Fornverkaskólinn - The Heritage Craft School Project

Fornverkaskólinn (The Heritage Craft School Project) supports and promotes historic building skills as well as records and preserves the vernacular names and terminology associated with traditional Icelandic building methods, which are all in danger of being forgotten. They are an extremely valuable fragment of Iceland's intangible cultural heritage. These skills provide an understanding of how to gather and prepare turf, stone, and timber; key processes to ensure the continued conservation of a large portion of Iceland’s built heritage. The project was established in 2007 and is a partnership project between the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum, the Carpentry Department of The Comprehensive Secondary School of Northwest Iceland, and the Tourism Department at Hólar University College

In order to preserve traditional building skills and the related knowledge, the Heritage Craft School Project has been offering courses, mainly in building with turf. The courses are meant to provide an in-depth and hands-on investigation of the practical application of ancient building crafts, and other traditional skills. They are based on current Icelandic conservation best practice as defined by cultural heritage management law. Emphasis is placed on the importance of conserving the historic integrity and authenticity of old buildings. Since 2007, the project has organized 40 courses, mostly on turf and building with turf, and we have, to date, received just under 300 participants, both from Iceland and from abroad.

As well as teaching about traditional building skills, we have been renovating and restoring a turf farm and associating outhouses in Tyrfingsstaðir in the region of Skagafjörður in northern Iceland. The old field in Tyrfingsstaðir has therefore, so to speak, been our “classroom” and restoring the turf buildings have been the assignments of our courses (at least most of them). In this way, we have been able to restore eight outhouses as well as the turf farmhouse, which consists of seven interconnecting buildings. Most of those buildings have been taken into use and are now used for housing livestock, storing hay, and smoking meat in a traditional way. The old farm and outhouses are open for the public to visit.

There is a lot of interest in traditional building skills, particularly related to turf, both domestically and from abroad. A project like the Heritage Craft School has several benefits:

It raises awareness and appreciation of traditional skills and knowledge as well as the associated buildings
It offers courses, on regular basis, that have not been available to the public before
As a side project we have been restoring an old turf farm and associated outhouses, which would not have happened without the courses.

Our courses have been open to anyone interested in traditional building skills, whether they have any prior experience or not. Through the years we have trained people with very different backgrounds and very different motives for participating.

These are some of the things we have learnt:

Participants, in general, appreciate practical assignments, that preferably will serve a purpose and be used after the course, and we have observed that people re-visit their projects and even bring friends or family.
It has been our aim to keep the number of participants relatively low so each participant will have the attention and guidance needed from the instructor/s, to be able to properly learn the subject.
Most of our courses have been 3-4 days (7-8 hrs a day), which, in our experience, is a suitable (minimum) amount of practice hours for participants.
Be advised that not all participants have experience with physical work so remember to offer frequent breaks.