Alta, the rock carvings at the top of Norway

In 1973 someone noticed shapes in the rock at a place on the edge of Alta called Jiepmaluokta, a Northern Sami name meaning the bay of seals. Once people began looking, the shapes kept coming: reindeer, elk, bears, boats and people, thousands of them, carved into the smooth rock along the shore. Through the 1970s more panels were found, and in 1985 the Rock Art of Alta became a World Heritage Site. The Alta Museum describes it as the largest concentration of rock art made by hunter-gatherers in northern Europe.

It is a strange thing to find at the top of Norway, far above the Arctic Circle, in a town better known now for the northern lights. But it makes sense once you think about what the coast offered the people who lived here. The fjord was full of fish and seals, the reindeer moved through the valleys behind it, and the shore was where everything met.

How a carving tells its age

The dating of the Alta carvings rests on a neat piece of geology. When the great ice sheets of the last ice age melted, the land that had been pressed down beneath them began slowly to rise, and in northern Norway it is still rising. That means the shoreline has been creeping steadily outwards and downwards for thousands of years.

The people who made the carvings seem to have worked close to the water's edge. So the higher a panel sits above today's sea level, the older it is likely to be: the oldest of them now lie some way up the slope, up to about 26 metres above the sea, and the youngest lie lower down, nearer the fjord. Archaeologists have used the heights to work out the order and the rough dates of the carvings.

The dates themselves are argued over, and it is worth being honest about that. The museum's own figure is that the rock art spans from around 7,000 to around 2,000 years ago. Other studies put the oldest phases a little later or a little earlier. What everyone agrees on is that the carvings were made over thousands of years, by many generations, and that the older ones were already ancient by the time the last were made.

What they show

The figures at Alta are a record of the world as their makers saw it, and it is a world of animals and of the people who hunted them. Reindeer are the commonest subject, alone and in groups. Elk stand with their heavy heads and long legs. Bears appear, and so do boats with their crews, and scenes of hunting and fishing. Alongside them are figures that are harder to read, people in groups doing something that may be a ceremony, or may simply be a gathering.

Nobody can say with certainty what any of them meant. They might be stories, or records of hunts, or something closer to religion. Part of the pleasure of walking among them is that you are allowed to wonder.

One thing that surprises visitors is that many of the carvings are coloured red. That is not how they were found. In the 1970s many of them were painted red to make them easier to see and photograph, which was usual practice at the time; the red is a modern addition, though a few genuine rock paintings in red ochre survive elsewhere in the World Heritage area.

Visiting the carvings

The largest site, at Hjemmeluft, holds more than three thousand figures and is the only one of the areas opened to the public. The Alta Museum moved there in 1991, beside the carvings, and in 1993 it received the European Museum of the Year Award. From the museum a system of wooden walkways leads down across the rock, about three kilometres in all, with a shorter loop of a little over a kilometre for those with less time.

The timing matters. The carvings are flat panels of rock open to the sky, and for much of the year they lie under snow and ice. They can be seen in the snow-free part of the year, roughly from late spring to autumn; the museum indoors is open all year round. If your visit falls in winter, you will see the museum and the landscape, but you may not see the carvings themselves.

Cruises that call at Alta

All three cruises here are Ambassador Cruise Line's Northern Lights voyages, and Alta is on each of them.

The fifteen-night Arctic Adventures & Northern Lights Explorer sails from London Tilbury in March, with Trondheim, Tromsø, Alta, Harstad, Narvik and Åndalsnes among its places. In March, the carvings at Hjemmeluft are likely still to be under snow, so this is a voyage for the museum, the town and the northern sky rather than the rock itself.

The sixteen-night Arctic Norway & Northern Lights Explorer sails from Belfast in September, with Liverpool, Ålesund, Trondheim, Tromsø, Alta, Narvik, Bodø and Geiranger among its places. Of the three, it is the one most likely to find the walkways open.

The sixteen-night Arctic Norway & Northern Lights Explorer from London Tilbury sails in October, with Stavanger, Åndalsnes, Trondheim, Tromsø, Alta, Harstad and Flåm among its places.

If you want the carvings, go early in the autumn. If you want the lights, go later. If you are lucky, you may get a little of both.