Suspense, Volume III by Henry Seton Merriman

It does not fall to the lot of many travellers by sea to plough through the yellow broken waters of the German Ocean where the coast of Suffolk lies low and fertile. Thus it happens that these shores are little visited, and never overrun by the cheap tourist. Upon this bleak, shingly shore there are little villages and small ancient towns quite unknown to the August holiday-seeker, who prefers crowding down to the south coast. The main-line of the Great Eastern Railway runs its northward course far inland, and sends out at intervals a small feeler, often a single line traversed but once or twice a day. Between these sleepy lines there are tracts of country where the roads are mere beds of sand or shingle, quite unfit for polite traffic -- broad marshes intersected by sluices and waterways too broad to jump, too unimportant to bridge, and at the edge of the sea a great hopeless plain of unfathomable shingle. Five miles across this country are equal to twelve upon a moderately good road. Driving is impossible, riding impracticable, and walking unpleasant. There is, indeed, a tiny coastguard path near the sea, but this is often lost amidst the shingle; and even when the land rises to thirty feet, in soft, sandy cliff, the walking is but doubtful.

The glory of this coast has departed; many of its villages and towns -- once important -- have likewise gone. into the sea. It is dreary, if you will. I admit that it is dreary, but in its very mournfulness there is a great beauty. I do not speak of the ruins of bygone monasteries, of the tall, square-towered churches, of the quaint black fishing hamlets -- though these are picturesque enough -- but of the land itself. The long, unbroken shingle shore, where is visible, upon the clean stones, a plank or an old basket for miles away -- where the shore retreats in ridges to the green seawall or bank, each ridge marking the effect of some great storm. And over the sea-wall, inland, a great wild, deserted marsh, or 'mesh,' as it is called in Suffolk, dotted here and there with black-hulled, white-sailed windmills, duly set at low tide by the solitary 'mesh'-man to pump the water into the sluices and so into the sea.