Fur sits in the Limfjord just north of the Salling peninsula, in Skive municipality, 8.2 kilometres long and 5.3 wide. Most of the population lives along the south coast, where Nederby, Stenøre, Debel and Søndergårde have grown into each other until the boundaries are administrative rather than visible. Nederby is the largest by a wide margin. The church stands apart from all of it, up on the east side, perched on the edge of an ancient sea cliff that the water abandoned long ago. The municipal school closed in 2014; islanders opened a private one rather than send their children across the strait every morning, which tells you most of what you need to know about how Fur regards the mainland.

The north coast is where the island becomes strange. Cliffs of moler rise white and soft above the water, banded with dark layers of volcanic ash, and streaked in places with the iron-red sandstone the islanders call Rødsten. Erosion has carved a set of gullies known as the Langsted Huller. Moler is diatomite, two-thirds the microscopic silica shells of algae and one-third clay, and it is genuinely useful: fired into insulating brick for ovens and chimneys, crushed for cat litter, used in filtering and in explosives manufacture. Two firms quarry it here and on neighbouring Mors. It is an unusual arrangement, a small community with a heavy extractive industry cut into the same cliffs that everybody comes to look at, and the two have coexisted for generations.

What comes out of those cliffs is not only building material. The moler is packed with fossils about fifty-five million years old, from insects and fish to birds and plants, preserved with a completeness that has made the western Limfjord internationally famous among palaeontologists. The Fur Museum opened in 1953 to hold and explain them, and it remains the place to start: fossils, moler, and the natural history of the island under one roof. Knudeklint, the headland at the northwest point, gives its name to the lower half of the geological formation itself. In 2026 the diatomite cliffs were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Fossil hunting is a normal thing to do here on an afternoon, and people find things.

Fur was once thick with Scots pine. Farming ate into it steadily, field by field, until in 1627 the last remnant of the original forest died, and for more than two centuries the island stood essentially bare. Replanting began only at the end of the 1800s. Today woodland covers fourteen percent of Fur, concentrated in the north. Something similar happened with the deer. Seven roe deer were brought over from Egeskov Castle on Funen and released in 1965 and 1966; there are now roughly two hundred of them on an island you can walk across in an afternoon. Rabbits, hedgehogs and stoats fill in around them. An island is a small, closed experiment, and Fur has run two of them within living memory.

In 2010 a Danish newspaper poll put the question to its readers and Fur came out on top, ahead of Læsø and Ærø, as the country's most wonderful island. The verdict has held up commercially. Around 250,000 people come each year for the cliffs, the fossils, the beaches and the campsite, and for Fur Bryghus, the island brewery that has done as much as anything to put the name in front of Danes who will never take the ferry. That is roughly 340 visitors for every resident. Most of them cross in four minutes, spend a day, and go home again with a piece of moler in their pocket.