Yorkshire Coast - Whitby 1

We arrived at Whitby, a coastal town in North Yorkshire. It was the beginning of our first Yorkshire Coast tour. Before starting our day, we had a breakfast at The Singing Kettle Café very close to the harbor. Mine was scrambled egg on toast. So generous egg! I wondered how many eggs were used for the dish. It was very simple as it was seen in a good way. J had a full English breakfast. Again, nothing fancy but nicely filling.

The historic 199 steps to St Mary's church on the town's east cliff helped us burn some of calories from the breakfast, we hoped. It is said that the first record of the steps was in 1340 although probably they were made a long time before that. Also, the steps were originally made of wood and replaced with stone in 1774.

Actually climbing up the steps wasn't so hard since we (at least I) stopped to take photos to capture the beautiful views of town and sea several times. Here was St Mary's church, an Anglican parish church founded around 1110 with the 18th-century box pew interior.

Behind the church, the ruins of Whitby Abbey, a 7th century Christian monastery that became a Benedictine abbey in the 13th century, stood quietly... with giant colorful snakes??? 

There were four of them. They were huge. It was almost impossible to take a nice photo of the abbey without the snakes.

Why snakes? According to Whitby Gazette, "To celebrate the re-opening and as part of English Heritage’s Telling Tales season, the charity has re-imagined a famous legend associated with Whitby, the abbey and its founder, St Hild. A temporary installation of giant inflatable snakes will evoke how Hild dealt with a plague of snakes in the abbey by driving them over the cliff. The snakes smashed their heads in the fall and were miraculously turned into stone." 

The snakes was going to vanish within 3 days after our visit. We somehow picked a day to visit the abbey during the rare event. The snakes certainly interrupted our photo shooting but because of them, I learned a little tale about St Hild.

To be continued...