Norse boat at Östvågöy, Lofoten Islands
Among her extensive travels at home and abroad in the 1920s the Scottish explorer-botanist Isobel Wylie Hutchison visited the mountainous Lofoten Islands, within the Arctic Circle off the north-western coast of Norway, from whose inner island-group of Vesterålen they are separated by a narrow stretch of water called the Raftsund. On her first morning at Svolvaer Hutchison discovered the local bathing beach, where a party from one of these picturesque high-prowed Norse boats was besporting in the water. She found, however, that beaches suitable for bathing were commoner on the smaller and more remote islands, and that a plunge in the pellucid green water was one of the greatest delights of this archipelago.
