Reached by climbing 199 steps and overlooking the harbour and town of Whitby, North Yorkshire, the Church of St Mary is a Grade I listed Anglican Parish Church. Founded on it's current site in 1110 in the shadow of Whitby Abbey, the current oldest parts of the church which include the tower and transepts date from the 12th and 13th centuries. There have been many additions and changes to the church and the interior dates mainly from the 18th Century.
The church forms part of the setting in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, he had visited Whitby in 1890 and was partly inspired by the town and graveyard at St Mary's, and whilst on a visit to the public library he came across the story of Vlad Tepes, the real life Dracula. In 1897 Stoker published his novel Dracula and the rest is history. People used to regularly search the graveyard for what they called Dracula's grave, in reality the novel is a work of fiction so no grave exists. Some graves used to have a skull and cross bones sculptured, which was thought to indicate it was the grave of a pirate although more likely a mason, 1 of these was the grave people searched for. A former rector fed up at being asked the whereabouts of the grave at St Mary's used to direct people searching to a cracked tomb in the grounds its inscriptions weathered away long ago.
The pictures were taken in the grounds of St Mary's using a Nikon d3300 SLR on August 25 2018. There are 9 which can be seen here or on Clickasnap where they are full size, resolution and un-watermarked. Copies can also be downloaded from there.
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All the pictures remain the copyright of Colin Green.
The nation's Shrines is a short video I recently uploaded to YouTube featuring a collection of 25 cigarette trading cards from a collection released in 1929 called the nation's Shrines. Each card is an image of an historic place from either England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and the complete set if featured in the video. They were released by Player's Cigarettes.
The images feature a number of abbey's, Cathedral's, Castle's and other places of interest in the United Kingdom. Sadly Kenilworth Castle is missing, the video software only aloud a brief glimpse of it between John Milton's cottage and Manorbier Castle. The pictures below are the ones that feature in the video. The break down of places represented is 17 sites from England, 3 from Wales and Ireland and 2 featured from Scotland. In this modern age i'm sure that split would be a bit more representative and certainly feature a few more sites of interest from the Celtic nations.