Haugesund, the herring town where Norway's unification is remembered

Norway likes to remember where it began, and it remembers it here. Just north of Haugesund, on a grassy rise above the sea at a place called Gard, stands Haraldshaugen, a granite obelisk about seventeen metres tall with bronze panels around its base. It was put up in 1872 to mark a thousand years since the Battle of Hafrsfjord, the sea fight in which, by tradition, Harald Fairhair defeated his rivals and made himself the first king of a united Norway.

Two honest caveats belong beside it. The battle itself was fought near Stavanger, some way to the south, and the date of 872 is the traditional one rather than a certainty. And the mound beneath the obelisk is only traditionally Harald's grave: tradition has long placed his burial here, and in 1872 it was generally believed, but historians are more cautious, and the old mound was largely lost when the monument was built on top of it. None of that stops it being a fine place to stand. The view runs out over the sound towards the open North Sea, the sea that made both Harald's kingdom and the town below.

A town built on herring

For most of its history there was not much of Haugesund at all. What made it was the herring. By the 1840s the herring fishery off this coast had become important, and the fishing that followed, the salting, the barrels, the boats and the merchants, gathered around a narrow, sheltered strait called the Smedasundet. A trading place grew up on its banks. It was given the status of a ladested, a small trading town, in 1854, became a municipality in its own right the following year, and gained full town rights in 1866.

It grew quickly. According to the Norwegian heritage directorate's history of the main street, the town had roughly three thousand people by 1865 and nearly eight thousand by 1900. When the herring declined, Haugesund turned to shipping, and later to the oil and gas industry of the North Sea, but the strait is still the heart of the place. The town's old waterfront faces the Smedasundet, and the herring is still part of how the town describes itself.

Avaldsnes and the kings

The monument makes more sense once you know what lies just across the water. A short way south of Haugesund, on the north-eastern tip of the island of Karmøy, is Avaldsnes, beside the Karmsundet strait.

The tradition is that Harald Fairhair chose Avaldsnes for his main royal estate in about 870, and Karmøy today calls itself the homeland of the Viking kings and Norway's birthplace. Whether it was literally the first royal seat in Norway is still argued over, but the royal estate did remain here until about 1450, and in 2012 archaeologists found the remains of the medieval royal hall. The site now has the medieval St Olav's Church, a history centre and a reconstructed Viking farm a short walk away.

Put the two together and the story of the area is clear: a coast of royal estates and sea lanes, a king remembered on both sides of the sound, and a town that grew rich, many centuries later, on the fish in the same waters.

Fjord cruises that call

Haugesund is a port of call on Ambassador Cruise Line's spring and summer fjord cruises from London Tilbury, usually paired with the deeper fjords to the north. All three in the catalogue are seven nights.

Fjordland Landscapes & Nordic Traditions sails in July, with Austefjorden, Bergen, Flåm, the Sognefjord, the Aurlandsfjord and Haugesund among its places.

Springtime Fjordlands sails in March and calls at Eidfjord, Bergen, Flåm and Haugesund. Springtime Fjords sails in April, with Haugesund, Flåm, the Aurlandsfjord, Austefjorden, Bergen, Stavanger and the Boknafjord among its places, which makes it the one to choose if you want to see the Stavanger end of the Hafrsfjord story too.

With a day in Haugesund, the walk out to Haraldshaugen is the obvious outing, and the waterfront on the Smedasundet the obvious place to come back to. Harald may or may not be under the mound. The herring, at least, were real.