Múlafossur drops about thirty metres off the lip of a grass-topped sea cliff and lands in the open Atlantic, with no beach, no river mouth and no shore in between. The stream behind it crosses a green shelf at the foot of Árnafjall, Vágar's highest mountain at 722 metres, and then simply runs out of land. In a westerly gale it does something stranger: the wind catches the ribbon below the lip and pushes it back over the clifftop, so the fall appears to run upward. Above the drop sits Gásadalur, a village of barely more than a dozen people. Until a tunnel was bored under the mountain in the mid-2000s, it was one of the most isolated settlements in the Faroes.
The walk from the car park takes two minutes, and the view arrives all at once. There it is: the white thread of the fall, the timber houses on the shelf above it, the flat-topped mountains behind, and Mykines out on the horizon where the sun goes down. A squall can swallow the peaks and clear again within the hour, and the same cliff turns grey, then green, then gold while you stand there. From late April to August, puffins nest in burrows dug into the turf around the fall and skim the cliffs below you. In winter the plateau goes white and icicles fringe the ledge while the fall keeps running through them. The tunnel that ended the isolation also brought the visitors: hundreds a day in summer, to a village that still counts its residents on two hands. There is a café, a free car park, and no railing at all on the cliff edge.