A Hundred Kilometres of Maintenance

Climb Parnidis at the southern end of Nida and the arrangement is visible in one turn of the head. To the west, beach, then a long low ridge running out of sight in both directions, then pine. To the east, bare sand falling into the lagoon. To the south, more sand, and then the Russian border about three kilometres off. The ridge is the part worth looking at. It runs for something close to a hundred kilometres, from the Klaipėda channel down into Kaliningrad Oblast, it is continuous, it is roughly the same height and profile all the way along, and it is not a natural feature. It was built.

The spit is ninety-eight kilometres long and between four hundred metres and four kilometres wide, which is a thin thing to put a road, four villages and a national park on. Fourteen settlements on it were buried by moving sand between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. Some were dug out, rebuilt further along and buried a second time. UNESCO listed the whole spit in 2000 as a cultural landscape shared by Lithuania and Russia, and the citation says the plainest thing anyone has said about the place: without ceaseless human effort against erosion, it would long ago have ceased to exist.

How it started moving

It was wooded when the Teutonic Order arrived. What removed the trees was three centuries of ordinary use — timber for shipbuilding, fuel for glass and potash, grazing, and armies crossing during the Northern Wars — and once the cover was gone the sand did what loose sand on a windy coast does. It formed dunes and the dunes walked, inland and eastward, at rates measured in metres a year. That is slow enough to watch and far too fast to live with: a village learned it had a decade, and then the roofline went under. Prussia took the problem seriously from about 1800, which was late by roughly a century but early by the standards of most nineteenth-century environmental policy, and the method that eventually worked was not planting trees. It was building a wall out of the sand itself.

What Epha built

Wilhelm Franz Epha, the dune inspector at Nida in the second half of the century, is the name attached to it, and there is a dune outside the village named after him. The technique was brushwood: rows of low wicker fencing driven into the sand near the shoreline, which slow the wind, drop its load, and get buried — after which you build the next row on top. Repeat for decades and you have a continuous artificial foredune ridge along the seaward edge of the entire spit, holding new sand at the beach instead of letting it start inland. It took the second half of the century and the labour of villages that had already been moved once. Marram grass was planted to bind what the fences caught. Only then came the trees, and most of them were not native — mountain pine from the Alps went in precisely because it would grow in sterile sand and survive salt wind.

It worked. The villages stopped being buried. Around two thirds of the spit is forest today and almost all of that forest was planted, in rows, by people who knew exactly which species they were choosing and why. The open sand that visitors now come to see is the residue of the problem, not the achievement.

The landscape is not what survived the sand. The maintenance is what survived, and the landscape is what the maintenance produces.

The bill arrives every winter

A structure fails in a way a landform does not. Baltic storms breach the foredune ridge, cut through it, and take metres of beach back with them; parts of this coast have lost tens of metres of beach within living memory. So the fences go back in. If you walk the beach below Nida or Pervalka you will pass rows of brushwood half-drowned in sand at odd angles, and they are not fencing anything off. They are the same machine Epha built, still running, and a standing item in the budget of a national park created in 1991 to look after a thing that a nineteenth-century forestry service made.

The second cost is subtler and has no obvious answer. Hold the sand still and the sand stops feeding the dunes; vegetation closes over open ground, and the grey dunes at Nagliai — the bare, wind-sculpted middle section that is the reason most people take the ferry — begin to green over and stabilise. The park now manages the strict reserve partly by keeping people off it, because feet destroy the fragile crust, and partly by accepting that a spit which never moves is not the spit anyone is trying to protect. Stability and openness are pulling in opposite directions, and both are written into the conservation objectives.

The cormorants

Then there is the wood south of Juodkrantė, which is the one part of this forest nobody planted: a fragment of old Scots pine on parabolic dunes, the last of what the spit looked like before the clearances, protected for exactly that reason. Great cormorants began nesting in it in 1989. There are now thousands of pairs, together with grey herons, and the colony keeps spreading through the wood. Guano strips the ground flora within two or three years and the pines follow; the wood beneath the nests is white, bare and standing dead. The birds are protected. The habitat is protected. They are the same site, and the park has spent three decades trying deterrence rather than removal, with limited success.

None of this is an argument against going. It is an argument for looking at the right thing when you get there. From the top of Parnidis the sand is what everybody photographs, and the sand is the leftover; the line worth reading is the treeline behind it, which is a drawing, and the low ridge in front, which is a wall. On the Curonian Spit the words natural and protected point in different directions, and have done since about 1800. Stay on the boardwalk at Nagliai, cycle the length of it rather than driving, and notice that the quietest thing here — a row of sticks in the sand — is the reason the rest of it is above water.