Holtaheia – an inspirational mountain of tragedy, mystery and hope

Rosalind Jones (France)

Here’s a conundrum. How is it that a mountain composed of schist has a topping of Larvikite granite which is surrounded by a deposit containing Iona Marble, Old Red Sandstone and Triassic pebbles? Furthermore, why did it make global news? How did it inspire students to become geologists? And why was a book written about its unsolved mystery?

If you’d like to know the answers, then read on.

The particular mountain is Holtaheia – a low summit in the Strand district of Rogaland in south-western Norway (Fig. 1). Clues for Holtaheia’s recent history lie in a well-trodden footpath and metal debris left on its slopes. A human tragedy is recorded bay monument on its peak, where exotic rocks repose. Holtaheia forms part of a plateau of ‘Blokkebærknuten’ whose grey schists are criss-crossed by tectonic jointing and fractured into blocks, which have been worn smooth by ice. Although no great beauty itself, the mountain commands a breathtaking panorama of lakes, fjords, islands and distant Stavanger, which is unforgettable.

Buried deep down inside this cordillera that bound the vast palaeo-continent of Gondwana together, Holtaheia’s schists were later jointed and faulted during Variscan tectonism. Over the ensuing eons, denudation gradually wore down the massive mountain chain until the crystalline roots were exposed – to face their own demise by weathering and erosion. Eventually during the Pleistocene, the mass that includes Holtaheia was abraded and smoothed by the immense glaciers, which gouged deep NW-SE trending troughs along the Variscan planes of weakness.

When the Ice Age finally ended, Holtaheia was revealed as a residual knob of striated, frost-weathered blocks, one of many such peaks located between the vertiginous ‘Pulpit Rock’ overlooking magnificent Lysefjord, and the island-studded western fjords (Fig. 2).

Subsequently greened with cotton-grass, asphodel, myrtle, heather and juniper, it became the domain of mountain animals. Homo sapiens eventually colonised the region, first by hunter-gatherers, then Vikings, invading Danes, then free Norwegians, and briefly Germans in WWII. Once the lofty retreat of deer and sea eagles, now hardy sheep graze its slopes above the farming hamlet of Holta, where the peak was once unmarked on maps and would have remained anonymous today but for a cruel twist of fate.

On Wednesday, 9 August 1961, a Cunard Eagle Vickers-Viking from London Airport, code name Papa Mike, delayed five hours by engine trouble, took off at 1.30pm with three crew bound for Stavanger’s Sola Airport. Aboard were 34 teenage boys and two masters from Croydon’s Lanfranc School, who were looking forward to an ‘adventure holiday’. They were flying towards bad weather in an old aircraft, with incorrect maps, and ignorant that stormy weather was building up around Sola. While being talked down for the approved instrument landing, Papa Mike disappeared. Instead of taking the prescribed glide path, incredibly the plane flew eastwards into the cloud-covered mountains of Strand –where it crashed just below the summit of Holtaheia.

At dawn the next day, a young local farmer and Royal Norwegian Air Force search and rescue pilots found the wreckage. There were no survivors. Holtaheia immediately became a honey-pot for the media, who cast the mountain as the guilty culprit – for being in the way of the lost plane. Journalists from Norway, Britain and several European countries swarmed to the site and waited with shocked locals under the cordoned off peak. Crash investigators and rescuers gathered on the summit. Pathe News filmed the scene. Never before had so many people gathered on Holtaheia.

The crash was Norway’s worst air accident and Britain’s worst peacetime school disaster.On11 August,20 young Norwegian Red Cross Hjelpkorps volunteers painstakingly retrieved bodies scattered far and wide amongst the rocks and burnt vegetation. The bleak summit had been set ablaze after the impact and debris was spread in a wide cone. The Holtaheia mystery made world headlines for days (Fig. 3).

In Stavanger, an anonymous sculptor donated a Larvikite granite cross to mark the tragic spot and the Red Cross Hjelpkorps saw to its emplacement on the peak.

In May 1962, the cross was dedicated and more than 500 people climbed the mountain for the ceremony, including the British Ambassador, top ranking British and Norwegian Air Force personnel, the Bishop of Stavanger, the mayors of Strand, Stavanger and Croydon, and the relatives and school friends of the victims (Figs. 4 and 4).

Despite her loss, the 16-year-old sister of one Lanfranc boy was spell bound at what she saw from the top of the mountain – the first she had ever climbed.

Once primordial sands and mudstones, the rocks forming Holtaheia were created during eons of polycyclic events, which led to them being metamorphosed into quartz-veined schists during the Caledonian Orogeny. During the Scandinavian Scandian phase, from 425 to 395mya, when the Iapetus Ocean closed and Baltica, Laurentia and Avalonia collided, sediments folded and mountains of Himalayan proportions were thrust up.

Viewing the beautiful panorama was a catharsis (Fig. 6). Previously, she was most interested in history, but the rocky landscape with glacial lakes, the islands sprinkled among converging fjords, distant skerries -the sheer magnificence of the landscape- hit her with such force that her interests converted from history to natural history instead. Collecting a frost shattered souvenir from the top of Holtaheia, she returned home inspired to work hard to study geology. I was that girl.

As a geology student at London University, I determined to return and, in 1966,initiated a scientific expedition to Arctic Norway – hoping I would be able to visit Holtaheia en route. Instead, the chosen route from Oslo lay across the interior towards Bergen. From there, we crossed the Jotunheim (Mountains of the Giants) and, skirting the long Sognefjord, followed the Scandinavian mountains northwards. Spectacular views were ever-changing – from plunging white-watered valleys flanked by truncated spurs and vertical-sided fjords with cascades of waterfalls, to jagged snow-covered peaks and chains of low islands at sea.

The journey northwards passed a cornucopia of geological exposures and landscape features that were subject lessons in petrology, structural geology and geomorphology -white anorthosites, impressive augen and banded gneisses, micro and pegmatitic granites, garnet schists resembling cherry-cake, as well as sedimentary varve lake deposits and outwash gravels. Folds, faults, thrusts and nappes were visible in naked cliffs and mountainsides, while hanging valleys, cirques, pyramidal peaks, kames, kettle holes and moraines made the journey a scenic feast. Eventually, the expedition set up base camp in an area of barren tundra in the Varangerhalvøya peninsular that juts into the Barents Sea near the Russian and Finnish borders. As the only geology student in the small group, I had the challenge and delight of mapping a bare rock vastness – alone except for lemmings, ptarmigan, and dive-bombing arctic terns.

On graduating, finding work wasn’t easy for a female geologist but I managed to join the palaeontology department of the Natural History Museum in London. There, I worked on their graptolite collection before marrying (a geologist) and continuing my career teaching A-level Geology – the highlight of which was fieldwork. I was delighted that many of my students continued at university and found careers in mining, gold prospecting and the petroleum industry.

In 1987, I returned to Holtaheia with my husband and two children – both geology students. I was a surprised to discover the base of the cross surrounded by a wall of stones. As the others climbed down to read the plaque (Fig. 8 ) marking Papa Mike’s point of impact just below the summit (Fig. 9), I silently promised never to forget my brother and his companions.

Some years later, my son revisited Holtaheia taking with him a serpentinite-veined Iona marble cobble to add to the collection around the cross. This green and white stone became buried under further rock mementos left by visitors (Fig. 10) – many of whom found unexpected solace at the site, some inspired to write poetry about their feelings for this place of pilgrimage.

In August 2011, more than 250 people gathered on the summit for the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy. Many, now aged over 70, had been present 50 years before. Wreaths, flowers and new stones from England were carried up (Fig. 11). From Devon came a smooth pebble of Bunter Sandstone inscribed to the young stewardess, and a piece of Old Red Sandstone inscribed to one of the boys. A twisted red-painted fragment of ragged metal, part of the fuselage of Papa Mike, rested on what had grown into an altar of stones by the cross. At the commemoration, the Mayor of Strand spoke of the tragedy and how Holtaheia and the event of August 1961was part of Strand’s history.

I was surprised to hear my name when the Mayor of Strand thanked me for writing ‘The Lanfranc Boys’ translated into Norwegian as ‘Flystyrten i Holtaheia’ – Plane Crash on Holtaheia – and for recording that history. It seemed amazing to recall that half a century had passed since the panorama from Holtaheia had inspired me to become a geologist, this love gaining me my husband and rubbing off on my children and students.

Now, I had returned to Holtaheia a final time and the promise I’d made to remember my brother and his companions had been kept – by my commemorative book. With me and my family were the farmer, retired members of the Royal Norwegian Air Force and many of the Red Cross Hjelpkorps rescue teams –now old men. All of them had contributed vivid recalled stories of what they’d found on Holtaheia.

So the conundrum I posed I have explained with this geologically human story of Holtaheia – an inspirational mountain, but where the mystery of why the crash happened 50 years ago remains unsolved.

 The book, The Lanfranc Boys’ (Fig. 13), is still available and can be bought on Amazon. All profits from book sales go to the Norwegian Red Cross in recognition of their rescue work.