Skógasafn Museum

Probably the best museum in Iceland outside of Reykjavik, the Skógasafn Museum is a wonderful repository of Icelandic history, covering housing, transport, natural history and in general life before the luxuries of civilisation arrived after WW2. It was a hard life, one of the hardest in Europe, with a tough climate, natural disasters and famines, not helped by the lack of wood due to early deforestation.

One highlight is this old fishing boat, used for over 90 years without any fatalities, unusual on rough seas off the south coast of Iceland, home to a large number of ship wrecks. These shoes are amazingly made of fish skin.Though probably not from this somewhat terrifying fish, which appears to have eyes.The highlight of the museum for me were the old houses, from the incredibly small, cold and damp stone and earth dwellings through to relative new (around a hundred years old) houses which felt much older, a sign of how far Iceland was behind the rest of Europe until relatively recently.

I loved the use of colour, particularly in the church, which turned out to be a standard interior paint job for an Icelandic church.

The transport part of the museum was home to quite a few trucks…

The natural history area also had some interesting sights.