Sitting in the Fisherman’s Wife restaurant, eating a dressed crab fresh from the North Sea, I was suddenly chilled to the bone.
There, loping along Whitby’s empty beach, was a huge, lone dog. For a split second, I thought it was Dracula.
In Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic, Count Dracula lands at Whitby on a shipwrecked schooner, the Demeter, thirsting for blood. The crew are all dead, including the captain, found lashed to the wheel. The only survivor is an immense dog.
As soon as the Demeter touched the shore, the dog leapt out on to the sand and headed straight for the steep cliff below the church of St Mary’s. The dog is Dracula in disguise.
The dog I saw was, in fact, racing towards its owner – and, thank goodness, it didn’t morph into a blood-sucking, coffin-dwelling, Transylvanian mass murderer.
There are echoes of Bram Stoker everywhere in Whitby. He stayed in the charming Royal Crescent (at number 6), just round the corner from my comfortable B&B, the Riviera Guesthouse.
The Riviera, a tall, classical house, has epic sea views. I watched out of my bedroom bay window for hours as darkness fell over the waves, which then lulled me to sleep.
Whitby still has a Gothic feel to it, with Goths, clad in black, wandering around town. I strolled past two in their 60s, in matching, sweeping capes, walking their dog along Khyber Pass, a street leading up from the harbour.
Whitby’s most splendid Gothic spot is its abbey, which sits on the headland above the town. Despite being bashed up by Henry VIII – and a stray German bomb in 1914 – its soaring arches still survive, yards from the cliff edge and St Mary’s Church, just above the beach where the canine Dracula made his landing.
English Heritage has recently completed a fine refurbishment of its museum in the 17th-century country house that sits in the shadow of the abbey. It was at the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD that King Oswiu of Northumbria said he would follow the southern Christian customs of Rome, rather than the northern Christian customs followed by Irish monks on the Scottish island of Iona.
In the Whitby Abbey museum are the earliest three-dimensional Anglo-Saxon crosses ever found in Britain – from around 700 AD, just after the Synod. There is an extremely early fragment of Anglo-Saxon stained glass; jewellery made of that familiar black jet; and the 12th-century Abbot’s Book, written in Latin and Anglo-Saxon – a real rarity, giving the details of the abbey’s landholdings.
The explorer Captain James Cook, murdered in Hawaii 240 years ago, remains the town’s favourite son. He began his career as a merchant apprentice there. His statue gazes out to sea from West Cliff, and he figures prominently in Whitby Museum in Pannett Park.
There are echoes of Bram Stoker everywhere in Whitby. He stayed in the charming Royal Crescent (at number 6), just round the corner from my comfortable B&B, the Riviera Guesthouse
Also very much worth seeing is the Captain Cook Memorial Museum – a beautifully elegant, mid-18th-century house where Cook lodged from 1746-49. The most stirring exhibits are the 16th-century maps showing great gaps in the Pacific in the places yet to be discovered by Cook.
You might say it was Cook who really put Whitby on the map, too – until a mammoth dog with a manic bloodlust landed on the beach in 1897.
Whitby is a seaside town, port and civil parish in the Scarborough borough of North Yorkshire, England. Situated on the east coast of Yorkshire at the mouth of the River Esk, Whitby has a maritime, mineral and tourist heritage. Its East Cliff is home to the ruins of Whitby Abbey, where Cædmon, the earliest recognised English poet, lived. The fishing port emerged during the Middle Ages, supporting important herring and whaling fleets, and was where Captain Cook learned seamanship. Tourism started in Whitby during the Georgian period and developed with the arrival of the railway in 1839. Its attraction as a tourist destination is enhanced by the proximity of the high ground of the North York Moors national park and the heritage coastline and by association with the horror novel Dracula. Jet and alum were mined locally, and Whitby Jet, which was mined by the Romans and Victorians, became fashionable during the 19th century.
The earliest record of a permanent settlement is in 656, when as Streanæshealh it was the place where Oswy, the Christian king of Northumbria, founded the first abbey, under the abbess Hilda. The Synod of Whitby was held there in 664. In 867, the monastery was destroyed by Viking raiders. Another monastery was founded in 1078. It was in this period that the town gained its current name, Whitby (from “white settlement” in Old Norse). In the following centuries Whitby functioned as a fishing settlement until, in the 18th century, it developed as a port and centre for shipbuilding and whaling, the trade in locally mined alum, and the manufacture of Whitby jet jewellery.
The abbey ruin at the top of the East Cliff is the town’s oldest and most prominent landmark. Other significant features include the swing bridge, which crosses the River Esk and the harbour, which is sheltered by the grade II listed East and West piers. The town’s maritime heritage is commemorated by statues of Captain Cook and William Scoresby, as well as the whalebone arch that sits at the top of the West Cliff. The town also has a strong literary tradition and has featured in literary works, television and cinema, most famously in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.
While Whitby’s cultural and historical heritage contribute to the local economy, the town does suffer from the economic constraints of its remote location, ongoing changes in the fishing industry, relatively underdeveloped transport infrastructure, and limitations on available land and property. As a result, tourism and some forms of fishing remain the mainstay of its economy. It is the closest port to a proposed wind farm development in the North Sea, 47 miles (76 km) from York and 22 miles (35 km) from Middlesbrough. There are transport links to the rest of North Yorkshire and North East England, primarily through national rail links to Middlesbrough and road links to Teesside, via both the A171 and A174, and Scarborough by the former. As at 2011, the town had a population of 13,213.