The Ghosts of Dritvík

Iceland's busiest fishing station once launched fifty boats a season from this black sand cove — and left behind a curse still blamed for wrecks on the beach.

Dritvík, on the black volcanic shore of the Snæfellsnes peninsula next to the beach at Djúpalónssandur, was for three centuries the largest seasonal fishing station in Iceland. From the 1500s until the mid-1800s, as many as sixty boats and six hundred fishermen worked from the cove during the spring season, living in temporary shelters through weeks of brutal, dangerous labour on the open Atlantic. The folklore attached to the site is correspondingly weighted with grievance. One of the best-preserved local tales concerns an old woman who, according to the rhymed warning recorded from the district, told a fisherman named Sigurður not to go out with the rest of the boats the following morning — she intended, she said, to take her revenge on the fishing fleet for the men's habit of using a corpse washed ashore, believed to be hers, as bait. Sigurður heeded the warning and stayed on land; those who went out that day did not fare well. The cove holds physical reminders of its history alongside its ghost stories. Söngklettur, the Singing Rock, is said locally to be the church of the hidden people, its acoustics giving it a genuine hum in the wind. A nearby formation called Kerling is said to be a troll woman, caught by daylight while carrying a bundle of fish back from the sea and turned to stone where she stood. Lifting stones once used by fishermen to test a man's strength — and therefore his fitness to be hired for the season — are still scattered on the beach. Dritvík's most recent tragedy is not folklore but documented history: in 1948, the British trawler Epine was driven ashore in a winter storm near the cove, and fourteen of her crew died. Fragments of her iron hull remain scattered across the black sand, weathering alongside the older stories rather than replacing them.