Fur the perfect island of special sand mining (diatoms) and general awesomeness

Fur, the beautiful island

We ended up with an extra day in the North of Denmark, so we decided to go to the local island of Fur, as recommended by Lars.  Fur is really very close to Morsoe.  So close in fact that it was only a 25 min flight, 15 mins of which was taken up in engine warm up at the beginning and circling the airfield prior to landing.  If we'd had a lookout on Morsoe we would have been able to see Fur from it.  

Fur is a little farm strip, owned by Poul, who promptly appeared from building a bike shed / toilet / shower room next to the hangar.  Poul is a really fantastic guy, who turned out to be building a helicopter.  We had to see that.  So we both hopped on the back of his quad bike for the short trip across the island to his garage where the project was progressing steadily.  

Me on quad bike

Chopper, awesome

Then we had tea with his wife and daughter, who then took us for a walk along the sea-shore.  Back in the day Fur's waters must have been pretty quiet as a whole heap of diatoms and larger stuff has been laid down.  The diatoms are mined and the fossils are collected.  So the sea shore walk was a good opportunity to look for fossils, which Poul's wife is great at and found us several examples of what I would call moss.  Unfortunately I was less good and didn't find that bird / archaeopteryx / fish that I would have liked to.  We also had a look at the little hiking shelter log huts, which we really wanted to go back and try out, but even in a 5 month trip there is a time pressure to keep moving.

Stunning coastline

The fossils come out of the cliffs behind us

Fabulous hiking huts

Cornflowers in the corn, it all begins to make sense

Then we went for a drive around the entire island to look at the old and now silted up harbour, the diatom mines and other sites.  At 5.30pm we were dropped of back at our plane after having a marvellous time and really having seen the island.

Poul would like to encourage visitors to his landing strip and I can't think of any place I'd rather go.  Lovely for bathing, walking and kayaking.  Poul has bought 20 new bicycles that visitors can borrow and there will be by now a toilet and shower available.  

Diatomaceous earth