Lincolnshire coast

Major settlements on the Lincolnshire coast include the ports of Grimsby and Immingham, and the seaside resorts of Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe (with Sutton-on-Sea), Ingoldmells and Skegness.

Smaller towns and villages on the coast include South Ferriby, Barton, Barrow, New Holland, Saltfleet & Saltfleetby, Theddlethorpe, Trusthorpe, Sandilands, Anderby Creek, Chapel St Leonards and Freiston Shore.

Looking inland from any point on the coast between Grimsby and Boston, the nearest visible geographical feature is a low line of hills, the Lincolnshire Wolds.

There are more than thirty miles of sandy beaches (in an unbroken line from Cleethorpes to Gibraltar Point), which give way in the north and south to acres of salt marsh and estuarine mud.

Owing to the combined sediment carried by the Humber and the rivers of the Wash, and to the muddy clay sea floor, the waters off Lincolnshire are usually an opaque brown.

In an effort to combat this threat (and that to wildlife of coastal squeeze), parts of the sea bank are deliberately being breached, and areas of the coast converted back to salt marsh in a process of "managed retreat".

Tourism is still important for the area around Skegness – tens of thousands of holiday-makers and day-trippers from the industrial East Midlands (Mansfield, Nottingham) and South Yorkshire visit the town each year.

Lincolnshire's only stretch of motorway, the M180, terminates near the village of Barnetby le Wold, but the road continues as the A180 to Grimsby, thus linking the docks with Scunthorpe and the industrial towns and cities of South Yorkshire.