Independent People by Halldor Laxness

ON a knoll in the marshes stand the ruins of an old croft-house.

This knoll is perhaps only in a certain sense the work of nature; perhaps it is much rather the work of long dead peasants who built their homes there on the grassy bank by the brook, generation after generation, one on the other's ruins. But for over a hundred years now it has been a lambs' fold; here ewes and their lambs have bleated for more than a hundred springs. Out from the fold and its knoll, mainly to the south, spread miles of marshland dotted here and there with islets of ling, and through Rauthsmyri Ridge a little river runs down into the marsh, and another from the lake in the east through the valleys of the eastern moors. To the north of the knoll towers a steep mountain, its lower slopes scarred with landslides, and the tongues between covered with heather. The crags soar up from the landslides in sheer castellations, and in one place above the fold the mountain is cloven by a gully in the basalt, and down from this gully in spring cascades a waterfall, long and slender. Sometimes the south wind blows the spray up over the brink again, so that the waterfall flows backwards. At the foot of the mountain boulders lie, scattered here and there. This lambs' fold, where once stood the bigging Albogastathir on the Moor, has for the past few generations been known as Winterhouses.