East Frisia

Today the landscape is characterized by a nearly perfectly flat plain filled with fertile fields, small coastal forests, and endless beaches of yellow sand. Beautiful villages and towns dot the landscape, full of windmills and picturesque farm estates. You won’t find many castles or palaces, though, a legacy of Frisia’s egalitarian past. Instead, you will have to explore the region’s history through the lens of the people that lived and worked the land.

East Frisia is actually a peninsula, surrounded on both sides by Dollart Bay and the Jade Bight, with the Wattenmeer and the North Sea to the North. In the distant past, though, the region was more of an island, with deep moors and lowlands flooded by the tides, cutting the North off from the mainland. Centuries of hard work have resulted in dikes and canals pushing the sea back and transforming the marshes into farmland.

The East Frisian Landscape can be categorized into three groups based on geography: the marshes, the geests, and the moors. Each category required different adaptations from the people that lived there, and today defines a unique cultural landscape.

• The Marsh: The word derives from the Germanic “Meer” or “Meersisch,” meaning “like the ocean.” This landscape encompasses the outer coastal areas of the peninsula and is characterized mainly by its flatness. Originally this landscape would have been “Watt” or tidal mudflats, inundated by the sea with the rising tides. With the building of the dikes, this landscape was transformed into agricultural land over time, often with topsoil transported from elsewhere. The sandy soil only supports a scattered coastal forest and is available mainly for agriculture.
• The Geest refers to the low hills formed by sand deposits from the ice age. The Geest Landscape forms the interior of the East Frisian peninsula, and it was here that the first settlements were built. The Geests offered protection from the storm tides that would wash over the region, and the first dikes were built around these hills. This part of the region was heavily forested, and some of these ancient forests are still visible today.
• The Moors are a series of massive peat bogs that once stretched along the entire North Sea Coast. They cut East Frisia off from the rest of the continent by nature of its geography as a peninsula and were the reason for its distinctive cultural identity. The Moors were mined for centuries as a source of burnable peat for energy. However, the moors could be drained and plowed into fields for settlement with the advent of the steam-powered traction engine. Once, the swamps stretched as far as the eye could see, but today they exist only in a handful of places.

‍