Drangarnir is two basalt sea stacks standing in open Atlantic water off the Faroese island of Vágar, and the larger of them has been worn clean through at the foot. Behind the arch that opening makes sits Tindhólmur, an islet with five sharp peaks. From one spot on the cliffs above, the peaks line up inside the arch as though someone had set them there; move a few metres either way and the whole thing comes apart. Everyone who walks out ends up standing in nearly the same footprints. Getting to those footprints is not casual. Most trips leave Sørvágur harbour by boat and put you ashore along the coast, and a guide takes the last stretch with you over open sheep pasture, boggy underfoot and completely exposed. The stacks stay out of sight until the final cliff gives them up.
The other way is to stay on the boat. Sailings run in close beneath the towers, where the swell heaves against the basalt and the arch goes up far above the deck, and that is the one thing the clifftop cannot give you: the height of the rock. In summer you pass near enough to sort the birds without binoculars, puffins in burrows through the grass tops, guillemots packed along the bare ledges, fulmars hanging in the updraught off the face. Faroese light does the rest late in the day, when the wet basalt warms to copper and, in June, the day holds well past ten at night. Nobody lives on the islet in the arch. A farmer kept a home there once, and the story goes that an eagle carried his two-year-old up to the highest crag, and that his wife climbed after them and arrived too late. The family left, and the peak has been Arni, the eagle, ever since. The bird was real enough — Tindhólmur was a nesting site. The white-tailed eagle no longer breeds anywhere in the Faroes, and what is left of it here is the name of that peak.