There are many sensible ways to plan memorable trips: weeks of diligent research, deep background reading, the considered counsel of well-travelled friends. All of these seem wise enough. But alternatively – if faced, say, with a sudden barely-thought-out midwinter itch for a couple of days somewhere windswept and sandy and upliftingly desolate, accompanied by a vague hunch that this may be the kind of thing that Scandinavia does best – you could just feed a list of words such as 'beach' and 'remote' and 'Denmark' into Google and see what pops up. That's what I did. Three days later I was in Skagen.
I first settled on Skagen before even looking at where it was on the map, and when I did I was delighted to see that not only is it the very northernmost point of Denmark, poking up towards Norway, but that it is at the end of a long, thin taper of land. I'm always drawn to places that are dead ends, destinations that are on the way to nowhere but themselves, where, once you get there, there are only two choices: turn around, or stay. In my experience, just before the land runs out you can usually rely on things to get nicely weird.
My conviction that this must be the right place was only strengthened the day before when I got in the mood with an episode of Borgen, the Danish political drama that is the chattering classes' TV favourite of the moment, in which the prime minister and her husband decide that they need a break. His suggestion: Skagen. She overrules him – impossible to sweep for security in time – but you can already tell it will turn out to be a terrible mistake.
Much of what is special about Skagen involves sand. The whole peninsula is in a gradual state of flux – the part of town I am staying in (Gl Skagen, short for 'Gamle Skagen'; 'old Skagen') periodically moves eastwards as the coast erodes, and the older residents apparently like to joke that they were born where the sea now is. Left to their own devices, the sand dunes themselves move even more quickly, and those forming out of the western beaches would slowly cross the peninsula, driven by the wind, until falling off the eastern coastline several hundred years later.
Such migratory dunes are now anchored by trees and grass, but one – the Råbjerg Mile, south of town – has been left to do what it does naturally. You can clamber on to it, a small serene undulating desert surrounded by trees, or a giant lumbering sand creature that slowly rolls over and over as it moves ever onwards across the land by about 20 yards each year. (Actually, on the morning I'm there, the wind is blowing fiercely in the opposite direction, thwarting it, probably even nudging it back a few fractions of an inch. But we all have days like that.)
Closer to town there is what remains of a church that was built before the people of Skagen learnt how to temper the sand's progress. After battling for years to rescue it, they finally abandoned it, leaving only its tower visible. I can imagine how, in many places, such a blunt reverse would be taken as a divine message of huge significance, but there seems to be no indication that the people of Skagen thought that the lesson learnt was anything more than that they had probably built their church in the wrong place.
The other natural phenomenon for which Skagen is known – and for all my prior ignorance, I come to realise that among the Danish people this is quite a celebrated place – is its light. Even on a day like this, where the sun struggles to make brief cameos through the clouds, the sky is a dark froth of wild, luminous blues and greys with sudden hints of yellow and pink and bright white. This contributed to the town's early fame when – supposedly triggered by an approving comment from a visiting Hans Christian Andersen – it became home in the last decades of the 19th century to the school known as the Skagen Painters, who specialised in scenes of local folk and landscape. Other celebrated Danes have left their mark since then. Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) came here for a few months to finish Out of Africa.
And after I make the required pilgrimage out to Grenen, the sandy northern point where two different parts of the North Sea meet each other and squabble in choppy turmoil off shore (even on a winter's day there's a steady trail of people out and back), I drive around the deserted northern coast and come across a remarkable building, with bold black rectangular air-vents sticking up from its roof like odd periscopes from a gathering of submarines. This, a nature centre, is one of the last works from a more modern Danish success story, the architect Jørn Utzon who, in his thirties, a virtual unknown who had never built anything outside Denmark, entered an international competition with a fanciful design that would become an emblem of its distant country: the Sydney Opera House.
Beauty comes from sadder, more accidental history as well. This was occupied territory in the Second World War, and when I randomly head for the western coast one afternoon, I find myself at a beach littered with some of the many German pillboxes that once also professed to protect this coastline, now tipped and half sunk and lapped by waves, so successfully claimed by their surroundings that now they seem nothing more than magnificent brutal sculptures, as harmless as the mirror image that reflects in the wet sand as locals wander by, walking their dogs.
My luck holds in choosing a place to stay. Those who like more hubbub, and shops, will prefer the main part of town near the port on the other side of the highway. Some of it seems delightful and old, but aside from the quite remarkably good fish soup I have for lunch at a place called Jakobs (largely ordered because even I could guess what fiskesuppe was), I avoid it. Ruths Hotel, which is spread out across a series of buildings in Gl Skagan, turns out to be the area's fanciest. It was named after its founder, Emma Ruth, who opened up in 1904. She later passed it to her daughter and her Norwegian husband, whom she met while he was recuperating at the hotel, the sole survivor of a wreck off the local coast. But it had fallen on lean times before it was bought in 2004 by Jørgen Philip-Sørensen, one of Denmark's richest men, whose fortune was based on the Group 4 security business and who had loved coming to this area as a child. He had the place rebuilt to his luxurious and sometimes impractical specifications (there is, beneath the dunes, a huge and barely used underground car- park, though more usefully a spa and deluxe restaurant) and subsidised its substantial annual losses. He died in 2010 – he is buried in the churchyard next to my room – and the hotel is still on its way to breaking even, though thankfully this seems a matter of only modest concern.
While in the winter this part of Skagen has only 23 permanent residents, and the whole peninsula just 8,000, the population is said to reach close to 100,000 in the summer season, the height of which apparently is a few days of celebrity fever when the younger Danish royals visit. Very few visitors are British – Ruths Hotel reckons that 80 per cent of its clientele is Danish, 15 per cent Norwegian and only five per cent from further afield – but I can't see any good reason why there shouldn't be more. (For the British it's not so hard to get here: Ryanair to Aarhus and then a little under three hours by car.) I'm sure that this hotel provides a welcome oasis of calm in the summer, and I can imagine how glorious and golden Skagen must be under a warm blue sky, but I doubt that I would like it more than I like it now.
The dunes are high enough on this part of the coast that you can't easily look at the sea – I can just glimpse it from the upstairs bedroom of my split-level cottage – but you can usually hear it as it pounds away, a relentless protest at man's vain attempts to make permanent what will always, eventually, change. Just before sunset I climb the dune and sit there. Down the coast some way to the south, I'm surprised to see a house between the dunes and the sea. It's exactly the kind of place I would dream of living in, but that I also know must be some kind of mistake. And so it proves.
When I ask about it, I'm told its complicated history, of each new questionable owner who vowed to protect it but never found the money in time, or perhaps knew that there was only so much that the money could do. Now, it's too late. A storm came early this January and swept under its foundations. Its floors are sinking, sucked out from below, and now it is only a matter of time before the sea claims it all, and there is nothing left but another empty beach to wander along into the distance.
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