Whitby

In 1987, the Demeter was caught in a storm, running aground on the coastline of the small town of Whitby, England. It was a misty, eerie time. Rumours of a strange dog circulated. Shortly afterwards, a pure young woman recently engaged to one of three options was defiled and drained of her blood. Another pure woman, if more worldly and pragmatic, saved England from an ancient vampire with her extensive knowledge of train timetables.

But there are no trains to Whitby. Instead one must study the bus timetables, and catch an early bus from the York train station and be sure to catch the one just before six (change in Malton), or else be stranded on the Gothic shores of the little township, for it is the last bus of the day.

Whitby Abbey, providing Gothic inspiration since 1897

There is a little gimmicky museum dedicated to Bram Stoker's creation. I didn't go in. Too much black plastic in the doorway. I ate fish and chips instead at the Magpie Cafe - a piece of fish so large that it refused to fit on my plate and at first I thought it was the most delicious piece of battered piece of dugong flipper n in the world, with a side of mushy peas. I wasn't expecting to like the mushy peas, but I thought I ought to have them as they seem a stock part of your English fish and chip meal. They were, luckily, also very delicious. I suppose the difference between the mushy peas I've eaten before and these was that these peas were deliberately mushy. The Magpie Cafe's culinary ability may also have contributed. I even tried Jessie's mussels, and found them to be not disgusting.

Whitby Abbey is, of course, one of the most obvious things on the skyline and possibly the key attraction of the area, unless you enjoy Goth-spotting when the Goth season comes around. To get into the abbey, you have to pass first through a graveyard where your friend won't let you lie on the stone tablets like Aslan, and then through a pretend museum which displays some unsettling gargoyle faces and allows you to make crayon rubbings of medieval designs and fonts. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of kids had been through before us and used up most of the paper, but we managed to find a few more bits and use up the rest. I have quite a nice rubbing in teal blue of a medieval lettering plate.


The sea salt in the air seems to have contributed to the patterned erosion of the old abbey, exposing the grain that runs in different directions on individual stones, showing off the pale gold-brown beneath the old grey surface. The detailed columns up in the high windows have been nibbled at by time. The Abbey changes shape depending on where you're standing. Sometimes it looks long and broad, sometimes shallow and squat, sometimes as though it was only ever a single wall. From a distance, it looks like a simple cardboard cutout in a pop-up book.

I found this out walking along a pathway at the edge of the cliffs, down through the eye-sore of a caravan park, and at last down onto a small bay. The sand was quite firm and peppered with smoothed stones, including some black ones that can be broken apart in flakes to reveal - if you're lucky - small shells compressed and fossilised between the layers. We sat on a rock and did this for a while. I wasn't very good at it. I enjoyed snapping the rocks in half, and feeling them crumble into thin chunks in my hand. The little beach was empty, and we stayed there for a little while, walking up to the rocks where water had pooled as the tide rolled out, watching the waves. We found a thin waterfall as well, falling down the cliffs over damp weed and cutting down into the sand and out to the sea.

The cafe of chocolate lumpy bumpy

Despite the rumours, Whitby didn't strike me as a particularly Gothic town - although I did get another of those sunny days that have so far accompanied my visitation of ruins. Maybe on a darker day when the fog rolls up from the sea, or the weekend of the Goth festival, things would have been different. But it simply seemed a charming little town where families can enjoy the beach on weekends and fisherman can take you out on their ships to practice your own skills - for a price. It has quaint cafes with delicious cakes with names like "chocolate lumpy bumpy," botiquey jewellery stores lined with silver and the black jet Whitby is famous for, and people walking their small yappy dogs. It has a polar bear standing inexplicably on a building just beyond the bridge, a monument to born-'n-bred James Cook.

Captain James Cook and his Seafaring Chopsticks

Up on the hill, the graveyard and the abbey may be looking down, but they don't dominate the town. If anything, I think the ocean does. It is the ocean, after all, that you notice as you drive down the windy roads after emerging from the purple moors, that you can smell when you walk down the streets. It was the sea that gave the town its purpose, that Captain Cook took on his oceanic endeavours, that helped to groove the old abbey on the hill, that brought Dracula to the shores of England and the end of his ambitions.

Pensive over Whitby