Geirangerfjord in Stranda, Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. Actually it was two farms sharing the location, and they have been inhabited since at least the 1600s. There is also a mountain pasture situated some above the fjord. It is...
farm and the Seven Sisters waterfall
Seven Sisters Waterfall, Norway
The Seven Sisters is the 39th tallest waterfall in Norway. The waterfall consists of seven separate streams, and it is located along the Geirangerfjord in the municipality of Stranda in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. The waterfall is located just south of the historic Knivsflå farm, across the...
.
Although it was abandoned in 1916, Skageflå was once one of the richer goat
Goat
The domestic goat is a subspecies of goat domesticated from the wild goat of southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. The goat is a member of the Bovidae family and is closely related to the sheep as both are in the goat-antelope subfamily Caprinae. There are over three hundred distinct breeds of...
farms in Geiranger
Geiranger
Geiranger is a small tourist village in Sunnmøre in the municipality of Stranda in Møre og Romsdal county, in the western part of Norway. It lies at the head of the Geirangerfjord, which is a branch of the Storfjord. The nearest city is Ålesund...
, and had 2 or 3 mountain pasture
Transhumance
Transhumance is the seasonal movement of people with their livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures. In montane regions it implies movement between higher pastures in summer and to lower valleys in winter. Herders have a permanent home, typically in valleys. Only the herds travel, with...
s for its animals. The farm was inhabited from the middle ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
until 1916; it is now a tourist attraction. A rock slide in 1873 destroyed much of the cultivated land. From the fjord, the farm has a difficult uphill hike to get to the farm.
Magdalene Thoresen, Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
's mother-in-law, said of the area:
This fjord is surrounded by the steepest and, one is almost tempted to say, the most preposterous mountains on the entire west coast. It is very narrow and has no habitable shore area, for the precipitous heights rise in sheer and rugged strata almost straight out of the water. Foaming waterfalls plunge into the fjord from jagged peaks. There are, however, a few mountain farms here, and of these one or two have such hazardous access, by paths that wind around steep precipices, and by bridges that are fixed to the mountain with iron bolts and rings, that they bear witness in a most striking way to the remarkable powers of invention which the challenges of nature have developed in man.