Walking to Pulpit Rock, and the fjord below it

Preikestolen, Pulpit Rock, is a flat-topped slab of granite jutting out some 604 metres above the Lysefjord, formed by frost working into cracks in the rock face over thousands of years since the last ice age. The plateau itself is roughly 25 metres across, level enough to stand on comfortably and sheer enough on three sides that most people who reach it stay well back from the edge. It is one of the most photographed views in Norway, and almost none of those photographs are taken from a ship, because the fjord below it is one thing seen from the water and quite another seen from directly above.

Geologists studying the crack that separates the plateau's outer section from the cliff behind it have confirmed it is stable for now, widening at a rate measured in millimetres over decades rather than anything that need concern a walker in any single visit. It is one of those facts more reassuring in the reading than it sounds on first hearing: yes, there is a crack, and no, it is not the sort of thing to plan a trip around avoiding.

A different way into the same landscape

A cruise into the Lysefjord shows the scale of the cliffs from below, which is dramatic in its own right; a walking route up to Pulpit Rock, a climb of a few hours on a well-used path from the car park below, shows the same landscape from the opposite direction, and adds the plateau itself, a genuine and slightly vertiginous destination in a way a fjord passing outside a cabin window never quite is. Neither view makes the other redundant. They are simply different instruments for looking at the same piece of geology.

The path itself has been substantially improved in recent years, with stone steps laid over the roughest early sections to manage the sheer number of people who now attempt the climb each summer, and it remains, for all that, a genuine hike rather than a stroll: uneven ground, some scrambling, and enough ascent that unsuitable footwear is a real and common reason people turn back before the top.

Further inland, on foot

A walking holiday through this part of southern Norway doesn't stop at Pulpit Rock. Routes continue inland towards Hardangervidda, one of the largest mountain plateaux in northern Europe and home to Europe's largest remaining herd of wild reindeer, and down into the Hardangerfjord region around Odda and the Buerdalen valley, where glacier-fed rivers and waterfalls sit within a day's walk of small farming communities that have worked this ground for centuries. It is a slower, more deliberate way to cover ground that a cruise itinerary would cross in an afternoon, on foot rather than from a deck, with the weather and the gradient setting the pace rather than a sailing schedule.

The route also touches the coast itself, at small island communities like Glesvær near Bergen, where fishing and farming have always sat closer together than the fjord scenery further inland tends to suggest. It rounds off a week that moves from cliff-top drama to quiet coastal ground, on the same legs the whole way, which a cruise, however good the itinerary, simply cannot replicate.

No boots required, if that's not your trip

Not every visitor wants a week on their feet, and there is no shame in that; a cruise still reaches the Lysefjord itself, passing directly beneath Pulpit Rock on the water rather than climbing to it, which gives a genuine sense of the cliff's height without requiring a single step uphill. It is, in its way, the easier version of the same view, looking up rather than down.

A cruise through this stretch of coast typically continues well beyond the Lysefjord, into the Hardangerfjord and Nordfjord further north, taking in glaciers, waterfalls and mountain scenery that a walking week, confined to a smaller area on foot, simply doesn't have time to cover. It trades depth for breadth, in other words, and does so without asking anything of the legs at all.

Choosing between the two

The honest advice is to pick based on fitness and appetite rather than which sounds more impressive on paper. A walking week through this stretch of Norway asks a good deal of the legs and rewards it with places a ship simply cannot reach; a cruise past the same coastline asks nothing of the legs at all and still delivers cliffs, waterfalls and a fjord that needs no explaining once you're on it. Both end up looking at the same rock. They just get there by entirely different routes.