Today is the feast day of St Hilda. Not heard of her? Well, she was around back in 657 AD, which was when she founded England’s first unisex monastery at Whitby, North Yorkshire. Sadly, there is little to be seen of the Abbey that she built: the Danes destroyed it, the Benedictines rebuilt it, Henry VIII dissolved it, the elements battered it and then finally the German fleet shelled it in the First World War. 
But it is not the Monastery and Abbey that St Hilda is most remembered for. Legend has it that she ended a plague of snakes in Eskdale by driving them all to the cliff edge, decapitating each one with a flick of her whip and turning them into stone as they fell over the edge. The ammonites still found in the rocks below are not just fossilised shellfish, but Hilda’s headless horrors, petrified for posterity…
But it is not the Monastery and Abbey that St Hilda is most remembered for. Legend has it that she ended a plague of snakes in Eskdale by driving them all to the cliff edge, decapitating each one with a flick of her whip and turning them into stone as they fell over the edge. The ammonites still found in the rocks below are not just fossilised shellfish, but Hilda’s headless horrors, petrified for posterity…
