Sørvágsvatn is the largest lake in the Faroe Islands, on the island of Vágar, and from one cliff at its southern end it appears to hang hundreds of metres above the Atlantic, though in fact it sits barely thirty metres above the sea, held off the ocean by a rim of rock. The trick is the angle. From the top of Trælanípa, the cliff that rises from the lake's edge, you look back along the water with the ocean far below in the same frame, and the lake seems to float on the sky; a camera makes the effect stronger still, and the photograph has become the picture of the Faroes. The walk to it traces the lake's eastern side across open moor grazed by sheep, climbing gently for about an hour, with the water on one side and the bare green slopes of Vágar on the other, until the ground ends at the cliff.
Trælanípa means the slave cliff. Faroese lore says that in the Viking age it was where masters threw slaves too old or sick to work down onto the rocks below, and the drop, 142 metres straight into the sea, makes the story easy to believe. At the far end of the lake the water spills over the rim in the Bøsdalafossur waterfall, straight down into the Atlantic, so the lake and the ocean do meet, just not where the eye says. Near the start of the trail an old stone boathouse and a small red boat sit at the calm edge of the water, a scene as Faroese as the sheep. The lake has no agreed name: the village of Sørvágur at one end calls it Sørvágsvatn, the village of Miðvágur at the other calls it Leitisvatn, and the islands have never settled it. Sørvágsvatn is a lake that looks like an illusion from one spot and like a lake from every other, and the walk is for the one spot.