here. Sam Leith makes a good case, although I don't think the Abbey is either Gothic or doleful. Norman and magnificent more like, and I hope Henry VIII is getting his ulcerous arse kicked around all the fiery corners of hell for ordering its dissolution and subsequent destruction.
It is atmospheric, especially on the east side where many of the buildings are hundreds of years old and have largely escaped the modernizing ravages of planners. Your glasses don't have to be too dirty for you to be transported to an older world.
Whitby's atmosphere is not made by the imagined Dracula and those who trail on his cape-tails (he came, he bit, he left) but by the real, permanent and every-present sea. You can't imagine Dracula coming to, say, Luton. A far scarier place in my experience, but not one where a storm tossed schooner can land a vampiric cargo. And that landing was crucial to the essential horror of the tale: the alien arrives and his horror is foreshadowed in the note tied to the dead Captain's body. Whitby's scenery and architecture provides a fantastic backdrop to his early depradations.
But this is all because of Whitby's position and history as a port and the true (and unexplored) majesty of the place is the sea. The North Sea as far as you can see from the clifftop where Dracula bit his necks has killed more than any vampire in fiction and has culturally given the world more than even Bram Stoker's legacy has managed.
The Abbey dominates the town because the Anglo Saxon Christians liked their headland situations for their churches. Godliness must be more profound when your face is being wuthered off in a northerly gale. The town's old buildings remain and are charming only because of its coastal isolation and the conservatism of geographically isolated, seafaring population. Its magnificence and the occasional brooding air about the place exist only because it sits between land and sea. The atmosphere surely comes from the impermanence and violence implicit in living by the sea. This is where whole villages vanish beneath the waves overnight, where gravestone have no bodies beneath them because the man's life was lost at sea and his body never recovered.
At the cliff edge and at the ever-shifting place where the sea creeps up the strand or crashes on the jurassic beaches, everything changes for we humans.
You can't go there without special people called sailors and things made by human ingenuity called boats. And where you go is utterly implacable and will wipe the life from your body in a few horrifying moments if you are incautious or unlucky. Drowning is not like the 'falling about in a green field' of fable. The cliff edge or the breakes on the beach is where our writ ends and that of an uncaring nature begins and man who fancies himself master of his domain is very much at its mercy. Our coastal towns and villages were populated by men and women whose lives and deaths centred around the sea and in the case of Whitby the many churches and old building gathered so close to the harbour are what gives the place the air that inspired Stoker.
There is much more to this place than Stoker's creation and it is a shocking lack of imagination to visit the place and see this (a stone coffin in the Abbey grounds)......
but not be inspired by this...
or, in more benign mood, this (Whitby's west beach with Sandsend in the background)...
The sea is why we are Bede's 'gens Anglorum'. It made Britain what it is, it gave Whitby its complex and wonderful history and a sense today that pasts real and imagined are close and accessible. It made Dracula and it should make many more voyages of literary fantasy possible.
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