Poor after voluntarily giving up his family inheritance, Ludwig worked for a while in Skjolden's fruit juice factory. There was a friendship with a local man, Arne Sojgren, and a conspicuous absence of women in his life, which generated some gossip. Happy hours were spent walking and talking to the local hotel owner about religious belief. Wittgenstein felt some things were true of human life that couldn't be sensibly said, but instead reveal themselves to us in the way we are.

Through the 1920s he chose a different escape route, teaching in a school in rural Austria. By the time he revisited Cambridge in 1929, he needed his Norway again. During his longest ever stay between 1936 and 1937, where he wrote the much-admired Philosophical Investigations, retired English teacher Anna Rebni became his chief support. "The closest he came to being married," chuckles Johannessen. "They fought all the time."

When, in 1951, he fell ill with cancer at the age of 62, he would have returned to Sjkolden for a last time to stay with her, but was already too weak to make the journey. It's one of the great regrets of scholars and historians working on the growing body of material relating to Wittgenstein and Norway that no one interviewed Rebni before she died in 1970.

In this sixtieth year since Wittgenstein's death, an anniversary that has only been marked by specialists, Alois Pichler of Bergen's Wittgenstein Archives told me how much remains to be understood about this unique philosopher who placed the whole burden of philosophy on language. Many would say that two succeeding generations of logic-chopping Ordinary Language philosophers from Britain and America got his legacy wrong and that the aim now should be to restore the logic to a natural and human setting.

The problem of what to do about the hut, which a local man Arne Bolstad inherited, remains. When Wittgenstein died Bolstad had it dismantled and reerected as a modest, comfortable home inside the village. Over the years his family have declined to move, or sell. Equally, the owners of the Wittgenstein plot on the rocks have wanted to hold on to their land. But this year, with the generations moving on, there seems a chance to change this. Local historian Harald Vatne, whose book on Wittgenstein and the people of Skjolden will appear in 2012, has been chivvying the local council to have the requisite permissions in place.

Should the hut be rebuilt out of the original materials? Vatne and Johannessen think so. British artist and Wittgenstein disciple David Connearn even insists so, because anything else "would create a ghost". More modest plans to turn the Bolstad house in its present position into a Wittgenstein centre are also being considered. 

Will it become a shrine for scholars or could it have a wider significance? A fashion for wild places, and silence, is one stream of interest that Norway's local Wittgensteinians could, and probably should, tap into. In Skjolden's fine Wittgenstein-rich library and at the indoor pool adjacent to the fjord, I spent a few days reading and swimming, thinking that this part of Norway could become my refuge too. 

Millions love silence but few know much about Wittgenstein. When Vatne asked a busload of 50 tourists if they had heard of him, only two said they had. True, the heritage industry might make an effort on behalf of the other 48, but tourism doesn't easily wrap itself around artists and intellectuals without smothering their strangeness. What is needed is of a different order: a stunningly fresh idea to link difficult philosophy, intransigent genius and one of the most beautiful places on earth.