Dear fellow travellers
We are following the coast of North Jutland, the edge of Denmark that meets the North Sea head-on. This is the ‘Line in the World’ that gave Danish writer Dorthe Nors the title for a book and a sense of belonging. The book was first published in Danish of course, and the English translation was published by Pushkin Press in 2022.
In A Line in the World, Nors tells the story of a year on this stretch of coast, but in reality the book is about a lifetime of connection to place. We are new here in North Jutland, but we are trying to see if we can capture the magic that Nors describes, like the flash of a ray of sunshine escaping a gap in the grey skies to hit the surface of the moody waters beneath.
“It takes a certain build to stay standing on this line,” writes Nors. “You’ve got to bend, walk sideways. The old houses have buckled at the knees, but still hold firm. They’re digging in to shelter behind the dunes. They shiver on windswept plains behind gust-warped trees. They have hipped roofs and little windows. Everything is about making themselves small, against the pressure of the wind […].”
The season is turning. In Løkken, a few souls lean into the wind as they cross the beach towards the last of the white summer houses that are being taken away for the winter. We shelter beside a fishing boat that has pulled up high onto the sand, to watch the kite surfers ride the white horses beyond the curl of the waves as they crash onto the shore. The wind bites, a slap to the cheeks. We hurry inland in search of shelter and hot dogs, washing them down with coffee and hot chocolate.
Shelter is not always so easy to find.
Nors again: “The people who developed the historical building practices along this line knew they weren’t living on a western coast. They were living on an eastern one: the eastern coast of the North Sea […] The North Sea is a nation without a capital, but with its own powerful identity. At the transition between sea and earth, its vast energy has nowhere to go and surges deep into the land […].”
Here, the coastline shifts and changes. We continue on, north to Lønstrup, where there is a gash in the town, as if a giant boat was once pulled ashore. It is grassy now, a quirky feature of a resort slowly preparing for off season. But the scar in the town was the product of violence, of the great storm of 1877 that made landfall on an August day and destroyed twelve houses as the sea reached into the land. As the sea pushed inland, the fishermen who had ridden out the storm on the waves returned to find their worldly belongings being pulled out with the tide, and a great ravine where their homes once stood.
Just south of the town is Rubjerg Knude, a lighthouse standing adrift among the dunes, where the wind whips up the sands in spinning twisters and the trees that grow on the edge of nearby fields are short and stunted, offering little protection to the sheep grazing in their shadow. The lighthouse has not been operational since the late 1960s, and in 2019 it almost fell into the waves. It was only six metres from the edge of the sandy cliff, as the erosion caused by the relentless sea shifted the boundary between land and water.
The lighthouse was saved by putting it on tracks and pulling it inland, away from the edge. We cross the dunes to reach the reinforced structure, climbing to the top for a view out to sea and down along Nors’ line in the world. Waves roll in. Long, unbroken lines that continue to crash, crash, crash against the shore. The lighthouse is safe until 2060, or so they think. Maybe the time will come sooner than they think. Maybe they’ll have to move it again. Or maybe priorities will have changed, and they’ll simply let it succumb to the waves.
We find shelter from the wind. It rattles the window frames and whistles beneath the door. As the light fades on North Jutland, it is now time to follow Nors on the page once more.
“When a landscape is in motion,” Nors writes, “as the waves roll in with the encroaching dark, people and buildings are compelled to follow […].”
Jutland repays those who take time to explore this liminal territory where land and sea meet. Meanwhile, as you hunker down for winter, you might enjoy some more articles from hidden europe which feature the shores of the North Sea.
Paul Scraton
