Schleswig-Holstein

The state changes its character as you travel across it. In the west, the marshland of Dithmarschen and the Frisian north lies low and open, its fields cut by drainage ditches and its villages built on artificial mounds that once kept farmhouses above the storm surges. The wind here never really stops. Move east and the land rises into the glacial hills of the Holstein Switzerland, where beech woods come down to clear lakes and the road turns and dips through pasture. Further east still, the Baltic shore is all indentations, with small bays, sailing marinas and red-brick Hanseatic towns that look inward toward their harbours. Toward the Hamburg border the mood shifts again, with commuter villages, wide roads and the slow brown Elbe running beside them.

A day here tends to be shaped by water. In Husum, the narrow harbour is full of old sailing boats and the grey houses along the quay have the calm of a town that once lived by the herring trade. Schleswig, further inland, offers the cathedral and the baroque palace of Gottorf, set beside a long fjord-like inlet of the Schlei, and a wander through its lanes is slow and pleasant. Lübeck's brick gates and church spires rise above the canals, and the cafés serve marzipan and strong coffee in equal measure. Walk the sea wall at the edge of the marsh, though, and the day becomes simpler: sky, grass, the smell of salt and sheep, and the flat shine of the tide coming back over the sand.

What lingers is the sense of a region that has never tried to be dramatic, and is all the more absorbing for it. The coast is not a separate attraction placed at the edge of the map. It is the thing that gives the inland towns their reasons for existing, and the thing that the marshland farmers and the Baltic sailors have both argued with for centuries. Leaving it feels less like departing a destination than like stepping off a dyke and finding that the water has quietly moved, and that you would like to watch it come in again.