Eat dinner in a log house one family has lived in for seventeen generations

The roykstovan is the log room at the heart of Kirkjubøargarður and it is more than nine hundred years old. There is a hearth in the middle of the floor and a hole in the roof ridge for the smoke to leave by, which is the whole ventilation system and has never needed replacing.

Kirkjubøur is seventy-nine people now and was the most important village in the Faroes for eight hundred years. The road to it comes south over the ridge from Tórshavn, and the first thing visible on the way down is the wall of St Magnus Cathedral, begun around 1300 by a bishop called Erlendur. It is the largest medieval building in the islands and it is still a wall.

Dinner is at a table in that room. Not a museum with a table put in it: the house is one family's home and has been for seventeen generations, and the meal happens in the part of the building they live in. Whatever anybody has eaten in before, this is unlikely to be beaten on the room.

Next to the cathedral is the oldest church in the country still holding services, and sealed inside the cathedral's altar wall is a saint's relic in a lead casket that nobody has ever taken out.