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If there's one essential stop on the North Yorkshire coast it's WHITBY , whose historical associations, atmospheric ruins, fishing harbour and intrinsic charm make it many people's favourite northern resort. The seventh-century abbey here made Whitby one of the key foundations of the early Christian period, and a centre of great learning, though little interfered with the fishing community that scraped together a living on the harbour banks of the River Esk below. For a thousand years, the local herring boats landed their catch until the great whaling boom of the eighteenth century transformed the fortunes of the town. Melville's Moby Dick makes much of Whitby whalers such as William Scoresby, while James Cook took his first seafaring steps from the town in 1746, on his way to becoming a national hero. All four of Captain Cook's ships of discovery - the Endeavour, Resolution, Adventure and Discovery - were built in Whitby. Hemmed in by steep cliffs and divided by the River Esk, the town splits into two distinct halves joined by a swing bridge: the old town to the east, centred on a curving cobbled street of great character, and the newer (though mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century) town across the bridge, generally known as West Cliff . Cobbled Church Street is the old town's main thoroughfare, barely changed in aspect since the eighteenth century, though now lined with tearooms and gift shops. At the end of Church Street, you climb the famous 199 steps of the Church Stairs - now paved, but originally a wide wooden staircase built for pallbearers carrying coffins to the church of St Mary above. Having made the climb, you've followed in the fictional footsteps of Bram Stoker's Dracula , who in the eponymous novel takes the form of a large dog that bounds up the steps after the wreck of the ship bearing his coffin. The parish church of St Mary at the top of the steps, loftily removed from the town it served, is an architectural dog's dinner dating back to 1110, boasting a Norman chancel arch, a profusion of eighteenth-century panelling, box pews unequalled in England and a triple-decker pulpit - note the built-in ear trumpets, added for the benefit of a nineteenth-century rector's deaf wife. The cliff-top ruins of Whitby Abbey (daily: April-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct-March 10am-4pm; GBP1.80; EH), beyond St Mary's, are some of the most evocative in England, the nave, soaring north transept and lancets of the east end giving a hint of the building's former delicacy and splendour. Its monastery was founded in 657 by St Hilda of Hartlepool, daughter of King Oswy of Northumberland, and by 664 had become important enough to host the Synod of Whitby , an event of seminal importance in the development of English Christianity. It settled once and for all the question of determining the date of Easter, and adopted the rites and authority of the Roman rather than the Celtic Church. Caedmon , one of the brothers at the abbey during its earliest years who was reputedly charged with looking after Hilda's pigs, has a twenty-foot cross to his memory which stands in front of St Mary's, at the top of the steps. His nine-line Song of Creation is the earliest surviving poem in English, making the abbey not only the cradle of English Christianity, but also the birthplace of English literature. Whitby likes to make a fuss of Captain Cook who served an apprenticeship here from 1746-49 under John Walker, a Quaker shipowner. The Captain Cook Memorial Museum (Easter-Oct daily 9.45am-5pm; March Sat & Sun 11am-3pm; GBP2.80; ), housed in Walker's rickety old house in Grape Lane (just over the bridge on the east side, on the right), contains an impressive amount of memorabilia, including ships' models, letters and paintings by artists seconded to Cook's voyages. Final port of call should be the gloriously eccentric Whitby Museum in Pannett Park (May-Sept Mon-Sat 9.30am-5.30pm, Sun 2-5pm; Oct-April Mon-Tues 10.30am-1pm, Wed-Sat 10.30am-4pm, Sun 2-4pm; GBP2), at the back of West Cliff, up from the train station. There's more Cook memorabilia, including various of the ethnic objects and stuffed animals brought back as souvenirs by his crew, as well as casefuls of exhibits devoted to Whitby's seafaring tradition, its whaling industry in particular. Some of the best and largest fossils of Jurassic period reptiles unearthed on the east coast are also preserved here.
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