The East Cliff: the 199 Steps, St Mary's and the Abbey

Three separate things sit on Whitby's East Cliff, and visitors routinely treat them as one. They are not. The 199 steps are a listed structure in their own right. St Mary's is the parish church at the top of them. Whitby Abbey is the ruin a few hundred metres further along the clifftop, run by English Heritage, with its own gate and its own admission. Sorting that out before you set off saves an argument at a ticket desk.

The steps are called the Church Stairs

Their official name, and the one on the grade I listing, is The Church Stairs. Locally you will also hear Church Steps and, occasionally, Jacob's Ladder.

The first written mention of the flight is in a document from 1370, and the path almost certainly predates that, since the church on the clifftop had been there since the twelfth century. They were wooden until the 1770s. As you climb, look for the level platforms set into the flight at intervals. Those are not viewing points. They were built so that coffin bearers on a funeral procession, carrying a body from the town up to the churchyard, could set the coffin down and get their breath back. Once you know that, the climb reads completely differently.

Running alongside the steps is a cobbled slope, the Donkey Road, which is also grade I listed and which runs at close to a fifty per cent gradient. The name is thought to come from the beach donkeys being walked down it each morning and back up each evening. It looks like the easy option. It is not. In wet weather it is considerably worse than the steps.

Everyone counts on the way up. Almost nobody arrives at the same total.

St Mary's, which most people walk straight past

At the top of the steps is St Mary's Church, and the mistake is to photograph the outside and carry on to the abbey. The interior is the reason to stop. It is an unrestored arrangement of white box pews packed in at floor level and stacked into galleries above, fitted piecemeal over generations by ships' carpenters, and it looks like the inside of a vessel rather than the inside of a church. There is nothing else like it on this coast.

The churchyard around it is the one Bram Stoker used, and Caedmon's memorial cross stands near the cliff edge, commemorating the seventh-century cowherd of Hild's monastery who became the earliest English poet known by name. It is a working parish church, so services take precedence and winter hours are shorter. Ring ahead if you are making a special trip.

The abbey

Carry on along the clifftop and you reach Whitby Abbey. What stands is the shell of the medieval abbey church, dissolved in the sixteenth century and weathering on an exposed headland ever since. The famous earlier monastery, founded under the abbess Hild and host to the Synod of Whitby in 664, left nothing above ground at all.

English Heritage runs the site, and the museum in the seventeenth-century house alongside is substantial rather than token: Hild, Caedmon, the shipwreck that fed into Dracula, and the headland's long service as a mark for sailors. Members go free. Everyone else gets the cheapest ticket by booking online before midnight the day before, and there is a further twenty per cent off an on-the-day ticket bought at the site if you have arrived by bus, train or bicycle and can show the ticket or the bike.

The route nobody mentions

If the steps are not an option, you have not lost anything. There is a road to the East Cliff and a car park by the abbey, and a taxi up from the town is a short fare. From that car park, the abbey, the museum, St Mary's and the churchyard are all reachable on reasonably level ground. The only thing you miss is the climb, and the climb is the part that is genuinely inaccessible: there is no lift, no ramp and no alternative stair.

Doing it this way round also gives you a better walk, because you can come down the steps rather than up them, arriving in the old town at the top of Church Street with the whole harbour in front of you.

Timing it

Go early. By mid-morning in August the flight is effectively single file with a queue on it, and the abbey car park is full. First thing, with the light coming off the sea and nobody else on the steps, is the version of this walk worth having.

Take a layer regardless of the forecast. The headland is completely exposed and a still morning in the town centre can be a hard wind at the top. In frost the stone is genuinely slippery, and the Donkey Road more so.

Allow two hours for the whole thing at a walking pace, three if you are going into the abbey museum properly, and add another twenty minutes if you finish at the Whitby Brewery taproom on the East Cliff, which is two minutes from the abbey gate and looks out over the sea. Which, having climbed 199 steps, seems reasonable.