The Caledonian Star cruised this morning off the north end of Edgeøya, turning south into Storfjorden, and landing us after breakfast on a steep shingle beach. We were at the mouth of a long, straight valley that cut back between the mountains. The valley called Rosenbergdalen, after a 19th century German zoologist, looked an inviting place for stretching our legs. Climbing steeply at first, then more gently, we found ourselves walking on thick green turf, sometimes dry, sometimes almost boggy, made up of mosses, grasses and flowering plants, including pink and yellow saxifrages, poppies, sorrel and golden buttercups.

It was puzzling to find, half a mile inland and over 100 ft above sea level, the bones of several bowhead whales. Not just the ribs or smaller flipper bones - the massive vertebrae and skulls, including this 20 ft long lower jawbone. Half-embedded in turf, encrusted with lichens, mosses and saxifrage, these bones have been there a long time. How long? We do not know. How did they get there? The wind did not blow them and nobody carried them. They may be sub-fossil bones, of bowheads that died naturally and dropped to the seabed. More probably they are the last remnants of whales killed during 19th century whaling and washed ashore on a strand. Either way, they showed us how very quickly Svalbard is rising as more and more of its icecap disappears.

Just 200 yards away six fat caribou grazed peacefully - the short, stocky Peary caribou of northern Greenland and Svalbard. They glanced at us, twitched their ears and kept right on grazing. With winter just around the corner and hard times ahead, they need to feed as hard as they can before the snow comes.