Luke Waterson One family hopes to show people how a return to basic mid 19th-Century life can teach us much about how to care for our environment today. The approach to my accommodation for the night was similar to the ascent into any valley in the Norwegian fjords. Precipitous rocky mountainsides thick with conifer forest increasingly pressed the narrow road to the shores of Haukalivatnet lake.
Yet somehow, enfolded in the valley’s upper reaches before the increasingly steep gradient precluded the possibility of settlement altogether, I arrived at some gentler, fertile land. Reidunn Botnehagen’s family have farmed this land for more than a century and, like many living amidst south-west Norway’s entrancing scenery, also have a countryside cabin here that they rent out to holidaymakers. But Haukali 333, as they’ve named it, is not just another country escape.
This cabin openly celebrates its jettisoning of conventional holiday mod cons in order to emulate the lifestyle of those that first settled Norway’s wilderness nearly two centuries ago. And her guests, Botnehagen told me, will be all the better for it. Haukali 333 is based on the design of a husmannshus or smallholder’s cabin.
Scattered all over rural Norway, these would have been homes for tenant farmers in the mid-19th Century, who worked on land owned by wealthy landowners and laboured long, gruelling hours to make ends meet. First glamourised by Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen in the late 1800s, in recent d.