Birkeland is a village in

Austevoll Austevoll is a municipality and an archipelago in Vestland county, Norway. It is located in the traditional district of Midthordland in Western Norway. The administrative centre is the village of Storebø on the island of Huftarøy. Other vill ...

municipality in

Vestland Vestland is a county in Norway established on 1 January 2020. The county is located in Western Norway and it is centred around the city of Bergen, Norway's second largest city. The administrative centre of the county is the city of Bergen, where t ...

county,

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

. The village is located just to the north of the village of

Storebø Storebø is the administrative centre and largest village in Austevoll municipality in Vestland county, Norway. The village is located on the northern part of the island of Huftarøy, just south of the village of Birkeland and northwest of the v ...

, the municipal centre. Birkeland is included in the urban area of Storebø which has a population (2019) of 1,588.

Name

The village is named after the old ''Birkeland'' farm (

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...

: ''Birkiland''). The first element is ''birki'' which means '

birch A birch is a thin-leaved deciduous hardwood tree of the genus ''Betula'' (), in the family Betulaceae, which also includes alders, hazels, and hornbeams. It is closely related to the beech-oak family Fagaceae. The genus ''Betula'' contains 30 ...

forest' and the last element is ''land'' which means 'land' or 'farm'.

References

Villages in Vestland Austevoll {{Vestland-geo-stub