Leka...hikes and bikes and a wee piece of home...

Day 74 & 75: Thursday 22nd July & Friday 23 July, 2026

Torghatten to Leka; Leka

Duration: 4 hours

A short 4 hour hop down the inner leads to Leka - which we thought looked a good place to hole up for more rain and strong winds that are forecast to come in tonight for at least 24 hours. The passage was a good one, and there was space for us on the harbour pontoon amongst the traditional Nordland boats who had popped in for their lunch...

...once safely secured we donned our walking boots and headed out to explore Leka on what we knew would be our only dry day...

First stop was Herlaugshaugen - one of Norway's largest Viking burial mounds - originally thought to be 70-80m in diameter and 10-12m high. A saga links the mound to King Herlaug, a local chieftan who, when Norway was being united into a single kingdom around 870AD, chose to die rather than submit to King Harald Harfagre, who unified Norway. ...

Three trenches were excavated through the site in the 18th Century to uncover its secrets and much of the damage derives from these crude excavations. In the centre excavators found the remains of two human skeletons, a sword and large quantities of pig, cow and sheep bones, (which were the remains of the provisions given to the deceased for their journey to the afterlife). There were also many rivets found which suggested that a large ship was also buried here....

From there we took a 6km coastal and wooded walk northward, up toward Skeisnesset that looped through heather and heathland, and brought us back to the road to the harbour at Skei....

From the road we could see the amazing rock formations on the west side of the island - which geologically speaking were once part of the Caledonian range of Scotland and the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains of the USA...

...so back to the boat we went....to get out our trusty bikes, so we could explore the mountains of home more closely...

...and it was well worth the pedal power to this UNESCO geological wonder...the scenery was amazing....

These Leka mountains, and the mountains of the Caledonian ranges and Appalachian ranges were once part of the Central Pangean range - a superchain of mountains formed in the Paleozoic era over 500 million years ago. When Pangea tore apart to open the modern Atlantic Ocean, fragments of the ancient North American plate and its boundary rocks - including Leka's distinct red serpentine and olivine formations were left stranded on the European side here...the island was also forced to tilt which exposed rocks from the Earth's mantle and oceanic crust which is over 500 million years old...

Where we stopped at, was also the sight of "Ornorovet"/Eagle robbery, when in 1932 a 3 year old girl was snatched by a white-tailed sea eagle from her home on the island. Over 200 local villages mobilized a massive search party across the island and after seven hours she was found alive and mostly unharmed on a narrow mountain ledge near an eerie, suffering only minor scratches. That ledge is marked by a red mark on the cliff above a square of white ...

A half hour pedal back to the boat, in time for a very nice dinner at Anker, Mat & Drikke,...

...and then a battening of the hatches for the strong gusty winds and rain....

which continued for all of Friday with the odd dry break that allowed us to have a few short walks and make a plan for another!!!! longer period of non-sailing weather to come...