IT was, to coin a phrase and to move more or less seamlessly from other Past Lives about an epidemic, love in the time of cholera. A romantic exploration of Morocco early in our marriage ended in an anxious mele around the frontier post a few miles east of Whitby (sic) as foreigners and the wealthier natives of that exotic entrept fled the scourge advancing from the south.

Only those who could prove vaccination were being allowed across the border. We were turned away. Caravan in tow, we retreated a discreet distance, got out the portable typewriter, made the necessary addition to our smallpox certificates and then re-presented ourselves. It was done with a clear conscience (we had self-administered jabs earlier in our expedition - honest!) but like to think it was the sheer exuberance of my version of the 60s' Darlington medical officer of health's signature that carried the day.

So it was onwards into Ceuta, one of Spain's enclaves in North Africa, to board the Gibraltar ferry. Farewell, Whitby, and the winding, cholera-incubating snickleways of your casbah ... we might have said had we known what we know now.

This week, on the trail of an 18th-century engraver who sang for his supper at Danby Wiske, Northallerton, I discovered that the Tangier of 330 years ago had a Whitby district.

Indeed, had the British government of the day not been panicked into abandoning the colony, it is as likely as not that the Dorothy Perkins in Gibraltar would today be placating disappointed customers by saying: "We can get a size 12 over from our branch across the straits in Whitby by this afternoon" and that Tangier would be a mere district of the world's fourth namesake of the North Riding original.

For there's a Whitby in Cheshire, one in Ontario and another in New Zealand. I don't know if the name Whitby survives anywhere in Tangier but in the casbah there is still a York House, the fortified headquarters of the British governor.

Whitby, Tangier, was drawn and tinted in 1669 by Wenceslaus Hollar, a Prague-born artist. He influenced the Samuel Buck who, a couple of generations later, began 40 years of summer odysseys during which he drew most of the cities and large towns of England and Wales as well as hundreds of what we would today call "heritage sites".

He and his brother Nathaniel, who assisted him for 26 years, were often given bed and board by the local gentry in exchange for a Buck representation of the stately home or manor house in question. Thus did Henry Peirse, an ancestor of our celebrated Beresford-Peirse family, acquire a drawing of Lazenby Hall, one of his several Yorkshire seats.

Hollar (1607-77) was "discovered" in 1636 by Thomas Howard, Lord Arundel, when that patron of the arts - Van Dyck and Rubens both owed much to him - was in Germany at the head of a British mission which failed to negotiate an end to the Thirty Years War. Arundel brought Hollar to England where he spent most of the rest of his life, founding the English school of watercolour landscape artists.

Arundel's influence secured him an appointment as drawing master to the Prince of Wales, later Charles II. He fought with the defeated Royalists during the Civil War, fled to Antwerp for eight years and was arrested by the Cromwell regime on his premature return. Even after the Restoration he spent years eking out a meagre living until Charles II appointed him "King's screenographer or designer of prospects".

Not the snappiest of job titles ... but the word "prospects" is interesting. Hollar's pen and ink and watercolour of Whitby, Morocco, includes his own inscription: "Prospect of Whitby by Tangier where the Stone for the Mould is fetch'd and the Workmen". In east London there a renowned Thames-side pub which for centuries was the Devil's Tavern until it eventually took the name of a ship which habitually moored alongside it in Wapping Reach - the sail collier Prospect of Whitby.

Hollar's North Africa picture shows low, barren hills, what looks like a quarry and a few figures and a mule descending a track which leads towards a barracks-cum-fort; offshore are British warships.

Hollar had been sent to Morocco by Parliament and the British Museum has some of the many-coloured drawings he made of the extensive new British fortifications at Tangier. The territory had been acquired from the Portuguese as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry when she married Charles II in 1662 but it suffered constant attacks by the Moors.

By 1684 we had decided that the place was not worth the trouble and expense. The modern city has a Rue Samuel Pepys - a reminder that the diarist, as a senior Admiralty official was despatched there to organise the evacuation of the garrison - but the name Whitby presumably did not survive the abandonment.

BUT back to art, architecture and Danby Wiske. Samuel (1696-1779) and Nathaniel Buck would spend their winters making their own engravings of their summer harvest of drawings of such antiquities as Richmond Castle and nearby Easby Abbey; Samuel, working alone, produced a set of Yorkshire scenes 1711-25, and in 1728, Durham was among the first of many other counties covered.

So prints of their work abound. Today's owners of Lazenby Hall and its farm, Malcolm and Sue Rayfield, have one, a memento of the hospitality accorded to Samuel by their predecessors at the hall. From it they learned the reason for the half-size windows in their bedroom on the first floor.

They are evidence of the removal of an elaborate balustrade shown in the 1720 picture at roof level on the central section of the 17th-century house's west front, where there is now a pitched roof. The same picture, nicely tinted pink in Hollar's style, can be seen on the wall of a bar at the Wensleydale Heifer, West Witton.

Samuel Buck's 1722 drawing of Mount Grace Priory is a good example, says one expert, "of the topographical style, the description of interesting places without the intrusion of strong personal comment". Only once, it is believed, did he forsake his pen and ink for oil - to paint Ripon Cathedral.