My return to the Fens and their coast – a land of brooding intensity

Revisiting his childhood haunts of Skegness and Mablethorpe, our writer finds the epic landscape surrounding them a good place to be alone yet still connected

There’s a ship passing seawards beyond the dyke, the New Old Sea Bank. This river, the Welland, flows through the town nearest to my childhood home, and here, after a long meander, it empties into the Wash and the North Sea.

This is not deja vu – I am returning to a place where I have never been. Back in the east Midlands, half a century ago, did I even know this was where the Welland ended up, in an almost featureless landscape?