The Brontës in the Wild Yorkshire Moors

The scenery around West Yorkshire's Haworth is thick with places associated with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Emily and Charlotte Brontë (their respective authors) lived in Haworth's Parsonage, along with their sister Anne (also a talented and popular Victorian novelist), their father Patrick (a poet as well as village vicar), and their brother Branwell (a portraitist and drunkard). Tourists flock to Haworth for its Brontë associations, for its picturesque charm, and for the wild beauty of the West Yorkshire moors.

Haworth (the ha- can be pronounced either as the ho- in how or the ha- in hat) is a showpiece, on a level with any place in England dedicated to tourism. Its gritstone-paved Main Street, pedestrianized during the tourist season, climbs steeply out of a gorge at a wheeze-inducing 12% gradient for the length of three football fields. It is lined along its entire length with gray stone buildings two and three stories in height, nearly all of which the Brontës would have been familiar with. Today they are mainly occupied by shops, restaurants, and pubs, including the Black Bull where brother Branwell would drink daily. When you reach the top of the lane, the view down along it is of wild moors tightly contained by prim stone buildings. It's enough to fool you into thinking you've reached the ultimate English village.

You haven't; Haworth isn't really anything like the type of traditional rural village that supported surrounding farms. When Patrick Brontë acquired the living at Haworth and moved his family there in 1820 it was an industrial town of 4,600 supporting the Yorkshire worsted manufacturers, and in the 41 years of Patrick's tenure it did nothing but grow. Look at the upper stories of those buildings, flat and filled with windows; these had been built to house weavers and their families. The men would work looms in the upper floor, illuminated by those wide windows, while their womenfolk and children would walk down the hill to their factory jobs in the mills already lining Bridgehouse Beck at the gorge bottom. Even by 1820, however, cottage weaving was a dying trade, and as the years went by families would become increasingly dependent on wage work at the factories. The town that Patrick served was new, raw, and dirty. Rotting garbage heaps lined Main Street, and raw sewage ran down its center. An 1850 public health report cited overcrowding, lack of privies (only one for every four or five families), and inadequate water polluted by the town's overcrowded graveyard — more than thirteen hundred burials in ten years. Think on that: a quarter of the population dies every ten years, and yet the population grows. The Brontës were witnesses to the worst of the Industrial Revolution.

The Brontës were the finest family in this rough working-class town. Their parsonage still sits at the top of the town, beside the church and its formerly noxious graveyard and bordering on the open moors. Today it is softened by a little forest that has grown up in the church yard, but of course in the Brontës' day there was too much grave-digging to allow trees to grow, and contemporary drawings show the church and parsonage bare and exposed from Main Street. The house today is carefully preserved as the Brontë Parsonage Museum and remains as it was in the Brontës' time, attractive and well-proportioned but not over-large (with a gable wing added in 1878, well after Patrick's time). The museum now displays the original 1778 home much as the Brontës would have known it, each of its eight rooms decorated in period with many family artifacts. One of Charlotte's friends, Ellen Nussey, later remembered it as "always beautifully clean ... [but] scant and bare ... mind and thought, I almost said elegance but certainly refinement, diffused themselves over all, and made nothing really wanting." The gable wing holds additional exhibits, as does a modern extension to the rear.

Haworth itself plays little role in the Brontë sisters' novels. While Patrick was genuinely concerned about his poverty-stricken flock and worked hard for their physical as well as their spiritual well-being, the mores of the time would not have his daughters mixing socially with them. Only one of the Brontë sisters' seven novels deals directly with factory workers, Charlotte's Shirley, and while that book treats the working poor sympathetically it is told from the point of view of the factory owner and his family. In it Charlotte dwells on the ravages of the Luddites, who destroyed labor-saving machines and even whole factories. The Luddites and their successors the Chartists, it may be noted, also targeted vicars who they suspected of sympathizing with factory owners, and for this reason Patrick invariably slept with a loaded pistol by his bedside. As its charge would go bad if left neglected, the vicar of Haworth would fire it out his bedroom window upon rising, to reload it fresh in the evening. Such things make an impression on a young girl.

Instead of looking towards their own town the sisters looked outward, towards the moors. They took long walks in these wild, wind-blown spaces, with Emily being particularly enamored of the moorland scenery. One favorite walk, now followed by a portion of the long distance path The Brontë Way, led them two miles to a lovely little waterfall, now known as the Brontë Waterfalls, that stair-steps on square gritstone rocks down the moor; it was here that Charlotte, walking in the rain with her new husband in January 1855, caught the chill which led to her death three months later at age 39. Another favorite walk took them three and a half miles to the top of the moor, where the ruins of an abandoned stone farmhouse (still there) evoked the wild remoteness that Emily would transfer to the farmstead Wuthering Heights.

One of their longer rambles took them eight miles to the isolated little village of Wycoller, then as now an enchanting spot. Wycoller is a sweet little English village of thatch and half-timber and old brick sitting at the wooded bottom of a steep-sided valley, a spot that would be more at home in the sunny south of England than the cold moors of industrial Lancashire (for a shire boundary runs across these moors). Yet here it is, surrounded by a wall of wind-blasted mountains, cut off from the towns of East Lancs, as confined and remote as an Appalachian cove. At its center sits the ruins of Wycoller Hall, a 16th century stone manor house sitting in the woods by the rocks and rapids of Wycoller Beck. Now the center of a fine country park, it is also noted for its three medieval (and older) stone bridges, one for pack horses and two "clapper bridges" made of great flat stones big enough to span the little creek. The manor's barn has been rebuilt as a museum, and there's a gift shop and tea room in one of the village houses. Wycoller is also along the Brontë Way, and an industrious walker will pass the Brontë Waterfalls on the eight mile walk from Haworth.

Wycoller Hall is associated with Ferndean Manor in Charlotte's Jane Eyre, and would have been intact (although abandoned and already crumbling) in the Brontës' day. It evokes, however, Emily's Wuthering Heights rather more closely, resembling the genteel Thrushcross Grange in its situation — as does all of Wycoller, a gentle spot cut off from the outside world, brooded over by high black-stone farmsteads atop the moors. It is easy to imagine Emily's sharp mind penetrating beyond the romance of the crumbling manor in its ancient surroundings, to wonder what kind of passion and brutality could stay hidden in such a spot, and to invoke events that would bring such a lovely place to ruins. Wuthering Heights takes place six decades before its writing and has a time line that corresponds to the abandonment of Wycoller Hall.

Haworth has other literary associations besides the Brontës. Fans of The Railway Children flock here as well — not for E. Nesbit's excellent 1906 children's novel but for the 1970 movie based on it, one of the most beloved motion pictures in Britain. While Nesbit's novel of children having adventures along a railroad takes place in the Yorkshire Dales twenty miles away, the producers of the movie needed a heritage railway, and the one that passes by Haworth was the only one in Britain that, in 1969, had a tunnel. Today the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway still runs steam locomotives along the five mile branch line from Oxenthorpe, a mile south of Haworth, to the main line at Keighley. In between it stops four times at stations restored to Edwardian conditions at Haworth (where there's a gift shop), Oakworth (where The Railway Children was shot), Damens (said to be the smallest working station in Britain), and Ingrow (home to the Museum of Rail Travel). You can board at any station.

And then there's Martha Grimes, the best-selling author of 22 mystery novels named after pubs — including 1989's The Old Silent, named for a moor-side gastro-pub less than two miles west of Haworth. This fine old stone inn dates back to the 17th century, with its unusual name first being mentioned in a 1908 novel by Halliwell Sutcliffe. Tradition claims the pub's name derives from Bonnie Prince Charlie having hidden there on his retreat from Derbyshire, conflating this ordered withdrawal with his flight after Culloden, and with his great-grandfather's (Charles I) flight from parliamentary forces a century earlier. Whatever the source of its name, it's the perfect image of a moor inn, with good food, good beer, and good views of countryside made famous by the Brontës.