The climb to the top
Forty metres of sand, with both seas in view.
CC BY-SA 3.0 · Ragnar1904 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ragnar1904 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ragnar1904 — CC BY-SA 4.0
**The largest migrating dune in northern Europe** — around a million cubic metres of sand crossing northern Denmark. The dune genuinely moves: the prevailing westerly winds push it east at about **15 metres a year**. It covers roughly a square kilometre and rises to **40 metres**, and climbing it feels like walking in a desert set down in Denmark — open sand with no vegetation to the horizon. It formed around the sixteenth century during what is called the **«sand flight»**, an environmental catastrophe across northern Jutland: coastal forests were cut for fuel and grazing, the sand was released, and it began to move, burying farms, villages and whole churches. The state fixed most of it by planting in the nineteenth century and largely succeeded — but Råbjerg Mile was **deliberately left free to move**, as a witness to the phenomenon. At its present rate it will reach the main road in about two hundred years. Note: there are no marked paths — you walk directly on the sand, which is hard work.
Forty metres of sand, with both seas in view.
The eastern side, where the dune buries the vegetation ahead of it.
No vegetation to the horizon — a landscape unlike Denmark.
Råbjerg Milevej, near Skagen — about 16 km south-west of the town
An environmental catastrophe lasting centuries. In the Middle Ages the coasts of northern Jutland were covered in forest and grasses that held the sand in place. Then **the trees were cut** for fuel and shipbuilding and **the grasses heavily grazed**, exposing the sand. With the strong westerly winds it began to move inland, burying **farms, villages, roads and churches** through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its most famous casualty is the **buried church** near Skagen, which its congregation had to abandon in 1795 after years of digging the sand away from its door every Sunday. ⚠ In the nineteenth century the state launched a huge planting programme of pine and marram grass that halted the advance almost everywhere. **Råbjerg Mile** alone was deliberately left mobile.
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