De Marne was created in 1990 by merging four smaller municipalities - Eenrum, Kloosterburen, Leens, and Ulrum - into a single administrative unit with about 10,000 inhabitants spread across 21 villages and 240 square kilometres of the northwestern Groningen coast. The local government employed around 115 people. On 1 January 2019 it was dissolved again, folded into a much larger municipality called Het Hogeland along with Bedum, Eemsmond, and Winsum. The map keeps the villages. The signs on the council buildings have all been replaced. The name De Marne survives as a regional identity - it appears on the spelt-bread labels and the tourism brochures - and as a habit of speech for anyone who lived there before the merger.

The most dramatic change to the De Marne landscape in living memory happened in 1969, when the Lauwerszee - a large salt-water inlet of the Wadden Sea - was sealed off from the open sea by a dike. The result is the Lauwersmeer, a 90 square kilometre body of water that began as a coastal estuary and is now a freshwater nature reserve. Salt retreated slowly from the soil over decades. Wetlands emerged where mudflats had been. The area is now a destination for fishing, birdwatching, walking, and cycling, with the village of Lauwersoog at the seaward end serving as a small harbour. Stand on the dike that closed the Lauwerszee and you are looking at one of the rare cases in Dutch hydraulic history where an act of engineering created a landscape almost overnight.

Before dikes, the only way to live in this country was to build upward. The Frisians who settled the Groningen coast piled clay into artificial dwelling mounds called terps (or wierden in the local dialect), and built their houses and churches on top. When the North Sea storms came, the mound stayed dry. Drive through De Marne today and you can still read the geography of fear: villages like Hornhuizen and Westernieland sit visibly higher than the fields around them, with church towers crowning the rise. Eenrum, Pieterburen, Wehe-den Hoorn, Kloosterburen - 21 villages in all, many of them with listed heritage farmhouses and protected village centres. The Borg Verhildersum in Leens is a small fortified manor house with surrounding farmland. The seal creche in Pieterburen takes in injured Wadden Sea seals. Abraham's Mustard Museum in Eenrum is exactly what it sounds like.

De Marne is laced with maren - narrow waterways that twist through the countryside, originally cut for drainage and now used for recreational sailing and canoeing. The municipality marketed itself as a network of footpaths, cyclepaths, and water routes connecting all the villages. The area also has an unusual concentration of important historical church organs. Builders including Arp Schnitger - whose surviving Groningen instruments are central to the European baroque organ tradition - left work in churches across De Marne, alongside organs by the Lohman family and by Hinsz. For a region whose population never exceeded 10,000, that level of musical patronage is striking. A 'Spelt Project' coordinates local farmers, millers, bakers, upholsterers, and distillers to produce spelt grain, flour, bread, gin, and cushions stuffed with spelt husks - one of those small-scale rural economies that thrives quietly on the edge of nowhere.

Sicco Mansholt was born in Ulrum in 1908. As Dutch minister of agriculture after the war, then as European commissioner for agriculture from 1958 onward, he designed the Common Agricultural Policy that still shapes European farming subsidies six decades later. He served briefly as president of the European Commission. Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, born in Leens in 1882, became an experimental Dutch artist, typographer, and printer; he was killed by the SS in 1945, just before the liberation. Cornelis Simon Meijer, born in Pieterburen in 1904, became a mathematician whose Meijer G-function is taught in graduate analysis courses worldwide. Freek de Jonge, born in Westernieland in 1944, became one of the most prominent Dutch cabaret performers and writers of the late twentieth century. Four large lives from four small villages, on a coastal strip that the rest of the Netherlands rarely thinks about.