Lincolnshire lost villages line a stretch of coast between Mablethorpe and Skegness that most visitors never hear about. The North Sea has spent seven centuries quietly erasing the towns, churches and hamlets that once stood here.
Drive the coast road between Mablethorpe and Skegness today, and you pass caravan parks, chip shops and wide sandy beaches. What you do not see is the mile or more of land the sea has reclaimed since the 13th century, or the walled market town that once stood where the waves now break.
Lincolnshire’s lost coast is not folklore. It is documented in Privy Council records, parish accounts, and the research of historians who have spent years reconstructing exactly what stood here before the storms of 1287, 1288 and 1526 took it away. This is what the sea actually took, village by village, and where you can still see the evidence today.
Region: Lincolnshire coast, Mablethorpe to Skegness
Best for: coastal history, geology, quiet off-season walking
Getting there: Skegness station, at the eastern end of the Poacher Line, connects to Nottingham in around two hours on East Midlands Railway. Mablethorpe and Sutton-on-Sea have no rail line and are reached by road or Stagecoach bus services from Louth and Lincoln.
Time needed: A full day to drive the coast road and stop at each site between the two towns.
Old Skegness, the haven town the sea erased in 1526
Modern Skegness sits nearly a mile inland from where the original medieval town stood. Old Skegness was a genuinely prosperous walled port, trading Baltic timber that helped build Lord Cromwell’s castle at Tattershall in the 1430s. The 16th-century topographer John Leland described it as a “great haven towne” with a castle and surrounding wall.
A storm tide in 1526 broke through the protective headland and the town began to crumble into the sea. Within years, the haven and much of the settlement were gone, and the surviving population rebuilt further inland, on the site that eventually grew into the seaside resort visitors know today. Historians still debate whether the “castle” Leland described was a genuine medieval structure or an earlier Roman coastal fortification, since no confirmed archaeological evidence of a proper castle has ever been recovered.
Standing on the modern seafront at Skegness, it is worth remembering that the original town lies roughly half a mile out under the waves you are looking at.
Where to Stay: Premier Inn Skegness Seafront. A straightforward, well-located base for exploring the southern end of this stretch of coast.
Worth Knowing: No confirmed archaeological evidence of a medieval castle at Old Skegness has ever been found, despite Leland’s 16th-century description. The claim remains disputed among historians.
Mablethorpe St Peter, the lost church of the 1530s
A few miles up the coast from Skegness, the original parish church of Mablethorpe St Peter was lost to the sea in the late 1530s, not long after Old Skegness suffered the same fate further south. The church that serves Mablethorpe today, St Mary’s, stands set back from the current shoreline, itself a legacy of the town’s slow retreat inland over five centuries.
The loss of St Peter’s was part of a wider pattern along this coast. Contemporary parish records from the surrounding villages describe churches, houses, and farmland disappearing within a generation of one another as the offshore barrier islands that once sheltered this coastline broke apart.
Walk the modern seafront at Mablethorpe on a grey winter morning, wind coming straight off the North Sea with nothing to break it, and it becomes easy to understand how quickly an unprotected coastline like this one could lose ground.
Where to Stay: The Cross Guest House, Mablethorpe. A family-run bed and breakfast around 2.7 kilometres from the beach, with parking and a garden.
Worth Knowing: Mablethorpe St Peter and Old Skegness were lost within roughly a decade of each other, part of the same sustained erosion event rather than two isolated storms.
Sutton, the parish erased twice
Sutton’s history is the starkest example on this coast of a settlement rebuilding after catastrophe only to lose ground again. In the 1630s, parishioners wrote to the Privy Council, complaining that, some 80 years earlier, the sea had destroyed their ancient parish church, several inhabited houses, and much of their best farmland.
The village rebuilt, and the church now known as St Peter’s, Trusthorpe, dates its first building on the current site to 1606, an inland rebuilding that fits the pattern of a community retreating from the coast rather than abandoning it outright. Today’s Sutton-on-Sea, a Victorian seaside development, sits some distance from where the original medieval parish stood.
Where to Stay: Manor Farm Stay, Sutton-on-Sea. A working farm setting a 15-minute walk from the beach, with farmhouse rooms and self-catering options.
Worth Knowing: The 1630s complaint to the Privy Council is one of the few surviving first-hand accounts of coastal loss along this stretch of coast, written by those who lived through it.
Trusthorpe, the submerged forest and the rebuilt church
Just south of Sutton-on-Sea, the beach at Trusthorpe periodically exposes the remains of a genuinely ancient landscape: tree stumps and trunks from a prehistoric forest submerged by rising sea levels thousands of years before any village stood here. Radiocarbon dating of similar wood at Anderby Creek and Cleethorpes places the drowning of this forest between roughly 3500 and 2300 BC.
Continued coastal erosion over the last century has exposed sections of this buried forest at Trusthorpe and Mablethorpe, giving visitors a rare chance to see wood that predates the Bronze Age lying exposed on a modern beach. St Peter’s Church, Trusthorpe itself, rebuilt from 1606, still holds services today, an active place of worship sitting on ground that has already swallowed one church before it.
Where to Stay: Sunnycroft B&B, Sutton-on-Sea. A short drive from Trusthorpe, with a private garden and full breakfast.
Worth Knowing: The submerged forest at Trusthorpe and Mablethorpe is thousands of years older than any of the medieval settlements lost on this coast, a genuinely prehistoric landscape exposed by the same erosion that has taken villages since the 13th century.
Anderby Creek and Cleethorpes, the drowned Ice Age forest
Further along the coast, the beaches at Anderby Creek show the same submerged forest at its most visible. As sea levels rose after the last Ice Age, this stretch of Lincolnshire’s ancient landscape flooded gradually, leaving low hills as islands surrounded by saltmarsh before the sea eventually claimed the forest between them entirely.
Anderby Creek today is a genuinely quiet stretch of coast, a long sandy beach backed by dunes with a beach cafe dating to the 1920s and little else. It makes a good final stop on this route, low-key and largely free of the tourist crowds further south around Skegness.
Where to Stay: Sunnycroft B&B (see above) is the nearest verified option, a short drive south towards Sutton-on-Sea.
Worth Knowing: The Anderby Beach Cafe, a licensed cafe dating back to the 1920s, sits at the eastern end of Anderby Creek, directly by the beach, and makes a natural stop for anyone walking this stretch of coast.
Mumby and the marsh hamlets nobody remembers
Inland from the modern coast, the parish of Mumby and its lost chapel are part of a wider pattern of marsh settlements erased in the same medieval period as Old Skegness and Mablethorpe St Peter. Two hamlets within the historic Skegness parish, East and West Meales, were taken by the sea in the early 16th century, along with the loss of Sutton around the same time.
These names survive today only in historical records and the research of local historians, with almost nothing visible on the ground to mark where they once stood. That absence is itself part of the story. Unlike Old Skegness or Mablethorpe St Peter, there is no church tower or visible ruin left to photograph, only field boundaries and place names that quietly outlasted the settlements they were named for.
Where to Stay: Manor Farm Stay or Premier Inn Skegness Seafront, depending on which end of the coast you are basing yourself, both cover this stretch comfortably by car.
Worth Knowing: East and West Meales and the lost chapel at Mumby are documented in Privy Council and parish records from the period but have no visible remains today, a reminder that not every lost village leaves a ruin behind.
Practical Tips
Visit at low tide if you want a chance of seeing the submerged forest remains at Trusthorpe or Anderby Creek. They are only exposed under the right tidal conditions.
Bring proper footwear for beach walking. The exposed sections of the forest can be muddy and uneven.
Check the tide table before setting out. Sections of this coast can cut off quickly at high tide.
Use the AllTrails app to plan a coastal walking route between Mablethorpe and Skegness rather than relying solely on the beach.
Combine this route with a stop at Anderby Beach Cafe, one of the few genuinely old buildings left standing on this stretch of coast.
Responsible Visiting
This coastline is still actively managed with sea defences, including recent beach nourishment works around Sutton-on-Sea. Stay off construction and defence works where marked, and do not remove wood or material from the exposed submerged forest sections, which are of genuine archaeological interest.
Reader Q&A
Can you still see the lost villages today? No physical remains of the villages themselves survive above ground. What you can see is the submerged prehistoric forest at Trusthorpe and Anderby Creek, and the general sense of how far the modern towns sit from their original medieval sites.
When is the best time to see the submerged forest? At low tide, particularly after storms or periods of erosion, when more of the old forest bed is exposed on the beach.
Is Old Skegness marked anywhere? No. The original town lies roughly half a mile out to sea from the current Skegness seafront, with no marker or visible remains.
Why did this stretch of coast lose so much land? A series of severe storms in 1287 and 1288 destroyed the offshore barrier islands that had previously sheltered the coast, leaving it exposed to the full force of North Sea storms for the following three centuries.
Where to Stay
Premier Inn Skegness Seafront, Skegness. A reliable base for the southern end of the route, close to the modern seafront and Old Skegness site.
Manor Farm Stay, Sutton-on-Sea. Farmhouse rooms and self-catering options a 15-minute walk from the beach, well placed for Sutton and Trusthorpe.
Sunnycroft B&B, Sutton-on-Sea. A private garden and full breakfast, close to the submerged forest sites at Trusthorpe and Anderby Creek.
This coastline has been losing ground since the 13th century and continues to do so. Everything standing on it now- seafronts, caravan parks, sea walls- is simply the current chapter of a story the water is still writing.
For more content like that, visit our history section on our website.
