The Norwegian island at the end of the road

Driving along the road to Veiholmen, I don’t see a single other car. We glide past shadowy fjords and moose, and deer seemingly as big as moose. You can see why legends of trolls gained traction in this part of Norway.

If you look at Veiholmen on the map, it’s a village spread across a long squiggle of land, a frilly prong extending into the North Sea: part of the Smøla archipelago, which consists of more than 5,800 islands. I reach here, the farthest northern crumbs of Smøla, along a 10km-long, otherworldly causeway that crosses a series of rollercoaster bridges that hop from islet to islet like a skipping stone.

Veiholmen is thought to be the island referred to as Thule in antiquity, a metaphor for remoteness. It also has one of the world’s highest concentrations of white-tailed sea eagles. And if a planned new hotel is built in this end-of-the-world place, it could become even more extraordinary.

When I arrive at Veiholmen at the end of the skipping-stone bridges, it’s already night, but the spring sky has a luminous half-light, and the clapboard houses have a milk-white glow. There’s not a soul in sight. It feels exhilaratingly remote, yet I’m in the safe hands of Up Norway, a luxury travel company that connects tourists with local experts. On the road you’re on your own, but with 24-hour contact via their app. 

Veiholmen, once one of Norway’s biggest fishing villages, now has a permanent population of barely 300. The island is flat; pools of water flash silver-blue against granite and old-gold lichen. Each of the houses is painted rust red, white or mustard yellow, which must provide some vibrancy during the blink-and-you’ll-miss it winter daylight.

It’s an island with a fair share of whimsy. One day, I turn a corner and meet a resident giving a tea party for her chickens, featuring fine china — something that she does every couple of days. I’m told that in Veiholmen, you leave the key in the lock when you’re away, so that neighbours can sort any problems that arise. At parties, locals may break into the island’s song, which usually brings tears to the eyes. The chorus goes, “Hardly drawn on any map because the islets are so small./ But leaves a mark on the heart of any person with eyes to see.”

When I arrive, however, only one building glows with lights: the OlsenNaustet boathouse, run by Line Nicolaysen and her sister Hilde Røinås, the Up Norway connection here. They are also some of the warmest people I’ve ever met, enfolding me in hugs and proffering drinks. They’re from southern Norway, not Veiholmen, but are as much part of village life as the daffodils in Wellington boots that serve as window boxes.

Line launches into an account of how the sisters came to establish this boathouse restaurant. She gestures across the narrow channel to a lone, bone-white building on stilts, on the village molo (breakwater). It’s a strangely beautiful former fish-processing plant, known locally as “The Swan”. Their ownership is testament to the perils of late-night internet shopping. The family bought it online, inspired by a TV programme about buying property in remote places. When their father visited for the first time, “he put a piece of paper on his chest that said, ‘I’m the idiot from the south who bought the building on the molo’,” says Line. That trip ended with them buying the boathouse in which we sit. They’re now known locally as “the molo sisters”.

As they converted the boathouse, they slept in the eaves above the 17th-century beams, listening to the weather crash outside. It still has the beams, but now plate-glass windows, so you can watch the sea, where quilts of black-and-white eider birds flirt in the channel. They tell me that in mid-April, they saw the Northern Lights here, much later in the spring than usual, the sheltering sky smeared in moss-green.

The sisters persuaded chef Olav Kåre Jørgensen, from seafood restaurant Smia in Kristiansund to the south, to run a restaurant in the boathouse for the season (May to September). We drink Nine Sisters Ocean gin from Fedje, farther north, with notes of liquorice and grass, mixed with juniper berry-laced tonic, and dine on traditional fish balls (potatoes and cod) and tapas of caviar and ceviche, produced with an air of magic from the tiny kitchen.

White-tailed sea eagles are everywhere I look. Their wingspan can be as large as 2.45 metres; in flight, it looks as wide as the lighthouse

When the sisters arrived, there was one run-down hotel in the village (it’s since been sold and updated), so they bought three more houses dotted around town and converted them into Olsens Pensjonat, where guests can rent the whole house or just a room, with white-painted walls and beams, Scandi-kitchens and sitting rooms with views, binoculars, sheepskins and wood-burners.

Three years ago they obtained planning permission to build a futuristic hotel, mostly windows, to sit behind The Swan’s facade. If the dream is realised, this will be one of the world’s most extraordinary hotels, designed by Tormod Amundsen of Biotope Architecture who has built modernist cabins in wild places from Iceland to the Galápagos.

Still looking for investors, they hope to open in June 2025. It will have to be built on the island and then airlifted over to the breakwater. The Molo Hotel will have saunas, and rooms almost in the waves, which in rough weather crash either side of The Swan.

Although the project is already approved, the sisters recently ran a survey to gauge local support, with 84 per cent voting in favour. Their biggest fan is Jann Kåre Pettersen, a fisherman from Veiholmen for more than 50 years, like his father before him. He talks to me from his small boat in the harbour, which he uses to fish for wrasse. He says, “I hope with all my heart that they will succeed. It’ll create jobs and increase the population at Veiholmen.”

A few boats bob in the harbour, but the village itself is pin-drop quiet. Pettersen tells me that the people who remain here are deeply attached to the island, and the type to do dugnad (a Norwegian tradition of mucking-in to do communal voluntary work). 

There are some young people in Veiholmen, among them 23-year-old Henrik Holberg, who guides sea eagle-spotting trips on his pristine RIB (rigid inflatable boat), one of the activities suggested by Up Norway and its local partners. He explains that the youth of Veiholmen mostly live on a neighbouring fragment, which has the pub that’s most regularly open. “It’s open at weekends, year-round,” he says cheerfully, as he pilots the boat across the bouncy sea outside the breakwater barrier.

We draw into a sheltered spot between two islets. There’s a squat lighthouse, with an enormous nest on one side of the chimney pot. White-tailed sea eagles are everywhere I look. We watch as a bird glides in circles. Their wingspan can be as large as 2.45 metres; in flight, it looks as wide as the lighthouse.

Silver-haired Kurt Sivertsen, who now gives guided tours of the village, also grew up here. He recalls, as a child, the irony of being surrounded by sea on all sides, yet having no running water. His mother used to send him with buckets hung on a yoke to collect freshwater from the well. He tells me that the worst storm on the island in living memory came before he was born, in 1938. One man was swept away, but survived by hanging on to a flagpole, which still stands a few metres from the sea. In the local museum, a cluttered boathouse, there are photos of men transporting buckets of water by boat. A hard life.

On the village’s main drag, there’s a signpost criss-crossed with labels representing each of the over 40 different nationalities living across the archipelago, including refugees from Syria, Africa and Ukraine; work on Smøla is on fish farms, construction and the local crab-processing factory. The area has been very open to welcoming refugee families, hoping that they will settle here. It seems to go against assumptions about island life, this openness, this warmth. Kurt says, “People are much more extrovert here than inland. If you go back 100 years, the coast here was the main road, while there were no roads around the fjords.”

Pointing out circular wooden shields that hang on several of the houses, once used to protect piles of fish, he tells us how fishing was Veiholmen’s lifeblood. His father was a fisherman, but Kurt adds that not many people go into the family business anymore. In the past, many did not come home from the sea. Gesturing to some vaguely higher ground (the island’s highest point is only seven metres above sea level), he says, “Women used to go there to look out to sea when they were worried about their husbands. They called it ‘the serious place’.”

The reason that people came to live here was to get as close as they could to the fish. Former Smøla teacher Anders Hermstad has been leading kayaking trips around here for the last 10 years. There’s something hypnotic about the flat rocks, sharpened colours, mercurial light, and the space. It’s as if we’re kayaking around a vast tidal pool. Beneath the surface the shallow water rattles with pale shells. Olive-green seaweed drapes over rocks. I’ve never seen the North Sea like this, as clear as glass. Our kayaks glide easily through it. Returning to the shore, the first people we see are the molo sisters, popping out of one of their houses like weathervanes. 

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