The emergence of the south Lindsey coast of the Wash before Domesday

Abstract

The lowland areas of east Lincolnshire are often aggregated in written accounts and maps as ‘marsh’ or ‘fen’ without regard for any subtleties of landscape type or history. Even less discrimination is usually applied to the coastline between Skegness and the river Witham, unless there is recognition of modern reclamations of salt-marsh. An attempt is made here to show how the early medieval landscape of the terrain between the Wolds and the sea evolved from a continuous wetland into a number of landscape types and in doing so created a moving coastline which included embayments. The agencies are partly natural, as with regional alterations in sea-level, and partly human-made as early settlements are established and create drier land. A variety of sources are used to build a sequence of landscape emergence that was the basis for later medieval and modern intakes of marsh and fen that underlie today’s coastal setting.