Whitby Abbey was a 7th-century Christian monastery that later became a Benedictine abbey. The abbey church was situated overlooking the North Sea on the East Cliff above Whitby in North Yorkshire. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula featured Count Dracula as a creature resembling a large dog which came ashore at the headland and ran up the 199 steps to the graveyard of St Mary's Church in the shadow of the Whitby Abbey ruins. The Church of Saint Mary is an Anglican parish church serving the town of