5 September 2023 - Whitby

Miles driven today = 0

Total Miles to date = 227

It's been another day of pure blue skies and unbroken sunshine today.  Perfect for starting the day with an al-fresco breakfast if it weren't for the procession of people arriving at the elsan point next to our van to empty their toilet cassettes.  I think if we had been staying any longer we would probably have asked to move by now.  It wasn't pleasant.

We've been to Whitby a good few times before.  We used to be regular attendees at the "Musicport" World Music Festival which was held every November in the town's Pavillion Theatre.  The festival subsequently moved to Bridlington, and although it has since returned to its spiritual home we stopped going in the late noughties so it's probably 15 years since we were last here.

We set out from the van a little before 10 am and walked along the clifftop path to the Abbey which is run by English Heritage these days.  We thought long and hard about signing up for membership when we were in Kent earlier on in the year and we are probably going to visit at least another couple of their sites on this trip, so it made sense to bite the bullet and we have subscribed at £9 a month for the pair of us.  

Before entering the Abbey grounds themselves we had a look around the museum, which I'm pretty sure is a new addition since we were last here.  It's housed in the mansion which was home to the Cholmley family, who owned the Abbey and its grounds between the mid 16th and late 19th Century.

There are lots of artefacts on display from the Abbey as well as a plethora of historical information about the building and the wider Whitby area.

A monastery was first founded on the site in 657 but this was raided and destroyed by Viking raiders in the mid-9th Century and nothing now remains of the original buildings.

The site lay unused until a new monastic community took up residence in 1078 and in around 1100 a stone Church was built.

This was gradually replaced between the 13th and 15th Centuries with a majestic Gothic structure, the ruins of which we can still see today.

After Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in 1528 the Abbey fell into disrepair and gradually collapsed over the following centuries.  The surrounding buildings where the Abbey's inhabitants would have lived and gone about their daily lives have all but disappeared.

Further damage was inflicted in 1914 when Whitby was attacked by a German Warship.  The Abbey was hit by 3 shells, one of which destroyed much of the West front.  As a result ownership of the Abbey was passed to the government as the owner could no longer afford to repair the damage.

Bram Stoker wrote "Dracula" in Whitby and the town is the scene of the Count's landing in England in the form of a black dog.  One of the locations used in the book is the Church of the Virgin Mary which overlooks the town close to the Abbey.

There are some interesting gravestones in the graveyard.  Some are reckoned to belong to pirates.  This one with an obvious skull and crossbones appears to be one of them.

There are fantastic views of the harbour and the town from the graveyard.

The Church stands at the top of the famous 199 Steps which take you down into the town itself.

My only previous experiences of Whitby have been in November, when the town was relatively quiet, so I really wasn't prepared for how incredibly busy the place was today.  Most of the people wandering aimlessly around were of a certain age and we felt positively juvenile at times.  

Talking with our new friend Matt yesteday his opinion of living in Whitby is very much like other tourist towns such as Glastonbury and, to a certain extent, Lisa's home of Hebden Bridge.  They are great if you want to buy a scented candle or a replica sword but not much cop for getting hold of useful things like a packet of screws.  Whitby is full of shops selling jewellery made from the local jet stone.

I'll confess, we did sucumb to buying a selection of fudge in order to keep us going to lunchtime.

My abiding memory of Whitby from 15 years ago was that it was full of goth shops but sadly there don't seem to be so many of those nowadays.  There was a shop selling year-round halloween goods and you could avail yourself to the "Dracula Experience" but, apart from a couple of young ladies in fishnets and black lipstick at the church, we found very little else to indicate that this place becomes Goth-central in late October.

We wandered round the harbour.  I'm not sure if these were actually working lobster pots or placed here purely for asthetic display purposes.  I suspect the latter.

This old sailing vessel has been repurposed as a cafe/bar.

It was getting on for midday so we headed for the Magpie Cafe, which is reckoned by many to serve the best fish 'n' chips in the land.  We've had takeaways from here before but never sat inside so we treated ourselves. 

Lisa was very pleased with her dressed Whitby crab salad and my skate and chips was cooked to perfection, as one would expect in such a well renowned establishment.

Onwards to the beach.  Note the small cruise ship anchored a short way from the harbour walls with boats ferrying tourists to and fro to add to the already considerable elderly throngs.

There are two of these roundhouses at either end of the Battery Parade.  They were built in the early 19th century and used to store gunpowder during the Napoleonic Wars.

We clambered up the steps to the top of the West Cliff.  

At the top is this arch made of the jawbone of a Bowhead Whale.  Whitby was once a significant whaling port and more than 50 ships were involved in the industry here from the mid-18th to mid-19th Centuries.

There is also this statue of Captain Cook which commemorates the fact that his ship "Endeavour" and several other vessels which embarked on his voyages of discovery were built in Whitby.

So then it was back up those 199 steps again.  

Before making our way home we thought we would pop in to the Whitby Brewery which is next door to the Abbey.  However all of their outside tables were occupied and none were shaded and the inside seating area was uncomfortably warm so we abandoned the plan and made our way back along the clifftops to the van.

We got back at about 2:30 by which time my phone reckoned we had already done 15,000 steps for the day so we have had a chilled afternoon planning our next moves.  We did pop back along the path a way as the sun set.  I'm regretting that I don't have my Panasonic bridge camera with me on this trip now but I still got a couple of half decent shots of the sunset over the Abbey on my phone.



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