At the end of the road

The long, bumpy dirt and gravel road off Iceland’s main highway, an hour or so east of the seafront village of Vík, seems to lead nowhere. Past the tiny Grafakirkja church, little farmhouses thin out into nothing but a green glacial landscape, riven with streams and flanked by the mountains of Iceland’s Southern Highlands.

But at the end of the road, in a simple bungalow, lives Iceland’s most celebrated sheep farmer. Heiða Guðný Ásgeirsdóttir, now 40, is a former fashion model and local policewoman, who took over the family farm at Ljótarstaðir when she was 23, when her late father could no longer manage the 6,464-hectare farm. Now she lives there with her mother and 500 or so sheep, which she manages by and large alone.

But she’s now best known as an environmental activist. When an Icelandic power company proposed plans in 2012 to build a hydroelectric station whose reservoir would cover much of her farm, she refused to sell her land and fought the proposal, despite fierce pressure from the company and other locals who wanted to sell for significant profit. Her passionate fight drew the attention of Steinunn Sigurðardóttir, a novelist and poet who had never written non-fiction before but decided to write the book, Heiða – Fjalldalabóndi, about her (the name Fjalldalabóndi translates as ‘The Farmer in the Valley’, Ásgeirsdóttir’s nickname locally).