Ninety seconds on Ásbyrgi
A horseshoe canyon three and a half kilometres long under cliffs to a hundred metres, floored with birch woods and still water rather than the bare rock the rest of the north gives.
A horseshoe canyon about 3.5 km long and over 1 km wide, walled to 100 metres, cut by catastrophic glacial floods from Jökulsá á Fjöllum. Birch and willow woodland and the pond Botnstjörn fill the floor, and the rock island Eyjan stands 25 metres up the middle.
The canyon is read as the bed of a jökulhlaup, a glacial outburst flood down the Jökulsá á Fjöllum that emptied in a matter of days. Norse tradition gives it instead as the hoofprint of Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse.
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