Back in the mid-20th Century, Larsen told me, road-building projects were about building character as much as they were about building a nation. In 1939, unemployed youth were put to work constructing the 108km Sognefjellet road across the roof of Norway and through what is now Jotunheimen National Park. A few years later, in the 1940s, nearly 150,000 prisoners and the unemployed were given the no-less-challenging task of taming the coastline with the Kystriksveien.