A Mountain with a Hole

23/10/2025

We’d just had a mega hike but we still needed to find somewhere to spend the night. And I needed to work the next day too, so ideally we wanted to find somewhere with electricity where we could stay for a couple of nights.

A drive in the dark

The next stopover that fitted the bill would involve two ferry crossings. Would we be able to make it? We checked the timetables on the Entur app and the answer was yes. The ferries run reasonably late as they are so vital for transport around the area.

After dark is not our favourite time to be doing much. I think we both find driving in the dark less comfortable these days. The headlights of oncoming traffic seem so much more dazzling. It might be the introduction of LEDs but it’s more likely that it’s related to the long sightedness that comes with age. Anyway, as we really wanted to move forwards, not backwards, we decided to go for it. The roads here are so quiet anyway, fingers crossed we wouldn’t encounter many oncoming vehicles.

We prepped our dinner in the queue while waiting for the 6:30pm ferry at Tjøtta and ate it while we were on the ferry. Then we had a short drive in the dark down to Andalsvåg where we had a long wait for the next ferry to Horn.

Brønnøysund

Our parking was a few miles further in Brønnøysund, we arrived late and knackered and just parked up. We couldn’t even be bothered to hook up to the electricity, we’d sort that out in the morning. From the comfort of our bed we used the GoMarina app to pay for a couple of nights stay.

In the morning we got ourselves sorted out with the EHU and I did a days work. Paul fished, despite knowing we couldn’t possible cope with any more fish in the freezer. Luckily he mostly caught tiddlers, only one large cod needed to be returned.

We took an early evening walk into town to see the Havila boat that had announced it’s arrival with a long blast of it’s horn.

We could just make out the Havila ship from our parking spot

Torghatten

After another night at Brønnøysund we were ready to move on. We were nearly at the end of the Helgelands Coastal trail and we had one more location we really wanted to visit before we started our journey south.

Torghatten is a mountain with a hole, a tunnel 166m in length that runs from one side of the mountain through to the other. It seems incredible that this is a natural formation, it looks so square you would think it had to have been made by man but that’s just because the angle of the rock is so vertical. I would love to tell you how it was formed, but there seem to be a number of conflicting theories. Perhaps it was formed through glacial action, or sea erosion, or a combination of both. Or maybe it was created when the troll king threw his hat into the path of Hestmannen the troll’s arrow. The hat became the mountain and the arrow made the hole. Fortunately the beautiful maiden who was the object of Hestmannen’s ire was able to escape.

There are various walking routes in the area, including the option to walk across the top of the granite monolith. As the weather was pretty grotty we decided to just do the circular walk through the hole and back around the coast, this is a scant 3.5km and took us under an hour. It’s well paved but it does have a lot of steps.

Obviously the mountain is a major tourist attraction in the summer. The car park is enormous and has been recently paved, we were the only ones in it although another van did arrive as we were leaving. Opposite the car park is a new motorhome parking area where you can stay overnight which would be a lovely stopover in good weather as there is a beach not far away.

Finishing the Helgelands Coastal Trail

We drove back to Brønnøysund where we picked up road 17 again and proceeded along the final stretch of the coastal trail. We got some good views of Torghatten from across the strait including a couple of glimpses all the way through the mountain, but I suspect that the insta photos looking all the way through the tunnel have been taken by drone.

At Vennesund we had to catch the final ferry of the route, but before that we stopped off at a local beach for lunch and a leg stretch.

Lovely beach at Kvennvika. We have seen several similar sculptures of women looking out to sea but cant remember the name of the artist.

After the ferry the road started to head inland and although the trail doesn’t officially end until Namsos we felt as though the scenic route was done when the coast was left behind. In the more rural scenery as we headed onwards we saw some more moose, but they were far too distant to even bother taking a photo.

We continued, stopping now and again to suss out potential parking spots. In the end it was a lakeside spot on the shores of Grungstadvatnet, 110km after the ferry, that caught our fancy. A dirt track down to the waters edge offered up a handful of parking spaces, fireplaces, bins and a long drop toilet I looked at and then pretended didn’t exist. The clouds started to break apart and we got a bit of late afternoon blue sky and a lovely sunset. A caravan joined us later that evening and we had a lovely peaceful evening.

That was the end of the Helgelands coastal trail and it’s many ferries. We cant wait to come back and explore more of this area, maybe heading out to some of the more scattered islands.