kimbofo: Whitby

Monday, April 14, 2008

Whitby

Place: Whitby, on the north-east coast of England.
Date: June 21, 2007.
Camera: Sony Cybershot DSC-W1.

Last summer I was fortunate enough to visit Whitby, on the north-east Yorkshire coast, with my dad, who was visiting from Australia, and his cousin, who lives just up the road, for a quick day trip. I never got around to posting any of my pictures and, to be honest, I'd pretty much forgotten about them until I was reorganising my photographic archive early last week.

Whitby is one of those magical English seaside villages where the houses that line the steep cliffs look like they're about to tumble into the ocean at any moment. Their positions seem so precarious, you wonder how they've survived for so long without falling into the maze of cobblestone alleyways and narrow streets below.

From the top of the East Cliff -- where the parish church of St Mary's stands alongside the ruins of St Hilda's Abbey -- you can see all of Whitby and the River Esk spread before you, a sea of red roofs and grey cobblestones in the foreground, the green of the Yorkshire dales in the background. It's an amazing sight.

This was my second visit to Whitby and it had lost none of its charm from the first time I'd walked its streets and gorged on its delicious fish'n'chips -- possibly the best in the UK, I have to say -- back in 1998.

Any Australians who read this blog may like to know that Whitby is the very place from where Captain James Cook set sail for Australia. He was also educated in nearby Great Ayton.

But the fishing village also has an important literary heritage, for it was here that Irish writer Bram Stoker began penning his classic horror novel, Dracula, while on holiday in 1890. In fact Whitby features quite heavily in the book, because this is the place where one of the main characters, Lucy, meets Dracula for the first time. Spooky.