Hatteras Island
— — the long thin island the Atlantic keeps moving.
Not only on a wall.
“A barrier island roughly fifty miles long and never more than a mile wide, held between Pamlico Sound and the open Atlantic. Highway 12 runs the spine. The lighthouse, a black and white spiral and the tallest in the country, was moved 2,900 feet inland in 1999 to keep the sea from taking it. Off the cape the shoals still pull ships under. The wind here has a different sound.
Hatteras Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hatteras Island is the southern arm of North Carolina's Outer Banks, a barrier island pinned between the Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound. The island runs roughly 50 miles from Oregon Inlet to the village of Hatteras, where a free state ferry crosses to Ocracoke. Most of the land sits inside Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the first national seashore authorized in the United States, established by Congress in 1937. Seven villages line Highway 12: Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, Hatteras.
The waters off Cape Hatteras are called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The cape juts where the cold Labrador Current meets the warm Gulf Stream, and the shifting sands of Diamond Shoals reach more than ten miles offshore. Together with NOAA, the National Park Service counts well over a thousand documented shipwrecks along this stretch of coast. The same currents bring the fishing — red drum, bluefin tuna, marlin — that draws charter boats out of Hatteras and Oregon Inlet through every season the weather permits.
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse stands 198 feet, the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States, painted with a black and white spiral that reads at sea. In 1999 the National Park Service moved the entire tower 2,900 feet southwest to escape the advancing shoreline, a 23-day relocation that drew engineers from around the world. The light is open for climbing in the warmer months. The island itself is reached from the north by the Marc Basnight Bridge over Oregon Inlet, and from the south by the free Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry.