The Cabin in the Mountains

Turf-roofed and wooden-built, offering fresh clean air, peace, isolation and the promise of a day's wood-chopping, hiking or snow-clearing amid amid landscapes of great beauty, the hytte – or wooden cabin home – is a crucial part of the national identity of every Norwegian. In 2016, Robert Ferguson and his wife bought a piece of land high up in the Hardangervidda, the plateau that dominates south-central Norway, and on it they built such a hytte. For Ferguson, the hytte represented the realisation of a dream that first brought him to Norway from England more than thirty years ago. As the cabin takes shape he learns, through conversations with friends and cabin-builders, the cultural history of modern Norway. He learns of the changing traditions attached to these cabin homes for native Norwegians as they try to marry their new-found urban affluence to their past as a tight-knit, impoverished rural community-nation. Along the way he also describes the intense...