In Nordland the sea is both road and clock

Almost everyone who thinks of Nordland thinks of Lofoten: dark peaks, houses over the water, the familiar photograph. It is a real part of the territory, but only its north-western tip. The rest of the county, with Helgeland in the south, Salten in the centre, Ofoten in the east and Vesterålen in the north, rarely appears on postcards, and that is exactly where you understand what kind of place it is.

One look at a map shows the first trait: the coast is in charge. The mainland is a narrow strip pressed against the Swedish border, and in front of it spreads a cloud of islands reaching out to the open sea. For centuries, living here meant living facing the water and moving across it. You still notice it on every journey.

01 Five hundred kilometres long, six wide

Nordland stretches about 500 kilometres from south to north, yet driving from one end to the other takes close to 800. The difference comes from the fjords, which force you around every arm of the sea, and from the islands, which do not always have bridges. At some 38,000 square kilometres it is Norway's fourth-largest county; with around 240,000 inhabitants, it ranks only eleventh by population. That is fewer than seven people per square kilometre.

At its narrowest point the county almost disappears. At the head of Hellemobotn, an arm of the Tysfjorden, the salt water lies just 6.3 kilometres in a straight line from the Swedish border: the thinnest waist in the whole country. There the shape of Nordland is plain to see, a rim of mountains and, in front of it, all that sea.

That geography explains where people live. Towns do not cluster inland but along the shores, on the islands and at the heads of the fjords. Bodø, the capital, is a port city; Narvik was born as a port; Mo i Rana, Mosjøen and Sandnessjøen sit at the water's edge. The map of Nordland is, in fact, a map of quays.

02 The road that boards the boat

The Fv17, known as Kystriksveien, the Coastal Route, follows the shore for 630 kilometres between Steinkjer, in neighbouring Trøndelag, and Bodø. It is the slow alternative to the inland E6, and its slowness is the point: six times the road stops at a quay and carries on across a stretch of sea. The six crossings are Holm–Vennesund, Horn–Andalsvågen, Forvik–Tjøtta, Levang–Nesna, Kilboghamn–Jektvik and Ågskardet–Forøy, and the longest take around an hour.

Travelling like this changes how you think about a day. You plan not by distance but by ferry timetables. You reach the quay, switch off the engine, wait. The crossing is a spell on deck with the wind in your face and the coast sliding past, and it is also when the landscape makes most sense, because from the water you see what the road hides.

Bridges came late and one at a time. The Helgeland Bridge, a 1,065-metre cable-stayed span over the Leirfjorden, opened in 1991 and tied the island of Alsta, home to Sandnessjøen, to the mainland. Each bridge like that changes an island's life, but the small islands still depend on the boat.

That dependence has a history. In the late nineteenth century a letter could take three weeks in summer and five months in winter to reach the north along this coast. On 2 July 1893 the steamer Vesteraalen, owned by Vesteraalens Dampskibsselskab and commanded by Richard With, left Trondheim for Hammerfest, calling at ports such as Brønnøysund, Sandnessjøen, Bodø and Svolvær. Hurtigruten, the coastal route, was born, and the post began arriving in seven days.

The ships on that route still call daily at Nordland's ports. In Stokmarknes, in Vesterålen, regarded as the birthplace of Hurtigruten, a museum keeps an entire ship on land, the 1956 Finnmarken. It sums the place up well: here one of the great monuments to local history is not a castle or a square, but a ship.

03 Six thousand five hundred islands and a duck

Off Helgeland the coast dissolves into archipelagos. The best known is Vega: some 6,500 islands, islets and skerries spread over more than a thousand square kilometres of sea, of which only about 69 are land. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2004, not for a spectacular landscape but for the way people learned to live in it.

The key is a sea duck, the eider. As early as the ninth century these islands were an important source of down, which came to account for around a third of the islanders' income. To attract the females, people built small nesting shelters, and today there are more than a thousand. Every year they are cleaned and their layer of seaweed is renewed. Once the birds leave with their chicks, the down left in the nest is collected.

That work fell mainly to women, and the UNESCO inscription explicitly recognises it. They guarded the colonies during nesting, keeping ravens and eagles away, and cleaned the down by hand. It takes more than sixty nests to fill one duvet, and cleaning that much can take up to a week. The tradition is still alive, if on a smaller scale.

Vega explains something repeated all along the coast: in Nordland the relationship with nature is not only about contemplation, but about living alongside it and caring for it. The islands were not conquered; people learned to share them.

04 A sea with a timetable

About ten kilometres south-east of Bodø the sea passes through a funnel. Saltstraumen is a strait some 3 kilometres long and 150 metres wide linking the Saltfjorden with the Skjerstadfjorden. Every six hours, with the tide, up to 400 million cubic metres of water force their way through it. The current reaches about 40 kilometres per hour and forms whirlpools up to 10 metres across and 5 deep.

What is remarkable is not only the force but the regularity. Saltstraumen keeps a timetable: it changes direction with the tide and, between one flow and the next, there is a moment of calm. The abundance of fish the current brings helps explain why people came here so early: the remains of a hunters' settlement some 10,000 years old are the oldest known traces of human presence in Bodø.

At the other end of the county, at the southern tip of Lofoten, between Moskenesøya and the island of Mosken, there is another famous current: Moskstraumen. In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe made it the setting of «A Descent into the Maelström», and Jules Verne brought the climax of «Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas» to it. The word maelstrom, now used in English for any gigantic whirlpool, spread from these waters.

Living next to these currents teaches a kind of patience. The sea is not always available: you wait for it to settle, read the tides, know when to go out. It is the logic of the ferry, taken to its extreme.

05 A glacier twenty metres above the sea

If the sea organises the coast, the ice drew it. Svartisen, «the black ice», covers some 369 square kilometres just north of the Arctic Circle. It is made up of two masses separated by the Vesterdalen valley, and the western one, Vestisen, is the second-largest glacier on the Norwegian mainland. Seven of the fifteen largest glaciers on the Norwegian mainland are in Nordland.

Its name comes from the colour of its old ice, darker than fresh ice. One of its tongues, Engabreen, descends towards the Holandsfjorden and in 2007 ended about 20 metres above sea level, the lowest point reached by any glacier on the European mainland. Here the ice almost touches salt water, and beneath it there is even a subglacial laboratory.

Further south, in Helgeland, the landscape bears other marks of ice and sea. Torghatten, a 258-metre granite dome on the island of Torget, is pierced by a natural tunnel 166 metres long and about 41 high, opening some 115 metres above today's sea level. Meltwater, the ice itself and the waves carved it over at least two glaciations. Local legend prefers another explanation, involving a troll, an arrow and a hat.

And on the island of Alsta, the Seven Sisters, De syv søstre, form a 22-kilometre ridge with seven summits, the highest at 1,072 metres. On each top there is a notebook where climbers write their names. From the ferry they appear as a jagged profile above the water, which is how almost everyone sees them.

06 The Arctic Circle is crossed by boat

The Arctic Circle, at around 66° 33′ north, crosses Nordland from side to side. By land, the E6 crosses it on the Saltfjellet plateau, at about 680 metres above sea level, where a visitor centre has marked the spot since 1990. It is the best-known crossing, made among bare mountains, far from the sea.

On the coast, the same line is crossed on the water. The ferry between Kilboghamn and Jektvik, on the Fv17, passes from south to north of the Arctic Circle mid-crossing. And those travelling on the coastal-route ships cross it between Nesna and Ørnes, off the islet of Vikingen, where a metal globe marks the parallel. Hardly anyone sets foot there: it is seen from the deck.

It is a detail, but it captures the county's character: even its most symbolic boundary is meant to be seen from the sea. North of that line, the midnight sun and the polar night stop being an abstract idea and start to shape the year.

07 The wall and the edge

From Bodø, on a clear day, you can make out across the Vestfjorden a line of mountains that looks closed. It is the Lofoten Wall: some 100 kilometres of peaks 800 to 1,000 metres high rising straight from the sea. Seen like this, from afar and from the water, it is easier to understand than close up. It is not a collection of picturesque villages but a mountain range half sunk in the ocean.

Lofoten also lives with an anomaly. It lies well north of the Arctic Circle and yet has one of the largest gaps in the world between its temperature and what its latitude would suggest. Atlantic currents soften its winters. It is another way in which the sea decides how life is lived here.

Further north, Vesterålen tells the same story differently. Off Andøya, the northernmost island of the archipelago, the edge of the continental shelf lies very close to the coast, and an undersea canyon, Bleiksdjupet, drops the seabed from about 200 metres to more than 2,000. That nearby depth feeds one of the largest known gatherings of sperm whales close to land. In few places does the deep ocean begin so close to a village.

08 How to travel it

Nordland cannot be understood in a hurry or from a single spot. The most revealing way to travel it is along the coast: the Fv17 through Helgeland, with its six ferries, up to Saltstraumen and Bodø; then the boat to Lofoten and, from there, on to Vesterålen. That way the territory reads in the order in which it is lived, crossing by crossing.

Leave time for the waiting, because it is part of the journey. Check ferry timetables before you set out and accept that the day will be arranged around them. Sleep on an island rather than just passing through, and go to Saltstraumen when the tide turns.

In the end, what stays with you from Nordland is not a particular landscape but a habit: looking at the sea before deciding anything. Here the water separates, but above all it connects, and the whole coast seems built on that idea. If you get home and catch yourself checking the timetable for the next boat, you will have understood the place.