The sign on the wooden post is very clear. "The boundary of the National Park lies one hundred and fifty metres seaward of the mean high water mark," it proclaims. This is a place where precision prevails. The announcement somehow implies that visitors with an entire year to spare and a long tape measure might in theory be able to determine exactly the line of that offshore frontier beyond which the sea snails and the oystercatchers benefit from official protection. At low tide, gulls swoop and dive over the wreck of a wooden ship that grounded here ages ago. On the mudflats that lead out to the wreck, a million lugworms jostle for space, covering the surface with little trails of sand spaghetti. Beach snipes, sanderlings and greenshanks wait attentively for the chance of a snack.
Welcome to the North Frisian island of Sylt, where it is not just the wildlife that needs protection. For this German island is also the habitat of a peculiar sub-species of homo sapiens. Consider Keitum, a village of picture perfect thatched houses; some might affect to call them cottages, but there is nothing remotely cottage-like about these essays in vernacular Frisian architecture, with their studied formality, manicured lawns and assertive displays of four wheeled wealth stabled on the drive. Many of the Mercedes and Porsches have a curious little sticker on the back, a silver splodge that depicts Sylt's odd shape. Back home on the autobahn in Bavaria or the Rhineland, one gains a little kudos by declaring a Sylt connection.
Were this rural Wales and not an island off the coast of Denmark, irritated locals would long since have torched a few thatches. But Sylt is not Wales, and the local population happily mutters the Frisian greeting (“Moin, Moin”) to the incomers who have colonised Sylt’s more desirable villages. And the affluent migrants from the mainland quickly learn to say “Moin, Moin” too. It is a mantra that becomes a badge of belonging, the mark of one who affects to call Sylt his or her second home.
Keitum and Kampen, once little enclaves where artists and writers rubbed shoulders with Sylt fishermen and sea captains, have become the preserve of the rich: little galleries of chic exclusivity for the widows who feel that St Moritz no longer affords them the recognition that their status demands, and for the not quite so rich who would have all believe that they summer in Sylt and winter in St Moritz, whereas the truth lies more in a mix of Munich and Mallorca. The blow-ins populate the villages that look out over the heath, a sandy salad of heather and wild roses, to the tidal bays and inlets that separate Sylt from mainland Denmark away to the east. These are bizarre places, little nodes of secluded self satisfaction in an island eldorado, where sometimes the menus describe even the mineral water as ‘gourmet’!
There is something surreal about Sylt’s classier villages. In those that cater to the island’s migrant elite, it is easier to buy a gold watch than a litre of milk. Think Dolce & Gabbana, Cartier and Bulgari! Serious books too - with the bookshop in Keitum offering a better range of Russian and eastern European literature in translation than many a university bookshop on the mainland. For Sylt’s seasonal visitors come not just for prosecco, lobster and gourmet mineral water, but for their annual dose of reading, and there is an appetite for good literature. And for lavishly illustrated coffee table volumes that depict Sylt and the neighbouring islands as soft focus nature reserves.
Nature figures in another way on many of Sylt’s beaches, with neat signs labelled FKK at the points where wooden boardwalks lead off from Sylt’s one main north-south highway. Follow the trellised trail through pink roses and dunes to the beaches where those who read Dosteyevsky last night disport themselves naked by day on miles of pallid sand. For over eighty years, Sylt’s peculiar brand of hedonism has been defined, in part, by an affection for nudity. One recent German guide suggests that seventy per cent of summer visitors to the island use the FKK beaches, and that for many Sylt’s naturist culture is a prime reason for coming to the island. This is a place for beautiful people, and for the once beautiful people who find themselves stranded here in their dotage.
The island’s occasional visitors from other countries have a knack of wandering the duneland paths to stumble unwittingly in overdressed embarrassment upon an FKK beach. For FKK is one of those deeply encoded German abbreviations: it means ‘Free Body Culture’. Even in inclement weather, there is a certain kind of FKK habitué who still takes to the beach, braving the chill wind just as the tuberculosis patients of yesteryear were left to cure in a winter breeze.
But, being Germany, everything has its limits. FKK beaches are all on the west side of the island, a place where great grey breakers roll in across the North Sea from Lindisfarne, and the east side of the island is left to the snails and the oystercatchers. There the readers of great books stroll by day along the strand, keeping the statutory one hundred and fifty metres away from the boundary of the national park. Bloated caterpillars shuffle under the heather as the walkers pass on their way to tea to Keitum or Kampen, uttering “Moin, Moin” to those they meet along the trail. At low tide, kids walk out across the muddy sand. They cross the empire of the lugworms to the old wreck that lies just off the beach at Braderup. They gather clams and cockles, and clamber on the wreck. An old couple walking along the beach pauses and looks, minded perhaps to upbraid the young adventurers. But no! The wreck, they judge, is a mere one hundred metres below the mean high water mark. They turn and continue on their way.
