Name: The Whitby Lad | Songs of England #1 | Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire
Uploaded: 2021-02-19T19:25:16.000Z
Duration: 7 min 34 s
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Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

In the north east of England, where  the freezing waters of the North  

Sea meet the Yorkshire coast, the fishing town  of Whitby nestles between the surrounding cliffs.

Whitby emerged as a fishing port in the  Middle Ages, while the sparkling black  

jet embedded in the rock here was mined  by both the Romans and the Victorians.  

Above the picturesque roofs of the  town, on top of the east cliff,  

a soaring gothic ruin is silhouetted  against the skyline: Whitby Abbey.

This imposing structure has been an important  religious site for over 1000 years and its  

towering arches and turrets still retain  all the drama and solemnity of that history.

Whitby Abbey dominates a rocky headland  here in this part of the Yorkshire coast.  

But what we see today are the remain of a  Benedictine abbey founded initially around  

1078 by a Norman soldier who actually fought with  William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.  

But the roots of this place go much further back.  

The soldier when he came here was moved  by the remains of a much earlier religious  

house on this site and this is one that had been  founded by the formidable Northumbrian abbess,  

Hild in 657. Unfortunately nothing is  now visible of this much earlier minster.  

Whitby came to prominence shortly after in 664  when a great meeting, a Synod, was held here to  

decide upon the method for calculating Easter.  There were two schools of thought. There was the  

local Celtic tradition and then the Roman European  one. In the end the decision was made to follow  

the Roman method and this is what we follow to  this day and personally I love the fact that  

our year is still very much shaped by decisions  that were taken here more than 1300 years ago.

Looking at the ruins here and  the dramatic clifftop setting,  

it's easy to see why this place has inspired  such religious reverence over the centuries.  

But it's also been a site of poetic inspiration.  The Anglo-Saxon monastery is supposedly where  

the first named English poet Caedmon had  his divinely inspired artistic awakening.

Whitby is filled with legends. Some are  centuries old and linked to the abbess Hild,  

others are part of the local folklore such as the  'barghest' or ghostly black dog who's said to roam  

the local area. Those who see the dog are destined  to die soon after. But in more recent times the  

Abbey and the town have been associated  with another dark figure: Count Dracula.

In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula arrives in Britain  on a ship that runs aground off Whitby. He takes  

the form a large dog, a reference to the barghest  perhaps, when he first comes ashore. And Whitby  

is the setting for some of the most haunting  scenes in the book and these associations have  

most definitely stuck. Stoker came on holiday  to Whitby in 1890, a few years before writing  

Dracula and it was in the public library here that  he found a book referring to Vlad the Impaler,  

or Vlad Dracula, a 15th-century prince from  what is now Romania. Whitby's role both in  

terms of the setting and the inspiration  of Dracula really cannot be underplayed.  

For centuries the abbey itself was used as  a seamark, a navigational aid for seafarers,  

and that ship that brought Dracula to Britian  is thought to be based on an actual shipwreck  

that occurred here in the 1880s. This  has always been a dangerous coast.

Over the centuries generations of  sailers would have departed from Whitby,  

and for some, the sight of  the abbey's steep arches  

jutting out from the clifftop would have  been their last glimpse of English shores.  

The Whitby Lad, immortalised in this local  traditional song, sung for us by Fay Hield,  

would certainly have known what it felt like  to bid farewell to England in this manner.  

The song tells the tale of a boy  born on the wrong side of the tracks,  

who is sentenced to transportation to an English  penal colony in Australia. His journey to Botany  

Bay began here in Whitby and we can imagine  him peering back over the side of the boat  

as the silhouette of the abbey  gradually fades into the horizon.