Stand on the West Cliff as the light fails, and you will see them. Below, the harbour lights flicker on and the streets fill with the ordinary commerce of an evening. Above, the abbey ruins stand black against the sky, and it becomes entirely possible to believe that something older and stranger is keeping watch.Whitby has always been a place where history and legend have never quite agreed to separate. Ask a resident about the town and you will hear about the herring trade and the shipyards, about Captain Cook and the whaling fleets, about the smell of the fish quay on a warm morning. Ask the same person about the abbey and you may hear, without any change in tone, about the ghost of St Hilda, the spectral bell that rings beneath the cliff, or the great black dog said to stalk the churchyard steps. Neither account is offered as more true than the other. Whitby has always required both.Whitby: A History in Tides and Tales is the first book to hold those two ways together in a single volume. Part history and part folklore, it traces the town from its earliest Anglian settlement through the Synod of Whitby, the Viking destruction, the medieval abbey, the herring fishery, the Greenland whaling trade, Captain Cook's apprenticeship, the Victorian resort, and the wars of the twentieth century-and then turns to the stories that grew from that history: the abbey ghosts, Dracula's landing, the cunning folk and witch posts of the moors, the snakestones and the Devil's currency, the sea serpents and mermaids, the barghest and the boggart, the weather lore of the coast, the Penny Hedge, and the songs and shanties that carried the town's voice across the water.Written for the local reader and the curious visitor alike, it treats neither the archive nor the legend with condescension. Where the record is silent, it says so. Where a story has a traceable origin-as with Dracula, which can be dated to a specific summer's reading in a specific library-it traces it. Where a legend is older than any record we possess, it treats it with the respect that long survival deserves.This is a book about a town that has been, at various times, a religious centre, a commercial port, a naval nursery, a resort, and a symbol-and that has never entirely stopped being any of them. It is a book about a place where the past is not a museum but a neighbour. And it is a book about the sea, which has given Whitby everything it has and taken much in return.Perfect for readers of local history, British folklore, maritime history, and Gothic literary studies-and for anyone who has ever climbed the 199 steps, looked out over the harbour, and wondered what stories the stones could tell.
