Nature
Thy has a very varied landscape. In the north it is marked by flat coastal plains which were covered by sea in neolithic times, but fell dry because of the . These are interrupted with higher-lying plains that were islands in the neolithic sea. In the slopes that formed the coast in these times, high-lying limestone is often visible - hence the name of the Limfjord. The eastern stretch, facing the Limfjord, has quite fertile soil, is slightly hilly and dotted with small villages and farms like the landscape in most of rural Denmark. The landscape is marked by strong western winds, most trees bending eastwards.
The west coast has wide beaches and high dunes with Leymus grass and sea-buckthorn. Behind the dunes, there is heath with stretches of Calluna heather, Iceland moss, Cladonia, crowberry, bilberry, blueberry, cranberry and orchids including the unique Dactylorhiza majalis subsp. calcifugiens. This is the result of huge sand drift in the 15th to 19th centuries which covered much formerly fertile land. The sand drift affected the whole west coast of Jutland, and some other parts of Denmark as well. Since Thy is exposed to winds from both the north and the west, even from the North Atlantic, the sand drift went the furthest inland in this area, as far as 18 km (11 mi). Parts of the sandy stretches have been turned into conifer woods. A line of lakes, believed to have been caused by the sand drift's blocking the outflow to the sea, mark the border between the western, sparsely populated sandy area and the eastern, fertile farmland.
The wetlands Vejlerne in the northeast are the largest bird sanctuary in Northern Europe. Nearby is the bird cliff Bulbjerg.
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Famous quotes containing the word nature:
“All nature’s creatures join to express nature’s purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.”
—Graham Swift (b. 1949)
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards him like a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.”
—Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883–1917)