It was July 1890, and Bram Stoker, on holiday in Whitby, walked up to the abbey ruins on the high cliff above the harbour and looked east into the North Sea. He needed somewhere for his villain to come ashore in England, and Whitby gave him everything: the steep climb of 199 worn stone steps, the haunted ruin on the headland, the foggy mouth of the river, and a graveyard whose stones had been blackened by centuries of salt wind. He used all of it. Dracula's ship, the Demeter, drives ashore at Whitby with her dead captain lashed to the wheel. A great black dog leaps from the wreck and vanishes up the 199 Steps. From that day on, Whitby has been two things at once: a working North Yorkshire fishing town, and the literary front door for one of the most famous vampires in the world.
The Anglo-Saxons called this place Streoneshalh - Streon's nook of land - and in 657 AD they made it a major religious centre, founding a monastery for both men and women under the rule of Abbess Hild. The Synod of Whitby, held there in 664, settled the date of Easter for the English church and shifted Northumbria's allegiance from Celtic to Roman Christianity. The monastery was destroyed by Vikings around 870 and the area abandoned, except, the records suggest, for one Norse farmer called Hvita: Hvitabyr - Hvita's farm - became Whitby. The Normans rebuilt the monastery in the 11th century, and its ruins still dominate the East Cliff. Tudor herring fishing, then whaling, ship-building, and the export of alum and coal carried the town into prosperity. The Victorian fashion for jet jewellery, made from local fossilised wood and worn for mourning, added one last industrial chapter.
James Cook came to Whitby in 1746 as a seventeen-year-old apprentice to Captain John Walker, a Quaker ship-owner with a house on Grape Lane. Cook spent nine years working Walker's colliers between the Tyne and London, learning the hard, low-glamour seamanship of the North Sea coastal trade. The flat-bottomed Whitby cats - sturdy, beachable, capacious - taught him the kind of ship he would later insist on for his voyages of discovery. The original HM Bark Endeavour was a Whitby cat. So was Resolution. The town's whole shipbuilding tradition, in a sense, sailed Cook to the Pacific. A forty-percent-scale replica of Endeavour now pots around the bay in summer, carrying tourists where their many-times-great-grandfathers might have hauled coal.
The 199 Steps climb from the head of Church Street to the cliff top, emerging at St Mary's Church and the abbey ruins. The exact number is correct and the steps are worn into hollows by centuries of feet. The cliff edge below St Mary's is so eroded that the church itself is at risk, and - in a touch Stoker would have appreciated - human remains from the graveyard occasionally tumble down onto the gardens of the houses below. Twice a year, Halloween and late April, Whitby fills up for the Goth Weekend: black lace, black lipstick, top hats, parasols, and a town that throws itself into the role with a kind of cheerful Yorkshire gusto. The fish-and-chip shops do brisk trade. The pubs do better. The goths arrive on the train wearing capes and depart on the train wearing capes, and the town counts the takings.
Whitby still fishes. The harbour smacks tie up alongside the leisure boats, and the smokehouses on Henrietta Street, especially Fortune's, still cure kippers - whole split herrings smoked over oak shavings - by methods the founders would recognise. The cliff-top St Mary's Church has Norman foundations under late-eighteenth-century interiors that look like a ship's wardroom: high-sided box pews and a triple-decker pulpit. Whitby Abbey itself, the great ruined Benedictine house on the East Cliff, was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539 and quarried for stone by locals for centuries afterwards. What survives is gaunt and beautiful: pointed arches against the sky, a north transept still mostly intact, a precinct that on a misty morning looks exactly like the postcard Stoker remembered. The fishing fleet sails out beneath it. The goths still pose for photographs. The kippers still smoke.
Coordinates 54.4858°N, 0.6206°W. Whitby sits at the mouth of the River Esk on the North Yorkshire coast, about 18 nm south-southeast of Middlesbrough. The signature landmarks from the air are the ruined abbey on the high east cliff and the parallel piers of the harbour mouth, making the town immediately recognisable. The North York Moors plateau extends inland, with RAF Fylingdales pyramid about 8 nm to the south. Robin Hood's Bay is 5 nm down the coast to the southeast. Best viewed 2,000-4,000 ft in clear conditions. Nearest airports: Durham Tees Valley (EGNV) about 40 nm northwest, Newcastle (EGNT) about 60 nm north-northwest, Humberside (EGNJ) about 50 nm south.