Whitby
The vibrant eighteenth and nineteenth
century port that was the home to many Farndales
Directions
Whitby is
easy to find at the end of the A171 Guisborough Road. There’s a Park and Ride
and a train station.
St Mary’s
Church
St Mary’s
Church is the place of Dracula inspiration where many Farndales have been
buried, as a vantage point over Whitby, and its maritime activity
I suggest
that you start by crossing the Whitby Bridge and walk up Church Street, passing
many jet shops and bookshops, to the foot of the 199 steps dating to 1340 or
earlier, which might have been a test of Christian faith to those who were
heading for St Mary’s Church. At the top
of the steps is St Mary’s and its graveyard where many of the Whitby lines of
Farndales were buried and which inspired Bram Stoker when he wrote the Dracula
novel. This is also the perfect spot to look down over Whitby including its
harbour, the focus of Whitby’s maritime industry.
Find a bench
with a view over the harbour, and this might be the place to read about the history of Whitby, and the Farndale mariners who
made it their home. Bram Stoker had Mina Murray say of this spot, this is to
my mind the nicest spot in Whitby for it is right over the town,
and has a full view of the harbour and all up the bay.
If you
prefer something a little darker, you could try an alternative passage by Bram
Stoker. For a moment or two I could
see nothing, as the shadow of a cloud obscured St. Mary's Church. Then as the
cloud passed I could see the ruins of the Abbey coming
into view; and as the edge of a narrow band of light as sharp as a sword-cut
moved along, the church and churchyard became gradually visible... It seemed to
me as though something dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone, and bent over it. What it was, whether man or beast,
I could not tell.
Whitby
Abbey
The first
purpose of a visit to Whitby as part of the Farndale Story, is to visit the
place of the Whitby lines of the family, and the focus is on the maritime port.
However Whitby also features much earlier in our history, as a place of
influence on our Anglo Saxon ancestors, and the place of the Synod of Streoneshalch, later known more famously as the Synod of Whitby, in 664 CE,
which was very much a part of the story of Anglo-Saxon Kirkdale.
It is well worth
a visit to the English Heritage site of Whitby
Abbey. The existing structure, which became the ruin after the suppression
of the monasteries in 1539, originates from a new religious community founded
in 1078. However this was the site of the earlier monastery
founded on land given to Hild by the Bernician and Deiran King Oswy in
567 CE and its location on the cliff about the sea can be appreciated from here.
There is also a museum which will help in understanding the original monastery
and the history of the great Synod where a choice was made to take a European
over a Celtic path.
Captain
Cook Museum
When you
return down the 199 steps not far from the corner of Church Street with Bridge
Street, you will find the Cook
Museum at Whitby in the seventeenth century house where James Cook was an apprentice, not long
before he encountered John
Farndale on the Three Brothers and the Friendship. This is a
first museum to learn something of Whitby’s maritime past whilst meeting James Cook.
Flowergate
Next, head
back across the Whitby Bridge and head to a passage at 45 degrees as you face,
and at the end of the passage is Flowergate, where
many of the Whitby Farndales made their home, including Margaret Farndale
and Mary Farndale,
a seamstress in Flowergate in 1851.
Flowergate in the late nineteenth century
Whitby
Museum
If you
continue up Flowergate, and then St Hilda’s Terrace,
you will come to Pannett Park where you will see the Whitby Museum within the park. The museum
is a little old fashioned, even Victorian, which is part of its attraction, and
it houses a wealth of material about Whitby’s history, so is a good place to
explore the maritime past of the town.
The
Harbour
I suggest
you then return to the harbour and walk along its piers to soak in the
atmosphere of the home of many mariners and their families who feature in the
Farndale story.
Don’t leave
Whitby until you have had fish and chips at the Magpie along the harbour front on
Pier Road.
or
Go Straight to Chapter 13 –
the Mariners of Whitby
The webpage
on Whitby includes research notes and
chronology.