North Iceland

Húsavík claims the first house in Iceland: the Swede Garðar Svavarsson wintered there around 870, before the settlement proper, and gave the bay its name. It was a northern chieftain, the lawspeaker Þorgeir of Ljósavatn, who ruled at the Althing in 1000 that Iceland should become Christian, and who by tradition threw his idols into the falls since called Goðafoss. The north received its own bishop at Hólar in Hjaltadalur in 1106, and for seven centuries Hólar was its capital in all but name: Iceland's first printing press was set up there around 1530, the first Icelandic Bible was printed on it in 1584, and its last Catholic bishop, Jón Arason, was beheaded in 1550 resisting the Reformation.

The Sturlung civil wars of the 13th century were fought largely in Skagafjörður, where the battle of Örlygsstaðir was fought in 1238. Húnaþing saw the country's last execution, in January 1830, when Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Friðrik Sigurðsson were beheaded for murder. Akureyri, a Danish trading post with twelve inhabitants when it was chartered in 1786, grew with the farmers' cooperatives that began in Þingeyjarsýsla in 1882 and came to run the north's trade. Hard winters and the ashfall of Askja's eruption in 1875 pushed thousands to emigrate to Canada and the United States, a story told at Hofsós.

Norwegian boats began landing herring at Siglufjörður in 1903, and within decades it was a town of some 3,000 people, living on a catch that in good years brought in a quarter or more of the country's export income; the herring vanished at the end of the 1960s and the town shrank by more than half. At Mývatn, farmers dynamited a dam on the Laxá in 1970 to protect the lake, and the Krafla fissures erupted nine times between 1975 and 1984.

Northerners regard their Icelandic as the clearest in the country: the harðmæli of Eyjafjörður and Þingeyjarsýsla keeps p, t and k hard and aspirated in the middle of words, where southerners soften them. Akureyri calls itself the capital of the north and keeps the institutions to match — the Hof culture house, an art museum in a former dairy, and the houses of two writers, the children's author Jón Sveinsson, "Nonni", and Matthías Jochumsson, the pastor who wrote the words of the national anthem. The town divides on football lines between KA and Þór.

Skagafjörður is horse country, the one district where horses are said to outnumber people, and its year turns on the autumn round-ups, when horses are driven down from the mountains and sorted. The district is also known for its choirs, its horsemanship and its gatherings.

Around Mývatn, farmers still collect duck eggs by an old rule that leaves at least four in every nest, and the thirteen Yule Lads of Icelandic folklore are said to live in the lava of Dimmuborgir with their mother Grýla and her husband Leppalúði. Siglufjörður holds a folk-music festival each July in the town of the pastor Bjarni Þorsteinsson, who collected many of the country's old folk songs. On Grímsey the islanders' devotion to chess so impressed the American scholar Willard Fiske that he sent the islanders supplies and left the island money in his will, without ever landing there.

Akureyri, with about 20,000 people, is by far the north's largest town. The rest are spread thinly: Sauðárkrókur (about 2,600) and Húsavík (about 2,400) are the only other towns of any size, followed by Dalvík, Siglufjörður, Blönduós and Ólafsfjörður, while Reykjahlíð, the village at Mývatn, has a few hundred people and Grímsey fewer than sixty.

Akureyri is the service centre for everything between the Westfjords and the east: the regional hospital, a university founded in 1987, an airport with flights to Reykjavík and seasonal services from Britain, and the offices of Samherji, one of Iceland's largest fishing companies, whose trawlers anchor the Eyjafjörður economy. Skagafjörður is run to a striking degree by its cooperative, Kaupfélag Skagfirðinga, which owns the dairy, the slaughterhouse and the shops. Elsewhere the work is sheep, dairy and horses, the Krafla and Þeistareykir geothermal power stations, and tourism, which has turned Húsavík from a fishing port into a whale-watching one and Mývatn into a village of hotels.

Winter sets the rhythm. Snow lies from November to April, children ski at Hlíðarfjall after school, the pass roads to Reykjavík and the east close several times a season, and the geothermal pool in every town is where people meet. Housing for seasonal workers at Mývatn and Húsavík, cruise-ship crowds in Akureyri and the slow emptying of the north-east corner around Raufarhöfn and Þórshöfn are the current worries.

The north's kitchen runs on smoke and geothermal steam. At Mývatn rye dough is buried in the hot ground and dug up as dense hverabrauð, eaten with butter and smoked fish; in a land short of firewood, peat, dung and dried heather long served as fuel. Hangikjöt, smoked lamb, is eaten here as throughout Iceland, whose lamb is a point of national pride.

Laufabrauð, leaf bread, began here: paper-thin rounds cut into geometric patterns and fried, made by whole families as part of the Christmas preparations and now eaten throughout Iceland. Skyr, the soft yogurt-like cheese eaten across Iceland, is a staple here too.

Eyjafjörður is also craft-beer country: Kaldi has been brewed at Árskógssandur in the Czech tradition since 2006, and the brewery now has a beer spa beside it; Einstök is brewed in Akureyri; and Segull 67 brews in Siglufjörður. Siglufjörður's cafés serve pickled herring on rye, Húsavík's harbour restaurants the day's cod and haddock, and on Grímsey and Drangey guillemot eggs are still gathered from the cliffs each spring.

Akureyri sits at the head of Eyjafjörður beneath snow-streaked mountains: the church of 1940 by Guðjón Samúelsson, the timber houses of the old town, the botanical garden, the Forest Lagoon baths across the fjord, and the ski lifts of Hlíðarfjall above. Ferries run to the quiet island of Hrísey from Árskógssandur, and from Dalvík to Grímsey, where a walk across the Arctic Circle passes puffin cliffs. North of Dalvík the road tunnels through the Tröllaskagi peninsula, a block of peaks over 1,000 metres high, by way of empty Héðinsfjörður to Siglufjörður, whose Herring Era Museum fills three harbour buildings, and continues round to the Hofsós swimming pool above the sea and the cathedral of 1763 at Hólar.

To the west, Skagafjörður offers the Glaumbær turf farm and boat trips to the bird island of Drangey, where the outlaw Grettir died; on the Vatnsnes peninsula beyond, seals haul out near the 15-metre sea stack of Hvítserkur.

East of Akureyri the Ring Road passes Goðafoss and reaches Lake Mývatn: the Skútustaðir pseudocraters, the lava towers of Dimmuborgir, the kilometre-wide Hverfjall crater, the Grjótagjá cave, the mud pots of Hverir below Námafjall, the Víti crater and still-warm lava of Krafla, and the Mývatn Nature Baths. Húsavík, to the north, is a centre of whale watching in Iceland, its boats meeting several species of whale on Skjálfandi bay, with a whale museum by the harbour and the GeoSea sea baths. The Diamond Circle continues to Ásbyrgi, a horseshoe canyon with 100-metre walls, and up the Jökulsárgljúfur gorge to Dettifoss, 44 metres high and 100 wide, reputedly the second most powerful waterfall in Europe after the Rhine Falls. Beyond lie the Arctic Henge at Raufarhöfn, the seabird cliffs of Langanes and, by summer 4x4 track, the Askja caldera and the table mountain Herðubreið.