Hanstholm was an island once, and the name still says so — Hansted Holm, the island of Hansted, worn down over centuries to a single word. The knob of high ground it sits on runs roughly seven kilometres long and three wide, the northern remnant of a salt dome capped in chalk so hard that the ice sheets scoured around it instead of through it. Then the land itself began to rise. Relieved of the weight of the ice, northern Denmark is still lifting, and the water between the island and the mainland drained away into dune and pasture. Two farm names remember the crossing. Bådsgård means boat farm. Færgegård, out at Sårup, means ferry farm. There has been nothing to ferry for a very long time; you drive it now without noticing you have.

The first attempt, in 1842, was built too flimsily and had to be pulled down. Its replacement went up in 1843 and was the first lens-based lighthouse in Denmark — a machine for bending light rather than merely holding it up. Electrification in 1889 made it the country's most powerful, and for a stretch of its life the most powerful in the world; even with the intensity turned down since, nothing in Denmark throws a stronger beam. Automation arrived in 1970 and left a compound of empty keepers' buildings on the cliff. In 1979 those became a museum of the surrounding landscape and its history. From the gallery, sixty-five metres above the sea, the whole former island lies flat below you: harbour, plantation, reservation, and the grey seam where the North Sea becomes the Skagerrak.

The engineer Jørgen Fibiger got the law he wanted in 1917, and then the century got in the way. Grants dried up in the 1930s. The occupying forces, who had their own designs on the site, halted construction, stripped out the machinery and blew up the buildings on the beach. After the war the fight turned domestic, because other Danish harbours had no appetite for a new competitor on the North Sea coast. A fresh law passed on 29 April 1960 finally settled the argument, and the fishing harbour opened seven years later. The geology that made the headland is also the reason anyone persisted: sea currents keep the water off Hanstholm from freezing, so the port works year-round. On this coast that is rare, and it was the entire point.

For two decades the town was an international terminal. Fjord Line sailed to Egersund, Haugesund and Bergen until autumn 2008, and the fast catamaran Fjord Cat crossed to Kristiansand until October 2009. Longest-lived was the Norröna, the Faroese Smyril Line ship that made Hanstholm the Danish end of a route to the Faroe Islands and Iceland for close to twenty years. In autumn 2010 Smyril Line moved its Danish operation to Hirtshals, about 140 kilometres up the coast, and the last passenger link went with it. The town has been trying to win a route back ever since. Fish still come ashore here in quantity. The terminal waits.

Sand began marching east across Thy in the fourteenth century. By 1555 it had buried enough of Vigsø parish that the pastor proposed abandoning both village and church; the parishioners stayed. In 1690 there were dunes more than twelve metres high on the pastor's own fields. Only in the nineteenth century, through systematic planting of lyme grass and trees, was the ground finally pinned down. South of town, roughly 4,000 hectares of that dune country became a wildlife reservation, protected from 1949 and now the largest strictly protected area inside Nationalpark Thy, Denmark's first national park, opened in 2008. The other things in the ground are German. The wartime coastal fortress built here left bunkers too solid and too dangerous to remove, so most simply stayed — some now sitting on the beach or in the water, where the coastline moved and the concrete did not. Conifers planted afterwards to screen them are slowly giving way to broadleaf.