GOTHIC WHITBY

Yorkshire’s pretty fishing port is popular with tourists – but the town has a dark side. Explore misty ruins, whispers of witches, strange tragedies and a legendary vampire with Karen Ruffles

- Karen Ruffles

It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits,” writes heroine Mina Murray about Whitby Abbey in Dracula by Bram Stoker. I am writing, as did Gothic literature’s famous leading lady, from the shadow of Whitby Abbey – a spectacular ruin perched high above the town. There is the promise of a storm in the towering clouds across the bay and the wind hums around the ancient stone, whispering through dry grasses that have been left to grow for wildlife. The town is bustling, but up here, even at the height of the season, there is always peace to be found – and a blessed lack of anyone playing ‘Blueberry Hill’ on a kazoo (buskers, like wasps, are attracted to large concentrations of people with ice creams).

There is something about this place that inspires introspection. It has a calmness about it that causes people to speak quietly, if at all. Perhaps it’s the space. The abbey is imposing, but with windows now and forever open to the elements and the great expanse of the sea laid out below, the scale of the landscape has a way of putting things in perspective. Or perhaps it is the abbey’s great age – the site dates back to the 7th century and work on the current church started in 1220. It took almost 300 years to complete, and you can see the changing styles in what remains.

We refer to such ruins as ‘Gothic’ because of our romantic associations with the word but, originally, it wasn’t meant as a compliment. When the earlier, more austere Romanesque style with its rounded arches evolved into the Gothic style, with pointed windows and elaborate decoration, Renaissance writers were most upset and named it after the original Goths – Germanic tribes who overran the Western Roman Empire.