Whitby Abbey

OVERVIEW

The skeleton of a thirteenth-century Benedictine church on the headland above Whitby harbour, on the site of the monastery founded by St Hild in 657 that hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664. English Heritage keeps the ruin and the visitor centre in Cholmley House. Bram Stoker holidayed in Whitby in 1890 and his notes record the town's legends; Dracula (1897) brings the Count ashore at Tate Hill Sands as a black dog and is FICTION, which the town's Goth weekends celebrate as such.

HISTORY

Hild's abbey was destroyed by the Danes around 867 and refounded after the Conquest; the church was built in the 1220s and stripped at the Dissolution in 1539. German battlecruisers shelled it in December 1914. Marmion, Walter Scott's poem, set the walling-up of the nun Constance de Beverley here — also fiction.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Stoker's 1890 notes record 'a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows'; tradition names her Hild, seen in a high window on the north side in the morning, and adds a choir heard on the anniversary of her death and a coach on the cliff road. The entry keeps the legend, which is old, apart from the novel, which is not.

VISITING

English Heritage, ticketed; the 199 steps from the town, or the car park on the headland. St Mary's churchyard next door is a working churchyard.