Revealing Place Mobility by Walking and Map Analysing

Abstract

The chapter addresses how places are temporal and multilayered. They are obvious and hidden at the same time and always becoming through relational encounters of more-than-humans. In the chapter, the author makes use of two different methods, walking and map analysis, to explore how Western Barðastrandarsýsla county, a marginal place in southern part of the Westfjord peninsula, Iceland, can be and has been defined. Walking is an embodied experience, it relates to all the senses through the lived experience of the body as it moves with the environment. As a research method, walking reveals or produces a sense of understanding of the environment and emergent landscapes. Maps and place name archives produce another kind of knowledge about the landscape, gained and recorded through the ages. By analysing maps and crossing them with embodied experience of walking the old routes of Western Barðastrandarsýsla county, new knowledge can be created that provides understanding of the past and becoming of a place.

Revealing Place Mobility by Walking and Map Analysis

I am fascinated by lines in landscape: the visible ones, and the lines I can feel on my skin, the weather lines or the aura of history and folklore. This fascination is something I developed whilst walking and researching the landscapes of the county of Western-Barðastrandarsýsla (hereafter V-Barð) in Iceland, following lines, or making them with my feet or eyes, or even hands, walking them, sensing and viewing them. Being born and bred in this place it was not until I walked these landscapes that I noticed the lines in the landscape. The lines were one of the things which I discovered walking and processing the walk afterwards, for example, by drawing my line of walking on an old map of the place. Later, when I had gone deeper into the analysis of maps and was crossing my own embodied knowledge of walking with the multi-dimensional knowledge of maps (Aldred and Lucas 2018), I recognized how the old routes could be seen as indicators for the development of V-Barð as a place. Furthermore, I found my way along these old routes and walked into their rhythm, revealing layers and threads of the landscape and mobility of the past. In this chapter, I discuss these findings and ask: How does walking old routes, studying place names, and analysing maps reveal the changing mobility of a place?

Here, I discuss the mobility of V-Barð through old and new routes and roads. After introducing the methodology of the chapter, I discuss how the mobility of V-Barð is represented through routes and roads from a different time, which develop from being like a net laid over the landscape to a progressive line sliding through it: We can call them lines of mobility through which the place V-Barð is maintained. I then go deeper into the old routes themselves and discuss how navigating them becomes a skill, taking past mobilities of the place into consideration in light of the effort of the human body and history in the form of place names.

Methodological Approach

The methodology of the chapter is three-dimensional, consisting in seeing the landscape through the pedestrian act of walking (Vergunst 2012); through history using place names; and through interrelations of maps with the landscape, the reader and the remake of them (Aldred and Lucas 2018). The methodology is a mixture of different sources concerning knowing one’s way around in the world, addressing the question of how space is made familiar and how the human body reacts to landscape (ibid.).

Walking

Walking is a key to the landscape for me as a researcher, whereby I not only look at the landscape with my experienced researcher’s entwined body and mind but do so with the sensation of the bodily feeling of walking, as Lund (2005) and Edensor (2010) argue. Walking is a holistic experience. It has to do with the body, sensations, experience, memory, ideas and connection to non-humans; it is an interaction with the environment (Edensor 2010). According to Springgay and Truman, walking is “a way of inhabiting place through the lived experience of the moment […] a way of becoming responsive to place; it activates modes of participation that are situated and relational” (2019, 4). Walking the old routes of V-Barð did exactly that. It connected me to the landscape in a way that I had not experienced before. The idea was to walk into past mobilities, their rhythms and sensations and, in a way, share them with the bodies that had walked there before me—many of them relatives and people I had heard about in my upbringing. Archaeologists Aldred and Lucas describe this well when they write: “walking a beaten path […] reveals the shared ‘space’ not only between past and present […] but also between different bodies” (2018, 25). By these means, old routes can reveal rhythms of the moving human body where the affordances of the body differ according to terrain and landscapes, as Edensor (2010) argues. Although long gone, I like to call this type of shared space an enduring mobility which oozes from the footsteps of long-gone bodies.

During the research, I walked two-thirds of the old routes of V-Barð following oral and written resources, old maps, cairns and visible traces in the landscape. Walking the past routes of V-Barð revealed a different place than when travelling by car. It opened up past realities and created new ones. The bodily intimacy afforded by the method gave a special feeling of rhythm, connections, knowing-one’s-way by learning to ‘read’ the.

Vergunst (2012) explores how the politics of landscapes can be revealed by walking ethnography, where the pedestrian body feels the rhythms and affordance of landscapes, and the horizon and whole perspective of the surroundings moves with him (Vergunst 2012; Lund and Willson 2010). Walking as a research method gives new perspectives and insights into a place: a sense of rhythm, navigation, time, development, layers and lines. Walking is significant for that kind of knowledge and uncovers things that could not be revealed otherwise.

Place Name Archives

Place names are key to understanding more-than-human connections. With place names, humans try to organize their surroundings. Humans and their surroundings are intertwined and it is impossible to talk about the one without the other, as Keith Basso (1996) argues. The landscape has infected humans; their history is in the landscape and it influences their thinking. In that way, it is possible to read the history of places through place names, at times they are the only reminders left of humans in the landscape. Place names in V-Barð tell where it was good to harvest, where the best fishing grounds were, where not to go and where it was safe to go, where accidents happened and what people believed in. Place names are artefacts of everyday life in the agricultural and fishing society of V-Barð.

Place names are primary data that are connected to places, usually old oral sources that have moved between generations, but new generations have also contributed to and named places. Since the turn of the twentieth century¹ the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies (SÁM) has systematically collected place names from local people in Iceland and made them accessible. Thus, it is possible to access name archives from most farms in Iceland, arranged by counties and districts (SÁM 2018). In my research I used the archives from Barðaströnd, which is a part of V-Barð, and related places in V-Barð and compared them to maps of the area and to the landscape that I walked. In that way, I could often easily see how the landscape was continually ‘shaped’, i.e., how humans were a part of the landscape. In other places the landscape ‘lit up’ with meaning when the place names were added.

There are about eighty files of place names from the area from 1931 to 2010, some handwritten but most of them typed. There are up to four files about the same farm and other files combine some farms even though they had different owners. Many of the files are just lists of place names with numbers that match an index at the end of the document. Occasionally, there is further explanation about the story behind the name or the place it was used for. The younger place name files were based on or compared to the older ones. These files often had good references about where the places were to be found in the landscape. Some of them also narrate a story which tells about why the place got its name, for example, if the name of the place was because of something that happened there. “Reading” the landscape through the place names deepened my approach to it and made the landscape alive in a way that was new to me.

Maps

Aldred and Lucas (2018) write about the use of maps for research. They emphasize maps being looked at as media through which we can, for instance, see the “patterning and materiality of the landscape by noting continuity and change (e.g. through map regression or a comparison of historic and modern maps)” (29–30). They use the old archaeological metaphor of the landscape as palimpsest (Crawford 1922; Hoskins 1984) to demonstrate the relationship between maps and landscape. In this way, they show how landscape can be seen as “both a meaningful text which can be read, but also as a material text which has been written and re-written multiple times” (Aldred and Lucas 20–21). This, they stress, brings forth the understanding of the landscape “as a contemporaneous assemblage; less a static record of a once-dynamic landscape, and more of a polychronic ensemble that nods to the past and to the future through the present” (ibid., 22). Maps are tools in relation to their makers, readers and landscape, and they are constantly transformed through their use (Aldred and Lucas 2018). It is this interrelation of landscape and maps and their diverse perspectives that make them meaningful as research tools. Maps are mediators of the moving body and the landscape (ibid.) and along with contemporary maps; I use them to elucidate the changing mobility of V-Barð through the ages.

In the research, I looked at maps of Iceland and especially of the Westfjords and V-Barð from diverse sources; the website islandskort.is, at the National Library in Iceland; maps at The Royal Library in Denmark; maps from the National Land Survey of Iceland; and a map from the National Archives in Iceland (Gunnlaugsson 1844). The contemporary maps I obtained from the National Land Survey of Iceland, Google Maps and the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration. With regard to old maps, I especially searched for maps with routes on them and found that routes appear on maps quite early. I further studied 38 maps that include V-Barð from the period 1743 to 1948. The maps show up to 36 routes between regions and farms in V-Barð, most of which are known today or still noticeable in the landscape, for example, through way-marking cairns, drains and ramping through rough terrain. I searched for old routes, where they were and if they had a name or if the route was only drawn on the map without a name. What I found was that from early on many of the routes had names which still remain and they have been known routes between settlements since the earliest maps were made.

This induced me to go further and analyse the maps with references to historical concurrence, looking into how the old routes and modern roads came to be as they are today, and how they represent the development of the place. This knowledge was hidden in the old routes and maps and revealed by walking the old routes, drawing the line of wayfaring on a map afterwards and analysing the maps in the research process. Let us now look in more detail into the analysis of the maps.

Nets and Lines

Nets are formed out of many lines crossing and coming together in a meaningful connection. This is how I see the past routes of V-Barð. When walking them it surprised me how many they were. Having lived in V-Barð as a child and during a part of my grown-up life, I was used to travelling the automobile road which superseded the old ones from the middle of the twentieth century and continued as a variably stable grey line through the community. It thus came as a surprise to me that the old routes were everywhere: in between, under, beneath, above and to the side of the modern travelled road, and in places that were out of sight from the main road. In Fig. 9.1, old and new routes have been drawn on a map of V-Barð, where the old routes are red and the modern ones are blue in two thickness ratio. The map shows how the old routes lie between settlements, often in many directions from each place depending upon where one was headed. To me, when both walking them and looking at them on a map, they formed something like a net over the landscape. It is not a standardized mesh-size or grid-like net as the grids of longitude and latitude, but keeps pace with the landscape, organically. The map also shows how the mobility of V-Barð has changed from this netlike formation to a progressing line sliding through the area more in relation to the standardized mesh laid over Euclidean space. It is a progressing line in the sense of being straighter and lesser differentiating than the net that characterizes the past routes. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) rhizome comes into mind, where the old routes are like a rhizome formed through entanglement of human mobility and the landscape, whilst the modern roads are organized in a hierarchical tree-like crown, with smaller branches stretching out from the thick stock of the main road.

Fig. 9.1

Old routes of V-Barð (red) form a net over the landscape whilst modern roads (blue in two thickness ratio) are like a progressing line sliding through it. Thus, the old routes display a kind of rhizomatic interconnectedness whilst the new ones are hierarchically distributed like a tree-crown with smaller branches coming from the thick stock of the main road. The drawing is based on maps from Landmælingar Íslands (2023) (Map by Michaël Virgil Bishop) (Color figure online)

The map brings forth the landscape which characterizes V-Barð, a mountainous area with a high plateau, steep mountainsides and limited lowlands. The settlement in some places can be described as mini-cosmoses which earlier were sustainable unities of small, inhabited areas relying on agriculture and fishery for their maintenance. In some places, a church completed these cosmoses in their way of being self-sufficient.

The old routes connect the landscapes, the ways of travel between and within distributed settlements. Thus, there is often only one route between places in such landscapes. But where fjords and shallow waters cut the seashore, or mountains and cliffs divide the landscape into districts and communities, shortcuts over mountains and fjords are common, although they are not necessarily marked on the map, and make up other alternatives in wayfaring, where the rhythms of the changing tides and weather are in charge.

Discovering the old routes changed the way I saw and understood mobility in V-Barð. It was a fundamental change that opened up the place for me in a new way. Being used to driving the asphalt and gravelled roads, the different rhythm of walking the old routes made all the difference and helped me see how the place had changed, not only in relation to the way of travel, but also in regard to settlement. Today, the population has gathered in small villages served by the main well-established road, whilst the countryside suffers from reduced population, one cause of that being poor road connections. The old routes indicate more distributed settlement with different destinations and temporalities. Each presenting the times when they were travelled routes and changed their surroundings with road construction and waymarker constructions, just like the modern road does today.

But why did and do people move? Why this change in rhythms and destinations? Here, I want to draw attention to the westernmost point of V-Barð and indeed of Iceland itself, the Útvíkur bays, their names referring to them as the Outer Most Bays of the county. Some say it is the westernmost point of Europe, which indeed is the case if you do not count the Azores Islands in the ocean west of Portugal. Jóhannesson and Lund write that “destinations are not fixed or with valid meaning, rather they are products of various connections. They are mobile and fluid and in constant shaping” (2021, 50). In the case of Útvíkur bays (Fig. 9.2), the change in terms of old routes and modern roads to meaningful destinations is explicit and has been dramatic in the last eighty years. Útvíkur bays lie near rich fishing grounds and fishing booths were established in several places in earlier times, offering good conditions for landing boats. Fish were one of the main sources of food and trade goods. Seasonal fishing attracted people and for many it was mandatory work to go fishing for their employer. The old routes to the fishing booths and between places in the Útvíkur area are conspicuous on the map. They were well-travelled routes that came from far away, from other counties as well as within V-Barð.

Fig. 9.2

The old routes of the westernmost point of V-Barð, based on maps from Landmælingar Íslands (2023). Past mobility routes are marked in red, the modern roads in blue. Notice the two red lines reaching from Breiðavík and Látravík to the cliff Látrabjarg. These are routes for bird hunting and egg collecting (Map by Michaël Virgil Bishop) (Color figure online)

It is interesting to perceive these connections and relate them to history, although some routes do not make sense if one is not familiar with the landscape and perhaps one has to walk there to understand them fully. There are two old routes reaching from the farms Látrar and Breiðavík, to the great bird cliff Látrabjarg, the Cliffs of Látrar. Actually, the parts of the bird cliff are named after the farms that used to apply them although the whole of the cliffs now bear the name of Látrar farm, Látrabjarg. Thus, the part of the cliffs the route from Breiðavík farm reaches to is named Breiðavíkurbjarg, the Cliffs of Breiðavík, and then there are other names for other parts of the cliffs referring to its owner, i.e., Bæjarbjarg, the Cliffs of Bær and Keflavíkurbjarg, the Cliffs of Keflavík. The routes reaching from Látrar and Breiðavík to the cliffs are well established with waymarker cairns. They were used by those who went bird catching and egg collecting from these farms. It was essential for the wellbeing of humans to get the eggs and birds from the cliffs, and therefore, the tracks are there as a reminder of past times, of past mobility that is still essential even though it has changed. At first sight, these routes seem to have lost their purpose, but walking there you can see that a part of one of them is still in use, because people still collect eggs from these cliffs for their own use and also selling them e.g., in neighbouring villages and in Reykjavík.

It is notable how the modern road, the blue line, proceeds through the landscape (Fig. 9.2), still reaching the main places, the farms, hotels, museums, campsites and all the way to the lighthouse at Látrabjarg cliff (Bjargtangar, Cliffs Point). Today, it is a well-travelled road, with up to four hundred cars on busy days over the summertime. Travellers want to go to the westernmost point of Iceland and look at the magnificent bird cliff. They are also ‘hunting’ for the puffin and other birds with their cameras (Haraway 1984). The emphasis in travelling has changed, there are new destinations and the previous ones have lesser weight and are even forgotten or have gained another purpose.

The evolution of the lines reflects the development and changing mobilities of V-Barð itself through social changes and time, one of the greatest transitions being the modification from a farmer and fisherman society to modern society in the late nineteenth century, with urbanization and the establishment of villages. Before then subsistence farming and fishery characterized the area, and settlement was dispersed with main centres around churches or official governmental places as the churches often were. The development accelerated with Iceland’s belated industrial revolution in the beginning of the twentieth century, with increased production and trade. A modern market society arose and with it came the need for more mobile people and goods.

In V-Barð drastic changes took shape when three villages were started forming in Bíldudalur, Patreksfjörður and Tálknafjörður on the grounds of urbanization and trade in the nineteenth century and till the midst of the twentieth centuries, and most of the fishery moved to the villages. The countryside was still populated, but mechanization in farming decreased the need for workers in the mid-twentieth century and that development accelerated throughout the century. Flatey island in Breiðafjörður fjord south of V-Barð had been an important trading post for the area of Barðaströnd (as well as other places around the great fjord) because seafaring was often an easier way to travel in Barðaströnd than travelling the mountains to the nearest village in the north or west. The trade in Barðaströnd moved from Flatey island to these villages in the 1960s when roads were built over the mountains and transportation changed. The arrival of cars and different wayfaring and transportation had encouraged the establishment of roads. This changed the mobility of V-Barð, straightening out its lines of mobility in such a way that now there was a simple line progressing through the landscape with driveways to farms and other destinations.

But the development does not stop here. It is an ongoing placing as Lund and Willson (2010) speak of in describing places as mobile and becoming but never fixed or still. Recently, V-Barð was connected to the north of the Westfjords all year round with the Dýrafjarðargöng tunnel and a reconstructed road over the toughest mountains, Dynjandisheiði mountain road. The change has already converted the mobility of people from the north, from Ísafjörður and other towns, driving through V-Barð further south to the capital, Reykjavík. The mobility also goes the other way: Locals in V-Barð now seek service and commerce in Ísafjörður more often than they used to do before the tunnel opened. The new connection to the north gives a feeling for the Westfjords as a united area for the first time in centuries.

Navigating Landscape

The old routes of V-Barð are rather well established with waymarker cairns, drains and clearings through rocky areas. In the early ages, road construction was mandatory work for men in neighbouring areas from the age of 20 to 60 (Þjóðskjalasafn 2015). For example, there was a need to reconstruct cairns and clear the route of stones that had fallen on it. Not having been attended to for over 60 years, the routes are presently in quite good shape: the trail is often clear, and the cairns help in navigating the stony world that these heath routes often are. It is mostly in the gravelled and vegetational areas that the routes have vanished or are difficult to find, and in early summer old snow patches from the winter can lead astray (Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3

(Photo by Elva Björg Einarsdóttir)

Fossheiði mountain road is an old well-established route between settlements in V-Barð. Its name and ‘line’ appear on the oldest maps of V-Barð. Here a group of people walk the well-marked route in the stony landscape with the waymarker cairns to guide them if the route becomes indistinct

In traditional archaeological understanding, cairns and old routes are the materialized mobility of humans which has gone still. It is something that has been on the move but now has stopped (Aldred 2021). To demonstrate this, consider a piece of pottery that I once found on Fossheiði mountain route. It dated from the mid-sixteenth century and had fallen to the ground to be absorbed. Many centuries later it was revealed when the erosion of the weather brought it to the surface again. This understanding of mobility is appealing and becomes embodied and mobile in the understanding of Tilley’s (1994) walking body, as Aldred (2021) argues. I feel this understanding whilst walking the old routes of V-Barð, sensing them in a human-centric way, through descending, ascending, terrain, view, orientation and so on (Tilley 1994); sensing how the route is exposed or demonstrably concomitant with the movement of the body. Cairns are navigation tools for humans on the move, walking or riding. Their position is in relation to the movement of the body and its position or point of view. Cairns are something you learn to ‘read’ when walking the old routes of V-Barð, when you understand that they were put there in your favour, for guiding the way. Although they were put there a long time ago and the key to their ‘language’, or to them as a ‘symbol’,² has been lost, they can still be found through wayfaring, the act that they were meant for all along. Thus revealing the connection or situation of the human body to the more-than-human, the being-with and knowing-one’s-way through space.

When following the routes and the cairns, you develop a skill for reading the landscape. You get the hang of it, knowing where the next step is, where the route proceeds, because you have brought how the landscape works into your body. Or, better put, you start to sense how the human body enacts the landscape and therefore, where the route would have been built, what would ease the trip for wayfarers on foot or riding. Navigation becomes a part of your vision when looking for the next logical step on an old route. You put yourself into the footsteps of the old wayfarers or road constructers, both literally and ideally speaking. You look ahead and think where you would go next if you were making this route. When you have got the hang of it you almost always get the next step right. The same insight goes for seeking old and destroyed cairns that make the way; in the beginning it can be hard to try to find them in the stony surroundings, but an experienced eye will spot each and every one of them even though you only find their foundation stones (not visible from a distance) when you get there. This is a competence that navigating walkers gradually develop on their walk.

The walking body gets used to a certain rhythm accompanying a specific place. How the body reacts to the environment and what effects the environment has on the body varies but can become rhythmic and foreseeable, as Edensor (2010) stresses. The body, though, is not force to “dance” the same dance at the same place or to perform the same choreography (Seamon 1980) as the place might offer or “suggest”, but the rhythms will have an effect on the walker (Edensor 2010). Walking the old routes of V-Barð gives a sense of rhythm and a sense of how the place was in the past, when these routes were beaten tracks. In my mind, the rhythm of the old routes put me into what I like to call an enduring mobility of the past. I felt as if walking into a rhythm that had already been there and was exposed, in a way, by me acting up on it, although I was doing it for a different purpose, in a different time and through different connections than the ones that went there before me.

In his book The Archaeology of Movement (2021), Aldred engages with old and new mobilities and demonstrates that walking an old route following wayfaring cairns reveals different temporalities of movements. It is a matter of a flow or a rhythm that “aligns different temporalities together” (Aldred 2021, 177); a kind of flow that never ends and is possible to revisit (Aldred 2021). Building on the immanence of José Gil’s body-space (Gil 2006) Aldred claims that “[j]ust as walking along a trackway touches underfoot along the gathering path, and in passing the waymarker cairns; these are shared contacts with the people and other bodies that also moved along the same route in the past” (Aldred 2021, 178). The cairns are, he continues, a “shared connection, a repetition, and rhythm” (ibid.). Even when walking a built-over old route which you have travelled hundreds of times before by car, tracing the old route under the new one provides a new rhythm, a rhythm of landscape, of human effort and intention, of everyday life: a new place and yet another layer or thread woven into the landscape.

My walking in V-Barð brought me a sense of layers of the place that were unveiled by my walking in rhythm with the landscape (Edensor 2010). By reading the place names a certain atmosphere or an aura was revealed. Walking without knowing much about a place gives a sense of freedom and discovering of a new place. You give the landscape your meaning without other “interferences” than what you bring yourself to the place. This was my approach to the landscapes of V-Barð before I discovered the place names files. I totally welcome this approach but also appreciate and acknowledge the perspective the place names gave me.

By reading into the archives of place names, I added a new layer of knowledge as well as a sense for the mobilities of the landscape. Moreover, I saw places which for me had only been “undefined landscape” that before had no meaning to me except to cross on my way to my destination. Now I would add a story, some knowledge of the landscape which came from the archives and had the effect of stopping the flow of endless, mobile landscape and bringing a meaning to it. The flow or rhythm, or the lines of the landscape, changed from being without a meaning to becoming worth stopping for and finding out and sensing the events or incidents that had happened there. Casey (1996) writes about places taking on their occupant’s reflection and as they do so they “happen”, they are an event which makes the landscape pop up with meaning. This event will provoke feelings and thoughts within people that visit the place in the future if they know about the story that the name of the place refers to. In this way, Legat (2016) talks about place names as hooks that stories are attached to. But even without the story the name of the place itself awakens some thoughts about it, or even mindsets, combining it to agriculture or wayfaring in the way people can refer to and understand. Place names of V-Barð tell where and when it is safe to travel; where to get what kind of fish; where there are good grazing and resting places for the domestic animals; who did what and where; what was necessary, e.g., where to find water; what people were proud of; and what people believed in (Fig. 9.4).

Fig. 9.4

(Photo by Elva Björg Einarsdóttir)

The waymarker cairns take over from the place names when underway on an old route (Einarsdóttir, forthcoming). Only a few place names remain to guide the wayfaring or tell if something has happened in a particular location. Here Lækjarskarð, Lækur’s Pass (middle of photo) on the route to Brjánslækur (Lækur in short)

Some places in the landscape have no story attached to them but are overflowing with aura because of their name. Útburðarlækur (Brook of unwanted children) is an example of a place like that. It is connected to the horrible old custom of killing new-born unwanted babies by putting them outside to die. The place name sticks, it is understood, and felt. The aura of place names like this is powerful and makes time collapse in such a way that the centuries between the past and the present stand side by side, or no longer matter (Aldred 2010). You are there and relive or connect to the event. But this only happens if you know the place name; I have walked the same landscapes without this knowledge and enjoyed drinking from this brook.

Thus, when taking place names into account, the place can become totally new. The landscape gains depth, the place lights up with the meaning of the lines and of the choreography of everyday lived life and events from the past. It adds another layer or a new thread that is woven into the landscape, of the kind which functions like a pop-up-book and encloses a place like an aura. ʻPlace names are like human-made lines in the landscape, often “straight” and out of rhythm with the chaotic lines of the landscape and timeʼ (Einarsdóttir, forthcoming). Place names can freeze places so that the place loses its character of being mobile and never still (Lund and Willson 2010), although the place will always be “affected” by the one that observes it. Place names are fractions of the past, which is reflected through them and reveals a deeper meaning and another place than the one without them.

Conclusion

Walking the old routes of V-Barð made me realize a different mobility of the place than I was used to when driving the modern roads. I was reminded of different rhythms, flows and temporalities of past livelihood, destinations and wayfaring. And I saw how the old routes were good indicators for that mobility. The method of map analysis, walking and place name reading helped in bringing forth this changing mobility of V-Barð. This meant going back and forth, beginning walking, then drawing my line of wayfaring on a map, reading the place name files, walking again, analysing maps and looking at them through the lenses of historical concurrences. Crossing the embodied knowledge of walking with the empirical knowledge of place names and maps lit up the environment, connected landscapes and places in a different way, created special atmospheres and revealed layers of past mobilities.

My walking made me realize how common the old routes were in the landscapes of V-Barð. Analysing the maps amplified that reality and brought forth how the old routes were like a rhizomic net over the Euclidean space (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). This is a different appearance of mobility than the one that the roads in V-Barð present today where they slide through the landscape as a progressive line or a hierarchical tree-like crown, based on the thick stock of the main road. This notion of mobility is supported by the way of travel, today by car or walking the past routes. Destinations are fluent and can tell about the mobility of a place (Jóhannesson and Lund 2021). The maps show the development that has accrued in the community and is entangled with more-than-human encounters, e.g., with the establishment of the villages, changes in the basic industries, improved transportation and marginalization of the area. And it is still changing because with connection to the north of the Westfjords with tunnels. The old and new routes show how the mobility of the place is changing all the time, and how indeed routes and roads are good examples of mobility.

Walking the old routes of V-Barð I was faced with the enduring mobility of the place. My body was moving and sensing its surroundings, finding its way along the old routes guided by waymarkers; constantly learning, picking up signs and symbols of the process of travel in the landscape, for example, in the form of waymarkers that had been placed there for guidance of the human body. I got the feeling that I had in a way walked into a preserved world of past mobility although it was also new. Every step brought me closer to an understanding of how the landscape and the travel would proceed. I felt with the landscape, it was a walking-with (Rantala et al. 2020) where the landscape is a companion on the walk (Einarsdóttir and Lund, forthcoming). A rhythm revealed itself and I was a part of it. And it was not only the landscape I was a part of, but the travel of long-gone wayfarers, different temporalities of different times, intention, outfit and performance. The walking body reacted to the long-built and enduring mobility of the past.

The materialization of the old mobility, the routes and waymarker cairns make it possible to follow in the footsteps of previous wayfarers. But as you do so you enact upon it; you make your own line of mobility, your own places and even place names. It is a different wayfaring to those who went there before, but then they were probably also diverse. It is fascinating how the layers of the landscape pile up or are woven together and the place names give a meaning that otherwise would have been unnoticed because there might be nothing that indicates an incident that happened there but the place name itself. The place names are yet another layer or a thread in the landscape and capable of contributing to the making of places. Navigating old routes and reading place names is a way of bringing forth the mobility of V-Barð. It is different to analysing maps, but it gets you deeper into the landscape and the different temporalities of the old routes.

Bringing forth the mobility of V-Barð through old routes and modern roads has been an ethnography of walking based in more holistic knowledge. Ethnography unpacks an embodied knowledge crossed and appended with multi-dimensional knowledge of maps and empirical knowledge of place names and the history of V-Barð. Just looking at the different types of routes and roads tells a story, walking them and studying them connects to the landscapes, its rhythm and layers. In this way, it is possible to explore V-Barð through old and new lines of movement, revealing its changing mobility in different and meaningful ways.