Eleven centuries underfoot.

Long before anyone farmed here, Kjalarnes was a volcano.

Two to three million years ago a great central volcano stood where the sounds off Reykjavík lie today. Its caldera may have spanned the bay. Ice ages and the North Atlantic have since stripped it down to its roots, and those roots are what you play on.

Look at the cliffs on the opening holes, the black rock that frames the 5th, and the sea stack called Gullkista with its cap of columnar basalt. You are looking at the inside of an extinct volcano, turned out to the weather. At Músarnes, the headland the course wraps around, geologists point to some of the finest intrusions on the whole peninsula: veins of rock that were once molten and forced their way up through older lava. Along the shore the stone forms rounded "pillows", where lava met water and cooled in an instant.

It isn't young lava. It's older and stranger than that. The holes were laid on top of it rather than carved out of it, so the ground still tells its story at every turn.

In the year 877, give or take a year, a volcano somewhere in Iceland threw a fine layer of ash across the island. Archaeologists call it the settlement layer. Anything built directly on top of it belongs to the very first generation of Icelanders.

In 2022, excavators from Iceland's heritage agency dug beneath the protected old farmhouse on Kirkjuhóll, Church Hill, at Brautarholt. They found walls of turf and stone laid straight onto the ash of 877.

They also found what people leave behind:

• a soapstone spindle whorl, probably carried from Norway
• net sinkers for fishing
• slag from smelting bog iron
• a pebble scratched with marks
• what may be a hnefi, the king piece from hnefatafl, the board game the Vikings played before chess reached the north

Someone spun wool here, fished these waters, made iron and played games by the fire, within a lifetime of the first ships arriving.

The Book of Settlements, Landnámabók, says all of Kjalarnes was taken by Helgi bjóla. He was the son of Ketill Flatnose and brother of Auður the Deep-Minded, one of the most famous settlers of all. Helgi made his home at Hof, a kilometre east of the course.

Brautarholt has its own saga. Kjalnesinga saga was written down in the 1300s. Like many of the later sagas, it mixes memory and invention, and it is set on exactly this ground.

It begins in a world we would not recognise: "At that time all of Kjalarnes was covered in forest."

A young Irishman named Andríður comes to Helgi bjóla, and Helgi gives him land on the ridge. The forest is so thick that Andríður has to cut a track (braut) to reach the high ground (holt). He builds his farm there and calls it Brautarholt, the farm on the track through the trees.

One winter his dark heifer, Mús, which means Mouse, disappears. Three winters later she is found alive on the headland west of the farm, with two calves at her side. The headland has been called Músarnes, Mouse Point, ever since. The course runs around it today.

Across the fjord, at the foot of the mountain, lives Esja, a rich Irish widow said to know the old magic. She fosters Andríður's son Búi, a boy who refuses to sacrifice to the old gods and carries nothing but a sling. Búi kills the chieftain's son inside the great temple of Thor at Hof and sets it on fire. When he is outlawed, Esja hides him in a cave high on her mountain, where a warm spring pools inside the rock.

The chieftain takes his revenge on the father. Old Andríður is killed at Brautarholt, and his widow buries him on the little island just offshore. "That island has since been called Andríðsey."

You can see Andríðsey from the course. Today it belongs to the birds: thousands of pairs of puffins, eider ducks, kittiwakes and shags. (Scientists counted about 17,250 puffin pairs in 2014.)

The mountain that dominates the view is still called Esja. Scholars think the saga named its witch after the mountain, not the other way round. On a misty evening, you may decide for yourself.

By around 1200 Brautarholt had a church, dedicated to St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. It was a fitting choice for a farm that lives with the sea on three sides.

In the early 1200s the farm probably came to Árni Magnússon through his marriage to Hallbera, a daughter of Snorri Sturluson. Snorri was the most famous Icelander of the Middle Ages: chieftain, lawspeaker, and author of the Prose Edda and Heimskringla. Much of what the world knows about Thor, Odin and the Norse gods comes from his Prose Edda.

In 1283 Bishop Árni Þorláksson and the chieftain Rafn Oddsson settled a long quarrel over church property. The settlement still carries the farm's name: the Brautarholtssamningur, the Brautarholt Agreement.

After the Black Death swept Iceland in the early 1400s, the farm passed to Guðrún Sæmundsdóttir, widow of Vigfús Ívarsson, governor of all Iceland. She lived here for many years. In 1436 the marriage contract of the governor's daughter, Margrét Vigfúsdóttir, was signed at Brautarholt.

Iceland's great land register of 1704 rated Brautarholt the most valuable farm on Kjalarnes. It had eight tenant farms, driftwood on its shores and a good landing place for boats.

On 30 December 1786 a boy named Bjarni Thorarensen was born at Brautarholt. He grew up to bring Romanticism to Icelandic poetry. His "Eldgamla Ísafold" ("Ancient Iceland") was sung for generations as a song of the nation.

In 1857 the farm's church was rebuilt in timber, the small dark church that still stands on the hill. From 1867 to 1873 its priest was Matthías Jochumsson. A year after he left, in 1874, he wrote Lofsöngur, the hymn that became Iceland's national anthem.

The church still holds services. Inside are a pulpit thought to be around three centuries old and an altarpiece from Denmark dated 1868.

Around 1900, two brothers, Sturla and Friðrik Jónsson, ran one of the largest dairies in the country here. They shipped milk to Reykjavík by sea.

From 1909 to 1914 the farm was leased by Daníel Daníelsson, a photographer and horseman. When the first cruise ships anchored in Kollafjörður, he met their passengers with horses and led them inland to the Tröllafoss waterfall.

Brautarholt has been welcoming visitors from abroad for more than a hundred years. Today they come by car, not by horse.

In 1923 Brautarholt was bought by Ólafur Bjarnason, a farmer from the north. He became district magistrate and chairman of Iceland's Farmers' Association. His family has farmed here ever since.

Through the twentieth century the land changed with the times. It carried hay and livestock, and from the 1960s its long hayfields fed a grass-meal plant, one of the farm's many reinventions.

By the turn of the millennium farming in Iceland was changing again. The hayfields running down to the cliffs were waiting for a new idea.

"This used to be agricultural land, but that had been declining … there were some generational shifts and we decided to build a golf course."

Gunnar Páll Pálsson, founder (to CNN, 2021)

Work began in 2009. The family brought in Icelandic architect Edwin Roald. Roald is known around the world for asking an awkward question: why 18 holes? His view is that a course should have as many holes as the land gives it, not one more. He traced a route around the edge of Músarnes to touch the sea as often as possible. The American shaper Michael Kelly then laid the holes onto the ground instead of bulldozing it flat, using the rock and water as the hazards.

The first holes opened in 2012. By 2017 there were twelve. At that size the course broke the convention that serious golf needs eighteen holes, and the rankings followed:

• Golf Digest's No. 1 in Iceland
• a CNN feature
• a place in Golf World's Top 100 for Continental Europe, one of very few courses ever ranked without eighteen holes

The course is also mown by robots: around thirty electric mowers run on Iceland's renewable power, and no chemicals are used. "I think we are the greenest golf course in the world," Gunnar Páll told CNN.

From 2022 the Canadian architect Tony Ristola shaped the final holes by hand, heading north along a ridge of rock. In July 2025 Brautarholt became a full eighteen holes. A year later Golf World ranked it No. 16 in the world on its first world list of X Factor courses, ahead of Pebble Beach.