Saturday 6 April 2024

Land on the Edge: The Landscape Evolution of the Lincolnshire Coastline (2023)

The Land on the Edge project was commissioned by Historic England and Lincolnshire County Council as part of the wider Inns on the Edge project (Historic England project number 8398). The long, low-lying coastline of Lincolnshire has changed dramatically and repeatedly over the centuries and millennia, and one of the key aims of the Land On The Edge strand was to produce a detailed academic report analysing the landscape history of the 75 mile-long stretch of coastline from Grimsby to Boston. Once the high ground on the westernmost edge of the now-drowned Doggerland that connected England to the Continent, the Lincolnshire coastal zone saw a dramatic inundation by the rising tide that began around 8,000 years ago and continued on and off right through to the medieval period and beyond. This has resulted in a complex and intriguing coastal landscape that still bears the traces of multiple large-scale shifts in both its character and the way that it has been used by its inhabitants. 

Lidar image of the entire study area. Land in blue is all below about 2.5m OD and so below the mean high-water of spring tides on this coastline, with land in dark blue being located close to or below sea-level; land in green lies up to about 5m OD, whilst land in yellow and brown is above 5m OD. The grey represents the 3m contour inland of the project area (contains Lidar data © Environment Agency 2021, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and modern mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors, used under the Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0 ).

The results of this project were presented in two reports written by me in 2023: a full, academic report of about 110,000 words entitled Land on the Edge: The Landscape Evolution of the Lincolnshire Coastline, and a shorter piece offering a summary of the results of the project for wider dissemination, entitled Land on the Edge: Headline Stories. Both of these reports have now been made available online by Lincolnshire County Council (along with the other reports from the wider Historic England/LCC project) and, as a result, they are now presented here for download too. The first link of the links below is to the Full Report and the second is to the summary Headline Stories:

Land on the Edge: The Landscape Evolution of the Lincolnshire Coastline, full report (2023): click the following links to read online or download from Academia.edu or Researchgate.  

Land on the Edge: The Landscape Evolution of the Lincolnshire Coastline (2023) — Full report, c.110,000 words, click to read online or download at Researchgate or Academia.edu.

Land on the Edge: Headline Stories — summary report for dissemination (2023): click the following links to read online or download from Academia.edu or Researchgate.

Land on the Edge: Headline Stories (2023) — summary report for dissemination, c.21,000 words, click to read online or download at Researchgate or Academia.edu


The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2024, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.