We landed at Avssaqutaq on the evening of 12 August, straight off a 510-nautical-mile crossing of the Davis Strait from Pangnirtung Fjord. It is a small island rather than a mainland settlement, and getting onto it is genuinely memorable: access is by a suspension footbridge about sixteen to eighteen inches wide, with wide gaps between the cables, rated firmly at one person at a time. Our expedition leader stationed a team member on it.

Avssaqutaq is a fishing settlement roughly ten kilometres from Sisimiut, close enough that people walk it, and a number of Sisimiut families keep a second house here. So a building like this one has not been abandoned in the way the word usually implies. Houses here fall out of use gradually, get stripped for materials, and are left standing because there is nowhere for the materials to go and no pressure on the land.

The vegetation is the other half of the picture. What looks like plain scrub is a dense Arctic plant community: Arctic willow in the foreground, growing as ground cover rather than as a shrub, along with cottongrass and a long list of grasses and sedges. Arctic willow can be decades old and ankle high. In a place with this short a growing season, the tundra in front of this house may well be older than the house.

On printing this one: the tundra in the foreground is the technical challenge, dozens of species of low vegetation at slightly different greens, which can turn to mush. A fine art paper with some texture suits both the subject and the weathered boards better than a glossy surface would.