Whitby is the most-drawn harbour town in our catalogue, and it earns it. A river mouth split by two piers, a town stacked in red pantile up both cliffs, a church you reach by counting steps, and an abbey ruin on the skyline that has been drawing visitors since long before Bram Stoker borrowed it. Here is what the seven designs show and where to stand to see them for yourself.
The 199 Steps
The Church Stairs climb from the end of Church Street to St Mary's church on the East Cliff. There are 199 of them, and yes, people count. The steps were built for the living but the wide landings were for coffin bearers to rest on, which is why they come in flights.
Our first Whitby design looks back down the steps at sunset, with the harbour, the piers and the North Sea beyond. A later one looks the other way, down past the cottages and hydrangeas of the lower steps to the water.
St Mary's and the harbour beach
From the beach below the East Cliff you get the classic postcard: the sand, the harbour wall, and St Mary's squat tower with the Abbey's arches behind it. St Mary's is the older of the two, a Norman church with a box-pewed, ship's-carpentered interior that is worth the climb on its own.
Two of the designs take this view, one from the beach and one from across the harbour with the boats in.
The Abbey
Whitby Abbey's ruins are what most people picture. The monastery was founded in the seventh century by St Hild, and the ruin you see today is the thirteenth-century church, roofless since the Dissolution and picked at by weather and, in 1914, German naval shells. Stoker set Dracula's arrival in Whitby after a holiday here in 1890, and the abbey has never quite shaken the association.
Our design draws the abbey reflected in the pond on its landward side at dusk, when the arches go black against a purple sky.
Over the roofs to the sea
The last design climbs above the town and looks over the pantiles to the piers and the horizon. It is the view from the top of the West Cliff by the whalebone arch and the Captain Cook statue, where the young Cook lodged and learned his trade on Whitby's colliers.
All seven are on the Whitby page, and they sit alongside the rest of the Yorkshire coast: Staithes, Robin Hood's Bay, Saltburn, Scarborough and Filey.
