Villa Oxford, Reinsdyrflya

Reinsdyrflya

Villa Oxford is a little trapper’s hut in Worsleyhamna in Liefdefjord, on the south side of Reinsdyrflya. The landscape near the hut is a very wide-open flat plain (“flya”), with large erratic boulders every here and there. The rocks have a beautiful reddish colour, derived from hematite (an iron oxide) which is part of the Devonian Old Red Sandstone.

Villa Oxford

Villa Oxford is a simple secondary hut on Reinsdyrflya, built in 1924 by Hilmar Nøis (see the Fredheim page for more information about this famous hunter) For building material, Nøis used timber of large boxes that were used to transport a seaplane to Spitsbergen by the English expedition from Oxford led by George Binney in 1924. This was in the very early days of aviation in the Arctic. The Avro-Lynx-seaplane was used for reconnaissance and arerial photography for mapping.