The Cabin in the Mountains

Turf-roofed and wooden-built, offering fresh clean air, peace, isolation and the promise of a day's wood-chopping, hiking or snow-clearing amid extraordinary landscapes surrounded by woods, lakes and mountains, the hytte - or wooden cabin home - is a crucial part of the national identity of every Norwegian. In 2016, Robert Ferguson and his wife bought a piece of land high up in the Hardangervidda, the mountainous plateau that dominates south central Norway, and on it they built a hytte.

For Ferguson, the hytte represented the realisation of a dream of Norway that first brought him to Scandinavia from England more than thirty years ago. In The Hut in the Forest, he charts the progress of the building of his hytte against a backdrop of the changing seasons, and explores the traditions that attach to these cabin homes for native Norwegians, as a reminder of their past as a tight-knit, rural community-nation. But he also writes about the profound ways in which this dream-tradition differs from his own notions of the hytte, bound up as it was (and remains) with ideas of loneliness, remoteness and meditative landscapes, derived from the Norwegian literature, music and art, which fixed his dream of this country long before he ever learned Norwegian and came out here to live.