The Curonian Spit is a thread of sand 98 kilometres long between the Baltic and a shallow lagoon, and it carries the highest moving dunes in Europe. It was forest once. When the timber was cut for ships and fuel, the sand underneath had nothing holding it and began to walk towards the lagoon. Fourteen villages went under it. The counterattack started in 1825: marram grass first, to fix the surface, then pine seedlings to keep it fixed. Almost every green thing on the spit was put there by hand over the two centuries that followed, and the single pines standing out on the bare sand today are descended from those seedlings.
That is why you do not walk on the dune faces. One person sliding down a slope moves tons of sand, so the stairway up to the Parnidis sundial exists to send all the traffic up a single fixed line. From the top you get both waters. They are not the same sea. The Baltic side stays cold through August, while the lagoon a few hundred metres behind it is shallow, nearly fresh with Nemunas water, and warm by late summer, with reed beds and small harbours instead of surf. At Juodkrantė a deck puts you over some 3,000 pairs of great cormorants and a few hundred grey herons nesting in the pines. Their droppings have killed the trees outright, so the colony sits in a bone-white forest. The lagoon bed beside the same village gave up around 2,250 tonnes of amber to dredgers in the 1800s, and mixed in with the raw resin came 434 carved Neolithic figures. The spit also works as a funnel on the flyway, and in autumn finch and thrush flocks stream low along the ridge in their millions. Bird ringing itself was invented here, in 1901. North of Pervalka the grey dunes roll away, their sand locked under a brittle crust of lichen and moss. The path keeps to its marked line, the only sounds around you are wind and dry grass, and somewhere underneath lie the fishing hamlets the sand swallowed.