"It is the summer of the soul in December"...

More "Tales of Foreign Places" Coming soon, but I wanted to put this out there first:

Overheard in parking lot of Target a few nights back:

Girl (probably around 10 or 12) to Mom: I can’t understand how people just don’t believe in Santa Claus.

Mom (Slightly hesitantly): Oh? Like who?

Girl: Like—my friends. Some girls at school (who she proceeds to name). They were saying that they just…didn’t…I guess.

Mom: Wow.

Girl: Yeah. I just don’t get it.

Mom (very hesitantly): So…you believe in Santa, then?

Girl (with utter confidence): Well, yeah! Of course I do! He is…just….everything that’s good at Christmas, you know?

I walked out of earshot around this point, but that little snippet of conversation has been in my head ever since. And it got me thinking.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I find the Christmas decorations in late-October as annoying as the rest of the western world. There is nothing that says “We are in a recession, for the love of God, BUY SOMETHING” or, more simply “Buy stuff or it isn’t Christmas”. And there are only so many times I can see faux-antlers or hear “Dominic the Italian Donkey” on the radio (seriously…what?) before I want to run screaming into the night. But it is also totally missing the point. Which this little girl at Target got, better than any card or any overly-emotive holiday commercial.

I think there’s something wrong with my brain’s hardwiring, but come Christmas, I turn into an utter milksop. No lie, I cry at everything. I see the lights spinning up the lightposts on Church Street, or the trees that like Commonwealth Ave, and I’m gone. There is a defiance of the darkness, a refusal to give into to the gloom of winter, as if those trees could hold the very stars closer, that makes me so happy I can’t really do much else.

Christmas carols do me in every time (don’t get me started on the Muppets and John Denver). Because I’ve seen those same people who roll their eyes at the piped muzak in Macy’s stop still in the middle of a gusting snow squall to listen to a group of carolers who are entrenched against the elements near a snowbank outside Starbucks. No surprise, I was one of those carolers, but you have no idea how many people genuinely light up at the sound of the music, how many bring their kids, how many have treated others (and us) to tea, have found rock salt so we don’t have to stand on ice…it’s really hard to sing and sniffle at the same time, but I’ve managed.

I cry at decorations. Trees, menorahs, what have you. Because for all they have been commercialized, there is a force about their presence. They, too, serve to banish the cold and the dark. They are light, and they are love. I cry at the words, too. My first memory of any kind of religion was hearing about the “multitude of Heavenly Host” and thinking that was the most beautiful phrase I had ever heard. That phrase was beaten only by the line in “Noel Christmas Eve 1913”, no surprise, on the John Denver and the Muppets album, “And they sat there and they marveled / And they knew they could not tell / Whether it were angels or the bright stars a singing”. I annually flip out my mother by bursting into tears at that song because I am so jealous of those shepherds and because I like angels and because, even if it’s only for a few days, I like that other people believe in them, too.

Like the girl at Target, my Santa isn’t necessarily a man who can wriggle down a chimney, or circumnavigate the world in a single night. He is the good in people that make the miracles of Christmas occur: He is the guy who gives you his parking space at the mall, or the MBTA conductor who holds the train an extra few moments so you don’t have to wait 20 minutes in the cold for the next one. He is the guy at John Lewis who needed help picking out yarn so he could learn how to knit his wife a scarf; and he is the ladies at Dunkin Donuts who remember you even when you’ve been gone for six months. He is in the little mouse ornament my mother bought me when I was three with the last of her paycheck because he was sitting on an hour-glass and I thought those were the greatest things ever; he is my father’s voice reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales on Christmas Eve before sending us to bed. Because he has tea with Santa on Christmas Eve and helps him put all the presents out just so.

If you want to write me off as rather damp, naïve, or assume that “I’ll learn soon enough”, that’s fine. Hell, I’m working at UPS this Christmas. If I had a nickel for every person who has informed me that this is the quickest way to kill the Christmas spirit, I still wouldn’t have enough to pay back my student loans, but it’d be an excellent start. But, fortunately, my Christmas isn’t about packages, or who gets what or what dress I need to wear. It’s about the power of love to make things beautiful and to make people good. It’s about that magic period where people remember what it feels like to hope.

The more I read this over, the less is makes sense. Basically, I like Christmas. And I believe in Santa, and angels and magical things and good people. And I thought I’d try and tell you about it. Merry Christmas.

The Great Ireland Adventure, Part 3: Postcards from the Garden Gnome(s)

Cedric: Hello, Stranger. Who might you be?

Larger Gnome with Lantern: I am looking for an honest man.

Cedric: A what? Oh,…well, I think I could perhaps help you out there.

Larger Gnome with Lantern: Oh? Indeed?

Cedric: Indeed, indeed. Pleased to meet you. The name’s Cedric. Professional travelling gnome.

Larger Gnome with Lantern: A pleasure. Mine’s Diogenes.

Cedric: I should have known. Well then, lad, tell us a bit about yourself.

Diogenes: Well, after some extensive, if unsuccessful travels, I decided to take a bit of a rest cure here in County Antrim and found myself at the St. George’s Market at the same time as your overgrown friend with the backpack full of books. And someone with that many books must indeed have a passion for the truth, or at least a desire to seek it in all its forms—

Cedric: Or just a bit of a maniac.

Diogenes: I beg your pardon?

Cedric: Nothing, my man, nothing. Now—how’s about I show you around Dublin?

Diogenes: I can truthfully say that sounds lovely.

Train travel ensues.

Diogenes: My good friend, I hope you will not take it amiss if I ask where on God’s green earth we are?

Cedric: Clontarf.

Diogenes: Truthfully?

Cedric: Our bookish friend, you will soon learn, is hardly one to stay to the proverbially beaten track.

Diogenes: And why, pray tell, did we walk in a five mile circle only to return to this rather ill-kempt crescent?

Cedric: Because, so far as we can tell, this is the house where Bram Stoker was born. However, at the time, the street was known as Merino Crescent. And no doubt had some kind of groundskeeper.

Diogenes: Shouldn’t there be a little green circle outside the door?

Cedric: One would assume, seeing as there is a throng standing in line to check out a stranger’s dustbins.

Diogenes: I don’t see anyone around. Except that man in the taxi giving us odd looks.

Cedric: Wanders off in direction of:

Sometime later…

Cedric: Oooh! Look! A gnome-friendly street!

Diogenes: This is true.

Cedric: I know it’s….oh never mind.

Diogenes: So, did the erudite one say why we have come here?

Cedric: This is the street where Dorothy Macardle [Kenneth’s sister] lived.

Diogenes: Is that why she’s taking pictures of that art gallery?

Cedric: Yuppers. Dorothy lived at number 16 back in the late 20's.

Diogenes: I must learn more about this person.

Cedric: I promise, I swear, you will know more than you ever cared to in a very short while.

Diogenes: Are you truthful?

Cedric: Would you stop asking me that?!

Later:

Diogenes: Where are we now?

Cedric: No! No! Stay in the bag! It’s a mob scene!

Diogenes: Are you—

Cedric: Ok, ok, it’s not a mob scene. But there is a gathering crowd and I have a fear of shoe soles. And you, my porcelain friend…

Diogenes: Say no more. I was quite comfortable, actually. But where are we?

Cedric: Oscar Wilde’s birthplace.

Diogenes: My, my. And would I be correct in stating that the crowd is due in large part to our friend’s feat of leaping over a parked car in order to get across the street to see said house?

Cedric: That…yeah. That would be accurate in the extreme.

Much later, on the train to Stoke Newington:

Cedric: I really can’t stand flying. If the good Lord meant gnomes to fly….

Diogenes: We would have been crafted with large feathery wings.

Cedric: I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Diogenes: She's taking our picture again, isn't she?

Cedric: Get used to it, Buddy Boy....

The Great Irish Adventure, Part 2 (Dundalk)

"So, where is your next stop?" Asked my long-suffering mother on the phone Sunday evening.

"Dundalk."

"And what is there?"

"Precious little, apparently. They just opened a mall, apparently."

"And you are going....why?"

"Because I want to see where Kenneth Macardle lived."

"Ah. Do you have an address?"

"I have a street, but the 1915 directory didn't give house numbers. I'll figure it out."

"I'm sure you will."

"Basically, I look at it like I'm on a blind date with a ghost, or something."

I bid Belfast farewell without many great pangs of regret, especially once the man at the bus station gave me the wrong information on how to get to Dundalk. Luckily the people at the train station (which is in the same building--one of the few awesome things about the city) were kindlier and I was soon tucked inside a train car and winding my way south. The view wasn't too much to write home about, save for the part when the train went through a junk yard and ran between piles of crushed cars stacked twenty feet high on both sides, which I found fascinating. I wander aimlessly through Dundalk for a bit to get a feel for things before getting a taxi to my hotel, which was about 2 miles from town.

The morning into town the next day was marred only by the windmill at the Dundalk Institute of Technology. I can't begin to tell you how utterly terrified I am of the new windmills thathave the ominous presence of a Poe specter and the unutterable malevolence of a Lovecraftian Creature (Cue my mother: it's a windmill Bridget, for the love of God calm down). I thus walked very quick past and tried not to look at it took closely for fear of drawing its evil attention.

Dundalk's name is derived from the Irish Dún Dealgan meaning "Dalgan's Fort", and is considered to be the home of the mythical warrior Cúchulainn. It is, according to its legal boundaries, the largest town in Ireland, but the vast majority of it is farmland and open fields. In 1863, it became the home of Macardle and Moore Brewing Company, founded by E.H. Macardle and Andrew T. Moore, who together bought out the town's former brewery and moved the building to the area of Dundalk known as Cambricville. The brewery grew in popularity through the century and, in 1915, Thomas Callan Macardle, the grandson of E.H., was knighted for his work in supplying grain and alcohol to the British Army. His son was one Kenneth Callan Macardle, who you may have heard me mention one or two times before (It would appear that Kenneth was working toward taking over the operation of the brewery, as he was apprenticed to a granary in England for a while and was ostensibly in San Francisco to learn brewery and farming techniques). During the Irish Civil Wars, Dundalk enjoyed quite a bit of notoriety as a border town and customs center (as well as numerous less-palatable incidences), and continued as a market town until the 1950's, when the rail lines to the town closed one by one. The brewery went strong for over a century until it was bought by Guinness in 1988, and in April of 2001, it closed for good.

As I only had a day, I didn't plan to do much more than walk around and get a sense of the place. I don't blame Kenneth in the least for leaving fairly quickly, as it isn't exactly a happening place, it is beautiful.

As foolish as this sounds, there is poetry everywhere. If the forms of memorial and public art is any indication of the mentality of the population, I can see where Kenneth got his linguistic talents.

This is the plaque on the statue commemorating the town gates that were originally erected in the 14th century. Despite having a more recent history of severe economic hardship and unemployment (County Louth, as well as being Ireland's smallest county, had it's highest levels of unemployment in the 1980's), it was really nice to see a town that was proud of its history. Dorothy Macardle (Kenneth's sister) wrote in her first book of a "sense one has everywhere in Ireland...of the companionship of the dead.” It's one of the things that struck me most strongly about Dundalk. Nearly every street had a plaque or a monument on it, not necessarily to significant events, but to individual people who were involved in history:

I'm still looking for information on the Watters family, but these are just examples.

And I too was there in the companionship of the dead, so to speak. It's hard for me to picture KCM as anything but as a tall, somewhat gangly, mustachioed 26-year-old, but I did find the street on which he grew up (according to the Registries of the early 20th century).

Like I said earlier, I couldn't track down a house number, so I had to go up and down the street and say Hello to all the buildings that weren't obviously too new--which got me more than a few questioning glances, believe you me. Also on Jocelyn Street is the building that was the main office for the Brewery

Which is now an office building and the small offices of the Dundalk Tourist Bureau.

I didn't have time to visit the archives (a perfectly good excuse to return, I think), nor was I able to find the cemetery where Sir Thomas is buried. It would have been nice to say hello and introduce myself, but according to the map, it was somewhere outside of town on a road that had no identifying features for miles and miles, according to the map. And as much fun as it would have been to haul my backpack down a non-desrcript rural road for hours and hours, I think enlisting some sort of transportation might be advisable for the next time around.

This time, however, it was nice to simply walk around, and say hello to the buildings. I do genuinely believe in Guardian Angels. Maybe he's mine, maybe I'm his. But we got to have another strange, fleeting visit, and it was worth every dusty mile it took to get there.

The Great Irish Adventure, Part 1

(Excellent taste in sweepstakes!!!)

I was in a bookstore today (not unlike every other day of my life) and saw rhyme that described Thursday's child (who traditionally "has far to go") as a natural-born wanderer, and that, to me, seemed highly appropriate. So when my student loans provided me with a few more weeks of wandering, I took them happily and rapidly booked a flight to Belfast. The plan is 3 days in Belfast, 2.5 days in Dundalk and 3.75 days in Dublin, and with my indestructible back-pack and Cedric, my erstwhile gnomey companion, I was off!

Belfast was....interesting. The good stuff first:

I was there mainly to go to the St. George's Market, where my favorite t-shirts are sold on Saturdays from Tee and Toast. Cedric has much to say about this, so I'll leave off for now, but I fell in love with the market as soon as I saw it. Fresh fish sat glaring up from beds of crushed ice, next to wheels of cheese bigger than my armspan, across from some of the most delicious-looking bread I ever saw, and around the corner were cupcakes. A whole table of cupcakes with whipped, marshmallow frosting.

As if this wasn't enough, I had tea and toast, of the edible variety, at the Linen Hall Library--the oldest library in Belfast and the last subscription library in Ireland. It's gorgeous on the inside, with dark wood shelves and old leather couches and standing-writing tables scattered around. And the toast is marvelous.

Speaking of books (again, not all that surprising here), I also found a mystery bookstore near the pub above, that was run by the greatest guy in Belfast. He was a bibliophile, he offered me tea, and he also spoke arguably the greatest greeting I have ever heard. A Queen's College professor came in to check on his reading list, and I, who was crouched on the floor behind a bookcase, my arms laden, heard:

"Stephen! How in hell are you? Sit your weary soul in that chair and tell me your tale."

I am ruthlessly stealing this line for a story one day. And thus Mr. Bookman has found immortality.

The Botanic Gardens are lovely, as well. Coming from a land where the sight of roses in late September are few and exceptionally far between, to be assailed by the smell of a whole rose garden in bloom was a rare treat.

It is also next to the oldest graveyard in Belfast that has ties to Druidical practices and ancient Celtic carvings...and is only open by appointment. Unspeakably unfair.

Also, the First World War happened.

Basically, there aren't a great number of First World War memorials in Ireland because of the awkward overlap of Ireland fighting with the British Empire while at the same time fighting the Empire for Home Rule. Which in itself is an incredibly interesting conflict, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

HOWEVER.

Belfast is weird.

Seriously. I've never been in a city that was so intensely defined by its geography. I was staying on Great Victoria Street, one of the major streets in the city. However,two streets west (while trying to find Belfast City Cemetery, a perfectly high-minded endeavor), I hit this:

Needless to say, I never made it to the cemetery. I was busy running very quickly in the other direction.

There is a persistent anger that lives just below the surface in so many parts of the city--not just an historical resentment, or a resentment of memory, but a truly ugly feeling that is as alive and as real as those murals. Maybe it's because the history is so recent and, in a sense, ongoing. But it still made me feel a guest at the Borden Family dinner table.

Also, everything closes at 6:00pm. Everything.

Except the pubs and bars.

I'm not exactly an Anthropophobic, but I don't have any need whatsoever to make friends. Especially friends who smell as if they have just drunk their own weight in cheap whiskey.

And on Sundays, nothing opens 'til one. There is no one out or about, save for the hooligans loitering near the City Hall. It's a ghost town.

It's not, though. I don't think ghosts like Belfast much, either:

And, being a devout admirer of memorials of all kinds, I was... perturbed, let's say, to see this:

It's the Belfast Titanic Memorial. Inside a Ferris Wheel. You can't see the bottom, because it's covered by a giant motor. You can barely make out the figures because of the constant swoop of cars. I was trying to get this picture when I heard a conversation over my shoulder:

"What is that girl takin' a picture of, Larry?"

"Don't know...is it the wheel then?"

"No...it's the statue inside. What is it, then?"

"Don't know. Looks old, though. Not really one for old things, me."

Like I say...Belfast and I...didn't quite see eye to eye.

Fragments...

This was a story I started to write for a competition by the English Heritage People--basically, you had to write a story that involved Whitby Abbey. However, since the story was due a week before my dissertation and could only be 2,500 words, it was never completed. Enjoy!

I saw him the first time was I was eight. My father was a religious historian and was writing a paper on the collection of myth and memory at significant sites throughout Britain. He did his best to schedule the trips in the summer so that I could join him—he said it was because he enjoyed the company. I knew that it was because, even then, I was the one who would type up his notes and keep our itineraries in order. He said it was because I always found points of interests that he missed. I knew it was because, even then, his eyes were failing him and I was the only person he would allow to guide his feet up the steps and over the hidden folds in the ground without being ashamed.

We arrived, perhaps appropriately, in the middle of a fog so heavy that I knew the sea only from its sound. We slept in an inn overlooking the Bay where my father made us tea with too much milk. Otherwise, he said, I’d be up all night and wouldn’t be able to see all the spirits that still lived in the Abbey. The tea had no effect on me one way or the other, but I was still up most of the night, my face pressed to the window, willing away the mist and the chill with childish savagery. My mood did not improve when, awaking (having been mysteriously transported to my bed in the night), I saw that the mist had congealed into fat, fuming rain clouds that spit and hissed against the windows and the walls of our tiny room.

I don’t remember much else about that morning, beside my Father’s weary chuckle at my impatience.

“It’s stood there for seven hundred years, Cait. I promise you, it won’t have changed much by the time the sun comes out.”

By noon, the clouds apparently grew tired of their games and began lagging behind each other, leaving patches of sunlight that stretched across the grass of the nave and made the steps shimmer. We went up, hand in hand, my little mary-janes sliding into the ancient footprints worn into the weary stone.

“You go on ahead,” my Father whispered, moving his hand to the railing so he could hold something still and steady. Thrilled to at last to be moving, I dashed up the rest of the stairs, losing count before 199, but in far too much of a hurry to mind. There was wind making my hair thrash around like a living thing and surf twinkling at my feet and for a few breathless moments, I felt like I could fly.

He saw me before I was even aware of his presence. He stood amongst the graves, as still and ageless as the stones that surrounded him. I had an image of black clothes and black hair and a face that was turned with intense, silent vigilance to the sea. Then my Father was behind me, his hand on the base of my neck, guiding me into the standing shadows of the Abbey.

As we walked up the path, the man turned his head, following our movements with something almost wary in his gaze. I met his eyes for a moment, and to this day, despite everything, I still see those eyes in my dreams. They were wide and nearly white, as if he had been staring to the sea so long that his eyes were now nothing more than a reflection of the sea foam and the sky.

“Who was that?” I asked, trying to turn my head back, but I was too slow for grown-up strides and merely ended up stumbling.

“Who do you mean, Darling?”

“That man there in the graveyard.”

“I’ve no idea, Cait. Come on—it looks as if it might rain again.”

It did. But not before we’d walked every path, studied the nave from every angle, and watched the starlings dance with the sunbeams through the holes in the masonry. My father would have been content simply to stare, to absorb the history and the atmosphere and distill from it some kind of truth, but I made him tell me again about the sacking by the Vikings, the German bombs that wrecked the nave, and the warriors who lay beneath the stones. At last, he sat on a broken wall and took his little notebook from his breast pocket, and I knew he would be writing his impressions for sometime and that I was free to wander. Eager to see the sea, I slipped through the walls of St. Mary’s once again—and found myself not three feet from the man with the moon-bright eyes.

“Are you waiting for someone?” He was leaning toward the wall around the Abbey, far less for support than if he were keeping it company. He turned lazily to me, as if we had already been introduced.

“You could say that.” His voice was calm and solemn and I suddenly felt very grown-up.

“Who is she?”

“How did you know it was a she?”

“You look too lonely. It must be a she.”

He smiled at that, and I saw that the skin around his eyes folded oddly, as if unused to the movement.

“Have you visited the Abbey before?”

“Nope. But my Dad told me all about it. He writes books.”

“I see.” We stood together in silence, while I watched him watch a gull ride a gust of wind over the cliff, before swooping down toward the shore.

“Can you hear it?” He asked presently.

“Hear what?” In answer, he nodded to the hulking skeleton of stone and shadow before us. The sky was rapidly darkening, and a few heavy raindrops splattered into the ground around us.

“Of course not.”

“Then you’re not listening hard enough.”

“Fine then. What do you hear?” I pouted. If he noticed, he gave no indication, far too busy staring into the dimness of the Abbey.

“It’s waiting,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “Just like all of us.”

It was more than twelve years before I returned to Whitby. But that time, the sun shone for the entirety of my visit, as if trying to apologize for being too cowardly all those years ago. I was engaged. I was published. And I was alone...

To be continued...

Perhaps....

Postcard from the Garden Gnome: Enter Freely and of Your Own Free Will...(Part 2)

Day 2 of this little excursion dawned much brighter and Bridget decided we were going to follow Mina's walk to Robin Hood Bay (yes, he was supposed to have hung out there). Fortunately for Mina and Lucy, there were no highways in 1892. There are now, and lest we re-enacted our little St. Brigid's expedition and get hit by a truck, I decided to curtail this expedition. I did, however, let her stop in the East Whitby Cemetery (I can hear her mother snickering right now--"It's always a graveyard with her").

There were a bunch of Commonwealth War Graves there, mostly for naval men, and as it was Sunday, it was mercifully quiet and free of tourists (But Herb, there are 199 steps! I counted them! Who the hell put those there? It's exhausting! Oh, I need to rest for a minute here...). I also met a lovely older lady who was "visiting her husband" and we spent five minutes looking for a water spigot so she could water her flowers.

I tried really hard to convince her to be well-rounded. I really did. Whitby has some great history. Captain Cook served his apprenticeship there before zipping off to the Antipodes to antagonize Aborigines, and there a long history of sea-stories and whaling off Whitby.

Oddly, its sister city is Anchorage, Alaska, and there is a giant bronze whalebone near the shore that was sent as a token of... camaraderie, I guess...

But, try as I might, she was deaf to the calls of culture. And, in the suddenly pouring raid (you have no idea how nice it was to be in a place that was at the climactic mercies of the sea again!), we found The House Where Bram Stoker Wrote Dracula:

(He also worked on it at the Royal Hotel around the corner when his landlady kicked him out so she could sweep and dust, but there's no plaque there). As the skies cleared, Bridget went down and strolled the beach, scanning for any sailorless ships, giant dogs or tall men in incongruous tuxedoes. Sadly, none were present, but I had a lovely paddle in a tidal eddie. A note: the North Sea is really cold:

And we saw another brilliant sunset at St. Mary's. We sat on a bench by Caedmon's Cross and hummed for him. Caedmon was a cow-herder who had a dream that God wanted him to spread The Word through song. So he presented himself to (St.) Hilda, the Abbess of Whitby. She agreed to give Caedmon a chance and had the monks read him a psalm to memorize (since Caedmon couldn't read), and in the morning he delivered the first hymn in the history of Christianity. He wrote over 600 of them, and never learned to read a word. He had the monks read him the passages every night so that he could teach people the beauty of the words.

So all in all, I really liked Whitby. It's a phenomenal city for walking, it has a fantastic bookstore--I rate bookstores on the comfiness of their chairs and the length of time I get to sit and read all the books in the store, and this one topped an hour-- and a superb literary reputation.

...Did I leave her there? On a bench, perhaps, in St. Mary's Cemetery? Hmmm.....

Rewind: Enter Freely and of Your Own Free Will...

So after some adventurous train travel that involved sitting in York, arguably the coldest train station in Great Britain, I arrived at Whitby in a fog so dense that I could only tell the sea by its sound. Perhaps not an auspicious beginning for a summer holiday, unless you're like me, in which case you get really excited, because it's all just so damn literarily accurate.

My hotel was The Leeway, run by arguably the two nicest people in Whitby, and possibly in Yorkshire. As it was cold and drizzly, I made some tea and hit the proverbial hay in order to be ready for morning.....

Which dawned just as cold and damp as the day before. But, if Mina could take it, so could I.

My first walk was from the B&B, a stone's throw to the East Crescent, where Stoker set Lucy and Mina's living quarters in Whitby, to the 199 steps leading up to St. Mary's Graveyard (where Lucy got nom-nomed)--the same walk my Mina made to save her friend. And let me tell you, Mina was no shrinking violet.

Just around the wall from the graveyard is Whitby Abbey, which has been there in some form since about the 12th century. I had to dodge around the school groups who were visiting, but just as I was entering the visitor's center, the sun began poking through the clouds.

There has been continual excavations going on around the site of the Abbey since the 1920's (when farmers were paid 6 pence for digging up ancient Roman artifacts by the local historic committee), and have uncovered a line of Roman graves that are estimated to be about 1200 years old:

And inside the visitor's center, there is are smaller pieces that have been uncovered. My personal favorite was the shoe leather that was discovered at a gravesite closer to the Abbey. They knew it was a religious because of the site, but apparently, there was some doubt as to whether it was a priest or a monk--before it was discovered that monks were traditionally buried facing east, while priests were buried facing west: that when, when judgement day came, they would rise and be able to face their flock. As this man was facing the east, he was a monk. Best of all, the imprint of his feet could still be seen in the leather. A fact which made me so happy I might have started doing a little dance in the exhibit hall.

The Abbey also has an audio tour that not only gives you the history of ruins, but also lets you hear some of the voices of the people who lived there. It's more of a children's thing (or appropriate for the less imaginative visitors), but there was a line in one of the sections that talked about the stained glass windows that were once in the main hall for visitors. They not only taught the stories of the Bible, but the near-miraculous colors that shimmered in the sun taught people how to wonder. As you can probably tell, I was really happy.

Down below the Abbey is the area known as Tate Hill sands. Or, to those of us in the know: the place where Dracula landed on the Demeter. I had to bide my time all day waiting for low tide and when there water finally rolled back to reveal the rocky shoreline, I scrambled down the sea walk as fast as my dignity would allow.

It's the perfect place for a vampire-arrival. The sand is black and the rocks are covered in gaping barnacles that curl around in the tide pools like spines of sea-monsters.

And above all, it stinks.

Literally, it's that low-tide stench that hits all seaports, but never gets old or familiar.

You can, however, find jet there, which is, essentially coal that is formed in seabeds. It is made into jewelry all over Whitby and is this gorgeous glossy black color and, oddest of all, is warm to the touch. While I was there, I saw two guys trying to get jet out of the rocks. Which, I'm sure is a noble enterprise, but I watching to grown men beating a rock with an ice pick was a bit of a mood-killer.

That night, I took a Dracula walking tour of Whitby. There were fourteen of us on the tour. Want to take a guess how many people on the tour had actually read the book?.....

Five. Including the tour guide.

The world is unjust. But the tour was great. Afterwards, the tourguide's publicist took two very friendly goth-tourists to do some photo-ops and I headed back up to the cemetery, since Whitby has some of the most heart-stoppingly beautiful sunsets I've ever seen and I wanted the best view.

What I didn't know was that the photo-op was in the same cemetery. All I knew, was that when I stood up from my bench, in St. Mary's Cemetery in the deepening twilight, I turned and saw a tall man dressed all in black standing beside one of the weathered graves and I nearly jumped out of my own skin.

Feeling rather sheepish, I took myself home and to bed, where a black moth slept on the head of my bed all night. Coincidence? I think not.