L'Anse aux Meadows
"Vikings were here five centuries before Columbus. Standing on this ground, that stops being a fact and starts being something stranger."
I arrived at L’Anse aux Meadows on a morning when the sky was the colour of slate and the wind off the Strait of Belle Isle was moving the long grass in slow waves. The site itself is not impressive in any visual way — low mounds in a meadow, reconstructed sod longhouses built to the dimensions of the original postholes, a Parks Canada visitor centre. What makes it overwhelming is what you know: that this is where, around the year 1000 CE, Norse explorers from Greenland built the first European settlement in the Americas, full stop. Five hundred years before Columbus. Here. In this particular meadow, at the tip of this peninsula, beside this particular bay.
The site was discovered in 1960 by Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine Ingstad, who were searching systematically for the Vinland described in the Norse sagas. A local fisherman named George Decker walked them to the lumpy meadow. What they found beneath the grass — the iron clench nails, the spindle whorl that proved a woman was present, the charcoal that could be carbon-dated — rewrote the history of European contact with the Americas so completely that the revision took decades to fully absorb. L’Anse aux Meadows became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.
The reconstructed longhouses give the site its atmosphere. They are dim inside and smell of wood smoke and wet turf and they have the particular quality of a space that has been built with functional logic — sleeping platforms along the walls, a central hearth, a smithing area where bog iron ore was smelted. The Parks Canada interpreters dress in Norse costume and demonstrate rope-making and smithing with the slightly apologetic air of people who know they are doing something inherently theatrical but can’t figure out a more honest way to make eight-century-old daily life legible. I found it worked.
The drive to L’Anse aux Meadows along the Viking Trail from Gros Morne takes about three hours and passes through a landscape of increasing bleakness and grandeur. The Northern Peninsula is one of the least-travelled parts of Newfoundland — few tourists, small communities, the Long Range Mountains on one side and the sea on the other, and near the top the barrens open out into something that looks genuinely subarctic. I stopped for fresh-caught crab in a restaurant in Plum Point where the owner’s husband had gone out that morning and the crab was so good I considered not going anywhere else.
When to go: June through September. July and August are the warmest months and the site is fully staffed with interpreters. Boat tours from the visitor centre take you around the headland to see the terrain from the water, as the Norse would have approached it. The drive up the Northern Peninsula is itself worth the trip; plan two days if you can, stopping at Gros Morne on the way.