Whitby.....

I've not been to the coast in ages and now I've been twice in as many weeks. Last week I was on the beach in Crosby near Liverpool in brilliant sunshine with views as far as Snowdon in Wales. This week we were in Whitby looking out across the North Sea. It looks cold and grey but it was actually reasonably warm. I didn't touch the water, it flows down from the Arctic Ocean so it can be cold even in August.

This is the bay just south of the town below the headland where Whitby Abbey stands in picturesque ruin. I remember being on a Geology/Geography trip here when I was at school. The rocks here are the same as those along parts of the Jurassic Coast and are full of fossils. We were having a poke about looking for ammonites and part of the cliff collapsed near us. It was scary. This entire part of the Yorkshire coast, made of soft rocks, is crumbling with houses falling into the sea in places.

It's also this bay where the ship that brought Dracula, in the story by Bram Stoker, to England ran aground. His first victim in this country was a young woman in Whitby. Although he's a fictional character, Whitby does quite a lot of tourist business on the back of the Dracula story. People of the Goth persuasion visit the town and Halloween is lively here.