Trondheim, and the cathedral at the road's end

Trondheim was founded in 997 by the Viking king Olav Tryggvason and served, for a stretch of the early Middle Ages, as Norway's capital before Oslo and Bergen took turns with the role. Its lasting claim, though, is a grave. King Olaf II Haraldsson, later known as St Olaf, died at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030 fighting to hold the throne he had spent his reign trying to Christianise the country from, and was buried at Trondheim. Within a year, reports of miracles at the grave had begun, and he was declared a saint; the cathedral that grew up around the site, Nidaros, became one of medieval Europe's major pilgrimage destinations, drawing walkers from across Scandinavia and beyond for the best part of four centuries.

It is worth pausing on how quickly that happened. A king who died fighting for his throne, rather than in any obviously saintly circumstance, was recognised as a saint within roughly a year of his death, a speed that says as much about Norway's urgent need for a unifying national story at the time as it does about the man himself. Whatever the truth of the miracles, the political usefulness of a royal saint to a newly Christianised kingdom is not hard to follow.

A building that kept catching fire

Nidaros Cathedral, begun around 1070 and largely built through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is the northernmost Gothic cathedral of its scale in the world, which is a fact more remarkable in the walking than the reading: this is a serious piece of medieval stonework at a latitude where most of Europe was still building in timber. It has also, over the centuries, burned more than once, notably in 1327 and again in 1531, and each rebuilding left its mark; the cathedral standing today is as much a record of restoration as of its original construction, work on it having continued, in one form or another, into the twentieth century and beyond.

The west front, covered in tiers of carved figures, is largely a nineteenth and twentieth-century reconstruction rather than surviving medieval work, and it is honest to say so rather than let a visitor assume every carving dates from the twelfth century. What makes it worth seeing regardless is the seriousness of the restoration: sculptors worked from what fragments and records survived to recreate a facade true to the building's original ambition, not simply to fill the space.

The route, and its revival

The pilgrim route north to Trondheim, known today as St Olav Ways, was one of the most walked pilgrimage roads in medieval northern Europe, roughly comparable in importance, for its time and region, to the Camino de Santiago further south. It fell out of use after the Reformation, when Norway's church turned firmly Protestant and pilgrimage lost its official standing, and stayed largely forgotten for centuries. It has since been re-established as a long-distance walking route, waymarked from Oslo and elsewhere, and walkers still arrive at Nidaros today, on foot, for reasons not so different from the ones that brought people here nine hundred years ago.

The main route from Oslo runs to well over six hundred kilometres, a walk of several weeks that few modern travellers attempt in full; most who walk any of it today choose a shorter stretch, often the final days approaching Trondheim, and receive, at the cathedral, a certificate much like the one long offered to pilgrims completing the Camino. It is a modern revival rather than an unbroken tradition, and none the less genuine for that.

Norway's crown, still kept here

Nidaros Cathedral has also, historically, been the site of Norwegian coronations, and the royal regalia are kept in the cathedral's museum rather than in Oslo, a small but deliberate acknowledgement of where the country's monarchy considers its ceremonial home to be. It gives the building a weight beyond the purely architectural; this is not simply an old church that survived, but one that Norway has continued, quietly, to treat as central to its own idea of itself.

A stop, not a destination in itself

For ships heading further north, Trondheim tends to be a call rather than the point of the voyage, and it rewards more time than a single afternoon usually allows. The cathedral alone is worth the stop; the fact that it sits at the end of a nine-hundred-year-old road, still walked, makes it worth rather more than that.

Beyond the cathedral, Trondheim's old town, with its coloured wooden warehouses along the Nidelva river and the fortress of Kristiansten on the hill above, is worth the extra hour most itineraries don't quite allow for. It is a working university city rather than a place preserved purely for its history, which makes the history, when you do find it, feel earned rather than staged.