Everyone knows someone who’s “done Skeggy” for the day. Bucket, spade, loads of sun cream, home before the traffic. Fair enough, it works. But treating the Lincolnshire coast as a day trip is a bit like turning up to a wedding for the cake and leaving before the speeches. You’ve had a good bit of it, sure, but you’ve missed the point.
Big Skies and Remote Dunes
This stretch of England, running from the fairground lights of Skegness down to the marshy hush of Gibraltar Point, is bigger and stranger and more varied than the postcards let on. There are Blue Flag beaches, yes, and there’s candy floss, obviously. But there are also 1,000-plus-acre nature reserves, a golf course being quietly handed back to the birds, and further south a beach that turns into a seal nursery come winter.
Stay a night or two, and you start to see all of it, instead of just the bit closest to the car park, and you might just find yourself planning a second trip before you’ve even left.
The classic seaside, done properly
Skegness, Mablethorpe and Ingoldmells are the coast’s beating, slightly sticky heart, and they know exactly what they are. Piers, arcades, chips eaten too fast because a seagull has clocked you. It’s proper old-school seaside, and there’s no shame in loving it.
Skegness Aquarium is worth an hour if the tide’s out and the kids need somewhere that isn’t sand, and Atlantis Adventure Golf next door will settle any family disputes about who’s the better putter. Head a few miles up the road to Ingoldmells and Fantasy Island delivers the rollercoasters and the noise, while Butlin’s is marking its 90th birthday this year, which feels like as good an excuse as any to dust off the bucket and spade for old times’ sake.
Rain won’t ruin your day either. Gunby Hall, a National Trust house just inland, gives you somewhere dry and quietly grand to retreat to, and once the sun’s gone down there’s enough entertainment along the front to keep things going well past ice cream o’clock.
If the full-volume version of the seaside isn’t quite your speed, Sutton-on-Sea sits just up the coast doing a much gentler version of the same thing. Same sea, same sand, considerably fewer flashing lights. And Mablethorpe splits the difference nicely, with splash parks and arcades for the kids but a slower rhythm overall.
Where the coast goes quiet
Then there’s the other Lincolnshire coast, the one that doesn’t sell rock or play music from speakers on poles.
Gibraltar Point National Nature Reserve covers about 1,000 acres of dune, marsh and mudflat, and somehow manages to attract 340 recorded bird species without anyone putting up so much as a neon sign about it. The Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust manages the reserve and if you turn up with a pair of binoculars and a bit of patience, you’ll understand why birdwatchers rate it so highly.
This summer, keep an eye out for Sandwich terns overhead, gatekeeper butterflies doing their bumbling laps of the grasses, and if you’re very lucky and very still, a harbour porpoise out past the shoreline.
Further along, Sandilands Nature Reserve is one to watch, quite literally, as it changes shape in front of you. It used to be a golf course. Now the National Trust is turning it back into wetland, with open water, reedbeds and islands slowly taking over where the fairways used to be. It’s part of the wider Lincolnshire Coastal Country Park, which threads together eight Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust reserves along the coast, so there’s an enormous amount of ground here for anyone who’d rather listen to oystercatchers than arcade machines.
There’s also something quietly satisfying about watching a place get rewilded on purpose. Most of us only ever hear about nature disappearing. Here, you can go and watch it come back.
Don’t stop at the sand
Here’s the bit most people miss entirely. Drive thirty minutes inland from the coast and the flat, big-sky landscape suddenly rolls itself up into hills, hedgerows and sleepy little market towns. This is the Lincolnshire Wolds, officially a National Landscape (the fancy name for what used to be called Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, in case the 2023 rebrand passed you by), and it’s the sort of place that makes you slow the car down without quite meaning to.
Towns like Louth, Horncastle and Alford are worth a wander in their own right, all cobbled streets, independent shops and pubs that look like they’ve been serving the same regulars since the Domesday Book. If you fancy stretching your legs after a morning on the beach, there are walking and cycling routes threading through the Wolds that couldn’t feel further from the arcade lights of Skegness, despite being barely half an hour’s drive away. It’s the coast’s quieter, hillier cousin, and criminally under-visited considering how good it is.
And if you find yourself tempted further inland still, Lincoln itself is well within reach for a day out, all cathedral spires and a hill steep enough to test your calf muscles. We’ve already gone into rather more detail about that one over in our guide to the Secrets of Lincoln, if you fancy pairing your seaside stay with a proper city day.
Building your own version of summer
The nice thing about the Lincolnshire coast is that it doesn’t ask you to pick a lane. You can have your fish and chips and your five-mile coastal walk in the same weekend, and nobody’s going to mind. Stay two or three nights instead of driving home with sand in everything, and you get to do both the loud bit and the quiet bit properly, rather than squeezing one hurried version of each into a single afternoon.
So this year, don’t just do Skeggy. Take your time and do the coast. All of it, at whatever pace suits you. And if you’re looking for somewhere to stay have a look at the Lincolnshire holiday cottages available with Rural Retreats and HolidayCottages.co.uk
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