Danish Land's End offers up fine food and seascapes of natural light

Martin Hesp discovers similarities to Cornwall with Denmark's 'plein-air' artists' movement

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Sometimes you find yourself enjoying a journey that you've decided to take for the most obscure of reasons. Such was the case with me last week as I strolled around a rather extraordinary seaside town, being almost blinded by the unusually bright natural light for which the place is famous.

Which, in itself, provides a clue as to why I was visiting the very northern tip of Denmark. It all began a few months ago when I attended a special conference on the future of food at the Danish Embassy in London (as reported in Hesp Out West). A tourism official said something that inspired my visit to his country’s version of Land’s End.

“So you've come up from the Westcountry? I've been reading all about the Newlyn School of Artists - did you know Denmark had a similar group of painters? An entire movement of ‘plein-air’ artists who descended on an area in the late 1800s because of its special quality of light - just like the English painters who went west to Newlyn.

“In fact, this autumn there's going to be a major exhibition based on one of them at London's Dulwich Gallery. You should visit the Skagen area to discover its delights and understand why these Danish painters enjoyed a very similar experience to the Cornish school.”

I was to discover that there are a lot more similarities on my journey to northern Denmark last week. The geographic set up, for a start. The Skagen peninsula is similar to West Cornwall in that it juts out into the sea, hence all that bright oceanic light - only its progression into the waves is more extreme. If you look at a map you will see what looks like a single thin hair protruding from the very top of the head of the large Jutland peninsula. This narrow spit of land (or sand, to be precise) extends into the Kattegat and Skagerrak straits.