Three whales, one Abbey and 199 steps

Mum, Luke and Ed have been to drop off the rest of my stuff (in fact most of my stuff) which I'd left in Cambridge. Thank you all very much!!


After we'd unloaded the car (not as easy as it sounds, as you'd notice if you saw the steep slope my house is built on!), and of course sampled Cake No. 1 (recipe now posted below), our priority was to take a trip to the cornucopia of Sutcliffe Family nostalgia that is Whitby. Most of my classic childhood memories seem to be associated with Whitby: wandering in awe around the huge ruined abbey; sitting right on the edge of the cliff eating our sandwiches; counting the 199 steps; fudge from Justin's; fish and chips on the beach; and, of course, playing in the sea until we were almost blue with cold.


Yesterday was a fine opportunity for us all to reminisce about these and other things. I liked the new set-up at the Abbey - they have a big visitor centre now, with some interesting displays, and a new back entrance. I was a little disappointed by the audio tour (which pronounced Cædmon incorrectly, talked about his poetry without quoting any Old English at all, and was generally read in a very over-emphatic way) but the abbey itself remained as craggily peaceful as always. They've now fenced off the sloping cliff-edge where we used to happily gambol about eating our picnic; clearly the authorities sided with Mum and Dad's view that it was a little too dangerous. The pier remains the same - as does Justin's Fudge Shop, even down to the 'bags of scraps' we always used to buy. 


But we were very disappointed, scanning the skyline on the opposite side of the valley, that we couldn't see the whale's jawbone arch. Passing through it had been an almost ritual event in childhood trips to Whitby: shivering slightly, awed at the immensity of the jaw and disquieted that it was real bone, I would walk nervously through the arch. I never dared to actually touch the bones, but a trip to Whitby wasn't a trip to Whitby without it. Suddenly one of the boys glimpsed the arch, there atop the cliff after all. We climbed the slope to go and have a look, complaining as we approached that we had remembered the arch as being much bigger.


For once, though, this feeling was not just one of nostalgia. The arch we remembered from our childhood had, it turns out, become too fragile through erosion to remain in place any longer. It was replaced in 2003, after a worldwide search for spare whale bones, the council being wisely unwilling to kill a whale for the sake of preserving Whitby's heritage. This new arch is made from the jawbone of a bowhead whale [1], and is 15 feet tall, a good 5 feet shorter than the one we remembered. So it wasn't just that we had grown since the old days - the arch actually has shrunk as well [2]!


[1] Killed in Alaska by Inuits.
[2] It seems that the arch I remember from my childhood wasn't the original either. The first whalebone arch to stand at Whitby was placed there in the 1850s, and is now in the Whitby Archive and Heritage Centre; it was replaced in 1963 with the arch I recall, the jawbone of a fin whale caught by Norwegian Thor Dahl off Antarctica. I'm curious to know where the 1963 arch now is.