The mountain bog around this stone was mined for peat in the cold centuries of Iceland, perhaps as late as the 1960s, but the stone was left. It was too big to build a fence from, too small to cut into a building block, and, besides, it wouldn’t burn in a fire.

Look how the arctic willow has clung to its warmth, though, building a rich ecosystem, even while the bog it might otherwise have rimmed is still nothing more than grass and a few flowers. The bog is now a thin layer of water mining the stone. Slowly, life will return from here.