Schiermonnikoog

Schiermonnikoog is named for its first recorded landlords — the grey-habited Cistercians of Klaarkamp abbey, who ran the island as monastic estate until the Reformation confiscated it — and it has been changing hands and shape ever since. Like every Wadden island it is a sandbank with ambitions, eroding at the western end and growing at the eastern, so that the island has effectively migrated east under its own name for centuries; the village had to be rebuilt on its present site in the eighteenth century after the sea took the old one. What the migration leaves behind today is the least developed of the inhabited Wadden islands: one village, a polder, and then kilometres of dunes, salt marsh and bare sand running out to the Balg, with no cars but the islanders' own.

Nearly all of that — everything outside the village and polder — became the country's first modern national park in 1989, and it is the compact textbook of Wadden nature. The south shore is mature salt marsh, among the broadest in Europe, purple with sea lavender in July and loud with brent geese in the shoulder seasons; the north shore is a beach so wide — the widest in Europe by most reckonings — that the sea is sometimes a rumour on the horizon of your own walk; between them the dune arcs hold orchid slacks, harrier territories and the freshwater Westerplas with its spoonbills. At the eastern tip, past the last marker posts, the Balg runs out into the Wadden Sea as raw new sand where seals haul out in hundreds and access closes for the birds — the island demonstrating, at walking pace, how it makes itself.

Migration is the island's high office. In May and again from August into November the Wadden flyway compresses over this handful of dunes: waders shuttling between flats and high-tide roosts in clouds, thrush and finch falls out of the northeast, rarities annually. The islanders have adjusted their calendar accordingly, and the village's pubs in October hold as many telescopes as walking sticks.

What's worth knowing before you go

The ferry sails from Lauwersoog (about forty-five minutes; foot and bicycle only for visitors — cars stay on the mainland), and the island then runs on bikes and a bus that meets the boat. Book beds ahead in any season; one village means finite pillows. The essential day is a full crossing: south-shore marsh at morning high tide for the goose and wader roosts, over the dunes at the Kobbeduinen, and back west along the great beach with the light behind you. July gives lavender, October gives migration and storm-light, midwinter gives the island to a few hundred residents and you. The connoisseur's rule is the eastern closure signs: respect them exactly, then take the marked route as far as it goes at low water — standing on the Balg with seals singing offshore is the Wadden Sea reduced to its elements.