A seter is a traditional summer mountain farm - a small cluster of timber buildings at the upper end of a Norwegian mountain valley, used for centuries as seasonal grazing for cattle, sheep and goats during the short Norwegian summer. The system is called seterdrift and shaped Norwegian agricultural patterns from at least the early medieval period until well into the twentieth century. The plural is setrer or setre.
The basic logic of the system was straightforward: the lowland farms held the long-term homestead and the winter feed crops; the seter held the herd in the high summer pasture so that the lowland fields could be cut for hay. The herd typically moved up to the seter in mid-June and back down in early September, walking the same drift route each year. A small number of family members - historically often the women - spent the summer months at the seter making butter, cheese and skim-milk products that were carried back down to the home farm.
Most working setrer have closed in the last fifty years as Norwegian agriculture industrialised, but the buildings remain across the country and many have been carefully restored. A summer drive through the inland mountain valleys - through Valdres, Hallingdal, Gudbrandsdal, Sogn - passes hundreds of seter clusters at the upper edge of the cultivated country. A small but growing number of working setrer have reopened as artisanal cheesemaking operations producing the distinctive Norwegian seter cheeses (gamalost, pultost, traditional brunost) that the lowland industrial dairies cannot replicate.
For the visitor, the seter is partly a landscape feature and partly a working part of several of the journeys we arrange. The Mjølkevegen cycling route - literally the milk road - follows the historic seter drift route from Vinstra into the Valdres mountain country. Several of the highland walking journeys spend an evening at a working seter where the kitchen serves the seter's own cheese with brown bread and coffee. See Cycling the Mjølkevegen and A walking week to the roof of Norway.