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For anyone with an ounce of poetry in their soul there can be few better places to arrive than Norway's Lofoten Islands on a calm summer's eve. The short crossing by propeller aircraft from the mainland is like drifting across a giant billiard table of brushed blue velvet, creased only by the occasional extravagant V made by a toy-sized fishing boat put-puttering for home.

The cushions that border that velvet are softened by distance, but as you draw closer they harden into obdurate, aristocratic mountains. So much so that you have to wonder where, in all that welter of rock up ahead, the pilot will be able to find a comfortable pocket in which to put his aircraft down.

But then the seabed suddenly swirls upwards with flourishes of Caribbean-like aquamarine and you're above land, above flannels of green that have been anchored to the mountains' ankles by wooden houses the colour of fish blood. A short skid on puddled tarmac, and you've arrived.

Anyone familiar with the way the Cuillins rear out of the sea on the Isle of Skye will have have some idea what the Lofoten islands look like. Both rise to similar heights (around 3,000ft) and come complete with grouse, heather, peat bog and midges - but in the case of the Lofotens somebody has xeroxed the Cuillins and hung them out to dry all along the horizon.

Actually, the designation 'island' is a bit misleading here. The Lofotens, which look like Jurassic vertebrae on the map, are so closely interlaced (tunnels and bridges plug the gaps) that it is often hard to remember which of the five entities you are on, and even harder to know which one you are looking at. Sea is still a major means of transport hereabouts and ferries and cruise liners perform their slow waltz in and out of the island chain.

This pristine environment is much as the ice age left it 10,000 years ago. But don't assume that because the Lofotens are north of the Arctic Circle that they are raw, wind-ravaged places: the season of fruitfulness may be short here, but from mid-May the ground bursts forth with wild flowers and berries, the skies are filled with cuckoos, curlews and eagles, and the water churns with migrating cod and salmon. When the sun shines there's a clarity in the air here which almost defies description, picking out beaches of clean white sand and piercing water so pure that you can watch the starfish grazing, 30ft down.

And then, of course, for about six weeks right in the middle of the year, there's the midnight sun. All lighthouses in Lofoten are switched off from 30th April and not turned back on until August 6th, when the sun finally sets.

Martin, Food and Travel's photographer, came over all faint when he realised quite what the permanent presence of the sun implied. "My god," he groaned. "24 hour photography." And it is certainly an odd feeling, daylight when there should be night. You draw your curtains and go to bed in the knowledge that the sun is still out there, the ultimate billiard ball still rolling along the horizon. Its presence is a challenge, and you can lie in bed imagining it taunting, "what are you, man or mouse? Bedtime, pah!" So of course we got up again.

Out at Eggum, on the Atlantic side of the island chain (the locals talk of 'Outside' and 'Inside'), the air was heavy with silence and the sea-gulls were moving at a quarter speed; but then, it was two o'clock in the morning. The sun played sweet nothings with us, creating tantalising pools of light on a shifting mercury sea stitched with skerries of rocks. It never fully showed itself from behind the clouds, but it never quite hid itself away either, and when we finally gave up and departed, it wept orange through a little tear. We duly oohed and aaahed, but was it really a strange and wonderful light - or a strange and wonderful time to have such a light?

Inevitably, in a place this far north, the weather is a key factor in determining what to do. Gerhard, a local carpenter, gave us some very good advice over lunch in Fiskekrogen restaurant on the quay in Henningsvaer. "It is an important rule of life here," he said, "if the weather is nice enough to make you think of doing something, then do it; it may never be like that again."

As if to illustrate his point, the weather changed as we talked. The day had been bright until then, but we'd noticed a bank of fog building up steadily on the outside of the island chain, flopping its forelock languidly over the mountain ridges, waiting for a breeze to give it a leg up. That breeze arrived just as we were embarking on the local speciality of cod's tongues in batter (delicate, a bit like prawns) when the first elbow of fog slithered down and over the town. By the time the catfish had arrived for our main course Henningsvaer had been severed from the mountains by a huge silent cadaver of fog, which then proceeded to isolate every house in its own creaking, dripping, world. Half an hour later, onto the wildberry mousse, the cadaver had slipped away and the sun was shining again as if nothing had happened.

When the weather's fine there's excellent walking on a network of inland tracks that climb past peat-dark lakes through cloudberries, bilberries, saxifrage and reindeer moss, with eagles above and the occasional moose up ahead. There are coast paths, too, winding through dwarf willow and mountain ash to ruined villages looking wistfully out to sea, their populations long since departed.

In less good weather there's the more human side of Lofoten life. Man has clung to the edges of these islands for around 6,000 years, although the prevailing conditions are not very conducive to human souvenirs. The once-strong Viking culture has been carefully reconstructed at Lofotr on Vestvagoy, but the main human tapestry is derived from the islands' chief obsession of the last 150 years: cod.

Few economies in the world are as mono-cultural as this one. We may talk of desperate measures to protect wild fish, but a Klondike-like atmosphere still descends on the Lofotens in the early months of the year, when the cod come to breed in the Vestfjord. Some 50,000 tons are landed in a few short weeks, a flurry of activity which in itself is enough to keep the island economy afloat. Hundreds of thousands of fish are put out on huge drying frames, a feature of every coastal settlement, and ultimately exported to Italy and Spain.

Tourism has arrived here almost as a by-product of the fishing business, because once the cod season is over, the fishermen have time - and the best months of the year - on their hands. They also have large numbers of rorbu, or fishermen's cabins, which were originally created to provide basic waterside accommodation to visiting fishermen during that winter frenzy. The simple construction and position of these wooden huts, right at the water's edge, makes very distinctive accommodation. Some changes have had to be made, of course, particularly because the beds were traditionally very short: fishermen believed that if they stretched out while asleep their soul would depart and they'd be dead by morning.

It is surprisingly easy to become deeply interested in the whole mythology of cod fishing on the Lofotens, even to the extent of spending an hour in the unlikely sounding Stockfish (aka dried cod) Museum in the carefully preserved village of A.

The commercial boats may be largely tied up, but there are plenty of opportunities to test the bounty of the sea for yourself. Most of the groups of rorbus have fleets of dinghies which guests are free to take out, and every corner shop has fishing gear. You should, though, know your own limitations and keep an eye on the weather; back in the 1860s some 500 fishermen lost their lives in the single night's storm.

Most of the more attractive settlements - Henningsvaer, Nusfjord, Reine and A - offer boat trips with fishing, but the best scenery/cod combination is out of Svolvaer, the commercial capital, from where boats travel up to the Trollfjord, a dramatically narrow and sheer-sided inlet, with cod-catching and eagle-feeding on the way.

Fish restaurants aside, there's not much in the way of urban life. This is not the place for niceties of style or design; the ultimate decorative device on the Lofotens is the right angle, and the houses are built like the hotels in Monopoly, plonked unceremoniously on the sward.

Wooden churches make the biggest architectural statements in this landscape, with big barn-like interiors where fisherman gave thanks for staying alive. The huge fish-drying racks run them a close second, though, and on a sombre day you could mistake them, too, for giant, arched cathedrals to cod.

There's one word that appears with puzzlingly frequency in both churches and graveyards; fred, meaning peace. In the Lofotens, there's an awful lot of fred about.

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