Skip to content
TravelPlan.guide
Whitby Abbey
AttractionEasy1.5 to 2 hours including the museum

Whitby Abbey

← All things to do

About

The ruin on the East Cliff, and the reason the skyline looks the way it does from every angle in town. What survives is the shell of the medieval abbey church, dissolved in the sixteenth century and weathering on an exposed headland ever since; the Anglo-Saxon monastery that made the site famous, founded under the abbess Hild and host to the Synod of Whitby in 664, stood here long before it and left nothing above ground. English Heritage runs the site with a substantial museum in the adjacent seventeenth-century house, covering Hild, the poet Caedmon, the wreck that fed into Dracula, and the headland's long afterlife as a landmark for sailors. Reach it by the 199 steps from the old town if you are able, or by road to the East Cliff car park if you are not: they arrive at opposite ends of the same clifftop.

Photos

Highlights

  • ✓The roofless shell of the medieval abbey church on an exposed clifftop
  • ✓The English Heritage museum in the adjacent seventeenth-century house
  • ✓The site of the Synod of Whitby in 664 and of Caedmon's community
  • ✓Views back down over the harbour mouth and the piers

Tips

  • →Opening hours, read on 2026-08-21 from the seasonal calendar English Heritage's own prices-and-opening-times page loads client-side: daily 10:00 to 17:00 until 24 October 2026; daily 10:00 to 16:00 from 25 October to 1 November; Wednesday to Sunday 10:00 to 16:00 from 2 November to 27 December, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and also closed 24, 25 and 26 December; daily 10:00 to 16:00 from 28 December to 3 January 2027; Wednesday to Sunday 10:00 to 16:00 from 4 January to 7 February 2027; then daily 10:00 to 16:00 to 16 March 2027, which is the last date English Heritage publishes. Its site banner gives last entry as 16:30 against the 17:00 summer close.
  • →English Heritage members go free. Non-members get the cheapest price by booking online before midnight the day before.
  • →Arriving by bus, train or bicycle earns 20 per cent off a ticket bought at the site on the day, under English Heritage's Good Journey partnership. Show the ticket or the bike.
  • →The site is genuinely exposed. A still day in the town can be a hard wind on the headland.
  • →Illuminated Whitby lights the ruin in the evenings in late October and is ticketed separately from daytime admission.

Best Season

SpringSummerAutumnWinter

More Attraction Activities

The 199 Steps
Attraction

The 199 Steps

The grade I listed Church Stairs from Church Street up to St Mary's, in use since at least 1370, with coffin-rest platforms on the way.

10 to 20 minutes up, depending on stopsModerate
Attraction

St Mary's Church

The clifftop parish church at the top of the steps, with an extraordinary unrestored interior of white box pews fitted by ships' carpenters.

20 to 40 minutesEasy
Captain Cook Memorial Museum
Attraction

Captain Cook Memorial Museum

The Grape Lane house where Cook lodged as an apprentice, now a museum of his Whitby years and the voyages that followed.

1 to 1.5 hoursEasy
Book direct