Skagen Odde — the Scaw Spit, or simply The Skaw on older English charts — runs some 30 kilometres northeast from Ålbæk to the point, forming the northernmost reach of Vendsyssel in Jutland. It is one of the largest spit systems in Europe, and unlike most European coastlines it is gaining rather than surrendering ground. Longshore currents drag sand and gravel up the west coast and unload them at the tip; over the past century the reef beyond Grenen has advanced at a mean rate of roughly ten metres a year, about a kilometre closer to Sweden. Every printed map of Denmark is therefore a little out of date at the top. Nothing here rises far; the high ground is about thirteen metres, so the Odde offers horizon instead of relief. One more geographic joke: Grenen is popularly Denmark's northernmost point, but because it hooks so sharply east, the true northern extreme lies a couple of kilometres west at Skagen Nordstrand, where nobody stands for photographs.

Southwest of Skagen a whitewashed tower stands alone among the dunes with nothing attached to it. This is Den Tilsandede Kirke, the Sand-Covered Church, dedicated to St Laurence and built between 1355 and 1387, with the tower added around 1475. At 45 metres long it was substantial for a settlement at the end of the country. Then the sand arrived. From about 1600 the drifting dunes pushed in, and the parish spent generations losing ground to it. On Great Prayer Day in 1775 the congregation had to dig the church door free before the service could begin. Twenty more years of that settled the matter: in 1795 a royal decree closed the church and the body of the building was pulled down, leaving only the tower, whitewashed, as a seamark for ships. Some eighteen metres of it still shows above the dune. The nave's floor and altar are presumed to be down there yet.

The lesson was eventually learned. In 1888 a dune plantation was laid out south of Skagen and extended along both sides of the road from Frederikshavn, planted expressly to pin the migrating sand in place and, as a bonus, to shelter the fishery. Those stands are mature woodland now — mountain pine, Scots pine, spruce, oak and patches of birch, with reindeer moss crackling underfoot. Where the sand was left to itself, it stayed spectacular, and most of it is protected. Grenen accounts for 350 hectares, Hulsig Hede for 2,170, Råbjerg Mile for 1,620, and part of Bunken Klitplantage for another 670. In late summer the heath goes purple with heather, and dune pansies come up in colours from white through to blue-violet. Creeping willow grows here in a tight curled rosette that people call the Skagen rose — not a flower at all, but dried and stuck on souvenirs regardless.

Michael Ancher arrived in 1874 and found a fishing village with a quality of light that exists nowhere else in Denmark. The reason is geography: sea on three sides, pale sand underfoot, no hills, so the light arrives reflected and doubled. Word travelled. P.S. Krøyer arrived in 1882 and became its central figure; Anna Ancher, who had grown up in the village, became one of the finest painters among them. They ate and argued at Brøndums Hotel, and they chased the blue hour, that interval after sunset when sea and sky lose their boundary and merge into one soft blue. Krøyer and his wife Marie rented a house from 1895 to 1909 in Byfogedgården, Denmark's northernmost beech wood; it is a museum today. The colony began to break up around 1890, when the railway reached Skagen and brought the tourists with it. Skagens Museum opened in 1908 to hold what the painters had made.

Roughly two million people a year walk out to the point. They are not the heaviest traffic. More bird species have been recorded around Grenen than anywhere else in Denmark, because migrants crossing between Scandinavia and the continent funnel down the narrowing spit and hesitate at the water's edge. Porpoises, seals and occasionally whales work the churning line offshore. Near the tip stands the most northerly building on the Odde: the Skagen Odde Naturcenter, designed by Jørn Utzon in 1989, built under his son Jan's supervision and opened on 19 May 2000 — four thousand square metres devoted to the forces that made this landscape: sand, water, wind and light. Lights have marked the spit's end since 1695, when a primitive beacon was raised here; three lighthouse towers still stand along the point. All of them, given enough time, are provisional. The sand keeps going northeast.