by Selva. Published on 16 July 2007: Whitby, a seaside town in North Yorkshire, is home to Dracula's cave, gothic gulls, and a B&B establishment that charms its guests with a roaring toilet the size of a matchbox, and a suicidal room heater that is colder than CERN's cryogenic systems. To this town, we - I and my wife Ramya - were headed for a vacation. Read on or listen to the audio.
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."-By Order, Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The Moors
The sight of a Bed & Breakfast establishment sends me into a reverie these days: I acquired this rather pathetic habit of looking at large and well proportioned toilets lovingly after a recent vacation in a Yorkshire coastal town called Whitby. Introduction to Whitby came by the way of my sister and her husband who used to live and work here. Whitby lies to the north-east of London, a distance of about 250 miles. The town is at the mouth of river Esk that drains into the North Sea.
As we neared Whitby, we drove through the Moors National Park, a brazenly weird landscape; like the high altitude salt basins of Atacama Desert in the South American Andes, the Moors is a geological bastard child, abandoned by the sea a long time ago and sent upwards by earth's unsentimental processes. The higher Moors are made of sandstone and consequently are allergic to water. They would not give easy passage to water, making it almost impossible for most plants to survive. The water-resistant sandstone substrate coupled with high rainfall is a perfect setting for some spectacularly ugly plants to stake their claim. The moors are covered with heather, a survivor among shrubs that lives up to its scientific name of Calluna vulgaris.[Wikipedia informs us that the generic name Calluna is derived from a Greek word meaning 'to sweep', as the plant was used to make brooms, the specific name vulgaris is derived from a Latin word for 'common'. Indeed, a suitable name.] Seasonally, the plant turns purple, but is normally a shade of brown; if seen in isolation a brown heather may induce puking, but in the Moors it spreads out on a such vast scale with a backdrop of glacial valleys that instead of puking it evokes a primordial fascination in the minds of mammals like me. The Whitby Abbey was visible on the hill miles away, projecting its ruined remains into the sky like a rotting sequoia wagging its bony fingers in historic indignation at the remorseless dull sky. Melancholy made an appearence in my mind at the sight of this skeletal splendour. I imagined people in the Cathedral fleeing in fear as they were hacked to death by the Vikings many centuries ago.
