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Vikings – Neil Oliver

Nothing seems to rise above the height of the conifer trees fringing the shore, so that Faro appears as no more than a thick line on the horizon.

The reclusive Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman made the island his home – as well as the setting for several of his films – and since his death in 2007 his grave has become a place of pilgrimage for thousands.  Apparently it was something about the quality of the light there that caught his eye, that and the silence.

There are no shops or banks on Faro, no policeman and no doctor….

For want of any guardians, the coastline is watched over here and there by rock formations carved out of the last Ice Age.  Called rauks, they are actually small sea stacks and they cluster at points along the shore like companies of fossilised sentinels……..

The tableau of artworks we had come in search of had almost certainly been the work of many ancient artists, created over many years.  Faro in the Bronze Age, a heyday of rock carvings would have been even smaller and more remote.  Little more than 40 square miles of low lying land today, the higher sea level then would have ensured it amounted to no more than  a fraction of that total 4000 years ago.

Joakim said the spot we were making for now well inland, would once have been in clear sight of the sea …..whoever made the pilgrimage to this point during the Bronze ages was in thrall to a powerful gravity…………..

From where we were standing the carving was upside down, the ship’s occupants depicted merely by a series of vertical strokes, appearing like the victims of a capsizing.  …. Joakim said there were something like 35 separate carvings on the bedrock there – ships, animals, people, swords and bowl shaped hollows.  There was something magical in the air around that plain of bedrock.