JUTLAND – IT’S A SHORE THING,

CLOCKWISE FROM THIS PICTURE Grenen, at the meeting of the seas; there’s plenty more fish and surfing, too; daily bread at Keramikafé; on the harbour, Skagen Fiskerestaurant combines fish and the arts – as seen in this vintage poster

The magical Jutland peninsula is a place of shifting sands, wide blue skies – and some of the best cuisine the country has to ofer. Norman Miller heads to its northern shores for stellar seaside feasts with a side order of history

Special places have special colours. In Jutland, the radiant mustard yellow of the buildings turns towns into splashes of fallen sunshine, while summer dusks bring the ‘blue hour’, when sea and sky merge into beautiful unity. Majestic dunes that would be the envy of the Sahara rise in silky ripples of platinum sand.

On my first day, I jinked through tussocky little dunes lent an eerie edge by German World War II bunkers, then along a vast strawcoloured beach to the slender sandbar that marks Denmark’s northern tip at Grenen, where two differently hued seas collide – the Kattegat jostling the Skagerrak in an impasto of choppy wavelets.

Think of Jutland as the Scandinavian riposte to Cornwall, a slender 110km-long peninsula reaching up from the cosmopolitan gateway city of Aalborg into the nook where Norway meets Sweden. For centuries it was a rugged backwater of lonely fishing hamlets, where the moated Renaissance jewel Voergaard Slot (voergaardslot.dk) stands out as a wonderful historical quirk. The castle has one of Denmark’s most ravishing interiors, priceless art and an infamous dungeon.

AN ARTY VIBE

Jutland stayed off radar until artists came in the late 1800s to forge a Danish Impressionism, whose depictions of hardy fisherfolk and elegant bourgeoisie fill the Museum (skagenskunstmuseer.dk) in the chic seaside town of Skagen (‘Skay-en’). I tuned deeper into the artist vibe at the nearby bohemian museum Anchers Hus (4 Markvej), home of 19th-century painters Michael and Anna Anchers.