Sheep. And sheep. And sheep. And sheep. Gathered together.

In Iceland, there are several times as many sheep as humans. And most of these sheep spend the summer in the remote highlands grazing on the fresh mountain herbs. It has been a tradition for many centuries (a viking tradition) to bring the sheep to the highlands in June and gather them from the highlands in September. And inbetween they are free to go wherever they want to go. There is nobody taking care of them.
The "free as an Icelandic sheep" life ends in September when the huge sheep gathering takes place. The sheep gatherers travel with their horses to the highlands and stay there for several days riding around, trying to find all the sheep (which are spread over a huge area!), gathering them and bringing them home. This is not easy, especially because the weather is very unstable in September. There is literally a whole line of low pressure areas above the North Atlantic Ocean waiting to hit the island and they bring cold wind gusts and pouring rain and snow storms and dense fog and often all of this mixed together into one "big weather".
Last weekend, there has been such a "big weather" (a snow storm with wind gusts up to 40 m/s, in one place 71 m/s) running over North and East Iceland. And in this big weather, the sheep gatherings took place and all the sheep were brought down from the remote highlands. (Honestly, I have no idea how the sheep gatherers survived this crazy weather but they just did!) They are gathered into a so-called réttir (sheep pen) and sorted into different compartments which belong to the different farms in a certain area. Many of the Icelandic "réttir" are quite special because they look like a bunch of vikings built them long time ago: their low walls are completely made of lava stones which are piled onto each other only hold together by their own weight!
Gauti and I were taking a look at how the sheep came down from the highlands last weekend and were gathered into the oldest "réttir" of the country: Fljótstunguréttir. Let the pictures speak for themselves:

See the tiny dots at the margin of the big lava field?

Yes, they are thousands of sheep coming down the highland.

A sheep gatherer riding infront of the huge sheep flock

Run, sheep, run!

This horse has been busy gathering the sheep for several days on the cold windy rainy highlands and now it waits exhaustedly that all the sheep run into the sheep pen.

Needless to say: more sheep. Finding their way over the uneven lava field.

All gathered into the sheep pen Fljótstunguréttir, build of lava stones.