A shore alien, eerie, and utterly desolate

From Unnatural Causes by P.D. James.

A marvelous description of the North Sea along England's East Anglia, a region where I have visited and even spent a year in boarding school.

Buffeted and foam-flecked, he squelched onward over the shingle finding the occasional and welcome stretch of firm serrated sand, and pausing from time to time to watch the smooth green underbelly of the waves as they rose in their last curve before crashing at his feet, in a tumult of flying shingle and stinging spray. It was a lonely shore, empty and desolate, like the last fringes of the world. It evoked no memories, cosily nostalgic, of the enchantments of childhood holidays by the sea. Here were no rockpools to explore, no exotic shells, no breakwaters festooned with sea weed, no long stretches of yellow sand sliced by innumerable spades. Here was nothing but sea, sky and marshland, an empty beach with little to mark the miles of outspate shingle but the occasional tangle of tar-splotched driftwood and rusting spikes of old fortifications. Dalgliesh loved this emptiness, this fusion of sea and sky. But today the place held no peace for him. He saw it suddenly with new eyes, a shore alien, eerie, and utterly desolate.