Tempting as it is to spend all our time absorbing the beauty of the fjords, the Jaeren region that unfolds south of Stavanger is worth more than a cursory glance. This is farming country: a land of flat, fertile meadows that roll to the crashing North Sea; a land of big skies and wide-open horizons. The rain has swept away during the night to reveal a morning as clear as cut crystal. The light here has a crispness and purity that sharpens every contour on the coastal road – one of Norway’s 18 national tourist routes – that scenically runs through the region. For hikers, the big draw is simply walking along the gorgeously long, dune-flanked beaches like Borestranden and Solastranden, perhaps stopping off for a dose of heritage on the way at sights like Sverd I Fjell. Here three huge Viking swords embedded in rock mark where King Harald Fairhair did battle to unify Norway into a kingdom in 872 AD.
From here, the road cruises on south and gradually the scenery begins to change. The lush meadows give way to an otherworldly landscape of gigantic, scarred boulders and pockmarked hillocks of pale grey rock mottled with vegetation. I’ve arrived in the Magma Geopark. While glacial erosion at the height of the last Ice Age had a hand in shaping this bizarre landscape, its origins reach back many millennia further. ‘Lunar’ might be the word that springs to mind and it’s bang on the money as the dominant rock here is anorthosite, a rare igneous rock more common on the moon than on the face of the earth, formed by red-hot magma around 930 million years ago.
Such facts have geologists rubbing their hands with glee, but even if you are indifferent to the rock, the hiking here is superb, the setting unique. Sogndalstrand is a fine base for dipping into the park. Hugging the shore of turquoise Jøssingfjord, the little harbour village is jam-packed with listed timber buildings from the 1800s, which are liberally decorated with flower baskets in summer. A boat ride across the fjord takes us within a hair’s breadth of the rugged rocks and the waterfalls pummeling their faces. Sea eagles wheel overhead in the bluest of skies. We dock in Helleren, where two rudimentary houses nuzzle under an overhang. The area has been settled since the Stone Age, but the current buildings date to the 1800s, when they provided shelter to farmers who eked out a living from fishing and shepherding. Close by, a marked trail makes leads 300m up and over gigantic slabs of anorthosite to Hellersheia – a moonwalk of sorts – providing tremendous views over the weird, potholed rockscape. At the top, the views crack open to reveal the blue sweep of Jøssingfjord and the sea beyond.
More enthralling still, perhaps, is the park’s star trek: the three-hour circular hike to Brufjell. The descent to the coast on a waymarked trail (and the ascent back up again) is not without challenge, but it is made easier by steel handgrips in places and refreshing dips on the white-pebble beach of Sandvig. Resembling caves and thrashed by waves, Brufjell’s enormous horizontal potholes are so big you can climb inside some of them. Here, almost at the country’s southernmost tip, you can look out along coastline as it dips and curves, imagining the raw elemental forces and grinding glaciers that have, over millennia, carved out this most exquisite of countries.
