Nags Head Beach

Nags Head is on the Outer Banks, the chain of barrier islands off North Carolina, with the Atlantic on one side and Roanoke Sound on the other. The beach runs about seventeen kilometres and the island is in places only a few hundred metres wide.

Behind it stands Jockey's Ridge, the tallest natural sand dune system on the eastern seaboard, thirty metres or so and moving south-west a few metres a year. It is a state park, and hang gliding has been taught on it since the 1970s — a direct line back to Kitty Hawk a few kilometres north, where the Wright brothers chose these dunes for the same reason: soft landings and constant wind.

The shore is broad quartz sand with a real Atlantic swell, sandbars and rip currents. The Outer Banks is a working surf coast and also a hurricane coast: these islands migrate, houses fall into the sea with some regularity, and beach nourishment is a permanent municipal expense. Wild horses live on the northern banks at Corolla, descended from Spanish colonial stock.

Development is a line of beach houses on stilts, largely rented by the week, with a highway behind and no high-rise anywhere. Public access points with parking are frequent and marked, which is the practical thing to know. Jennette's Pier, rebuilt in concrete in 2011 after the wooden original was destroyed by a hurricane, runs three hundred metres into the Atlantic and is the practical way to see how far the sandbars sit offshore.

Jockey's Ridge is the tallest active dune on the American Atlantic and it moves; the Wright brothers flew four miles up the road because of the same wind. The Outer Banks are a barrier island system that migrates landward, which the road and the houses are in a long argument with. Rip currents here are among the worst on the east coast.