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Yorkshire by Gordon Home
page 39 of 201 (19%)
any architectural attractions in the town. The charm of the place does
not lie so much in detail as in broad effects. The narrow streets have
no surprises in the way of carved-oak brackets or curious panelled
doorways, although narrow passages and steep flights of stone steps
abound. On the other hand, the old parts of the town, when seen from a
distance, are always presenting themselves in new apparel.

In the early morning the East Cliff generally appears as a pale grey
silhouette with a square projection representing the church, and a
fretted one the abbey.

But as the sun climbs upwards, colour and definition grow out of the
haze of smoke and shadows, and the roofs assume their ruddy tones. At
midday, when the sunlight pours down upon the medley of houses
clustered along the face of the cliff, the scene is brilliantly
coloured. The predominant note is the red of the chimneys and roofs and
stray patches of brickwork, but the walls that go down to the water's
edge are green below and full of rich browns above, and in many places
the sides of the cottages are coloured with an ochre wash, while above
them all the top of the cliff appears covered with grass. There is
scarcely a chimney in this old part of Whitby that does not contribute
to the mist of blue-grey smoke that slowly drifts up the face of the
cliff, and thus, when there is no bright sunshine, colour and details
are subdued in the haze.

In many towns whose antiquity and picturesqueness are more popular than
the attractions of Whitby, the railway deposits one in some
distressingly ugly modern excrescence, from which it may even be
necessary for a stranger to ask his way to the old-world features he
has come to see. But at Whitby the railway, without doing any harm to
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