The village of Vik is around 100 miles from Reykjavik on the ring road and is famous for its black sand beach. While the beach is black it is not made of sand. It is, in fact, lava that cooled rapidly in contact with the sea and fragmented in to small stones and fine grit. The whole area is shaped by volcanic activity with basalt stacks off the shore (trolls that turned to stone, according to some local legends) and columns further along the beach, not unlike those at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.
