Discover Whitby

Two cliffs, one river, and a harbour that still works

Whitby sits where the River Esk reaches the North Sea on the North Yorkshire coast, inside the North York Moors National Park boundary and about 30 kilometres north of Scarborough. The headland above the east bank has been occupied since the seventh century, when an Anglo-Saxon monastery under the abbess Hild stood there; the Synod of Whitby met at it in 664, and Caedmon, the earliest English poet known by name, was a lay brother in its community. The gaunt ruin visitors photograph today is the later medieval abbey church, dissolved in the sixteenth century and left to weather on the clifftop ever since. Below it, St Mary's parish church has its own separate history and its own extraordinary interior of box pews and galleries, reached from the town by the 199 steps, whose official listed name is The Church Stairs.

The town's money came from the sea and from the ground. Whitby ships carried coal and whale oil, and it was here that James Cook served his apprenticeship with the Quaker shipowner John Walker on Grape Lane; the vessel he later took to the Pacific was launched at Whitby in 1764 as the collier Earl of Pembroke before the Navy renamed her Endeavour. In the nineteenth century the cliffs south of the town yielded jet, a fossilised wood from the Early Jurassic that carves and polishes to a deep black, and a Whitby industry of over a thousand workers grew up around Queen Victoria's mourning dress before fashion moved on. What is left is a compact port that still lands fish, a jet trade that survives in a handful of Church Street workshops, and a calendar that swings between a folk festival, a sea regatta and two goth weekends a year.