Ponden Hall on the Market

Now's the time to search the couch and long-unused trousers for spare cash and see if you can collect £950,000. Ponden Hall, home of the Heaton family whose library the Brontës are said to have visited and supposed model for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights is now for sale:

Ponden Hall, a Grade 2* listed house in West Yorkshire, high on the Pennine Way.

Ponden Hall is now for sale through Halifax estate agents Charnock Bates (01422 380100).

Click here for details.

Quoting from the Ponden Hall website:

Emily Brontë's association with the Heaton family at Ponden is well documented - one of the Heatons served as a churchwarden to her father Mr Brontë, and we know she used the library, reputedly 'the finest in West Yorkshire'.

A catalogue still exists, though the books have long been gone from the house, and studies have been conducted on what Emily had access to that might have informed the Gothic inventiveness of Wuthering Heights. Some books from the library were sold in the market place in Keighley in 1898; those unsold were used to wrap vegetables; no-one knows what became of the priceless Shakespeare First Folio. 

There has long been a tradition that Ponden Hall is identifiable with the Lintons' home Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights, although none of the sisters left evidence of such a link themselves. In part this is due to its situation, on the way up to the moors; in part to the fact there were so few larger houses in this area.

The house may well have seemed grand to the Brontës, and the tree-lined drive may have made it seem more of a 'great house' like Thrushcross Grange, but actually, the fairly humble Ponden Hall is far more identifiable with the house Wuthering Heights, and recently scholarly opinion tends to identify Ponden Hall with the home of Heathcliff for more details (see Wuthering Heights website).

The date plaque above the main entrance identifies the rebuilt house as dating from 1801 – also the date that begins the story in Wuthering Heights. And many have pointed out the similarity between the names Heaton and Hareton, though that may be pushing similarity too far.

There is another important link between Wuthering Heights and Ponden Hall. In an account by William Davies (published in 1896) after a visit he made to Haworth in 1858, he tells how, after meeting Patrick Brontë ("a dignified gentleman of the old school"), he was taken on a tour of the area:

"On leaving the house we were taken across the moors to visit a waterfall which was a favourite haunt of the sisters… We then went on to an old manorial farm called 'Heaton's of Ponden', which we were told was the original model of Wuthering Heights, which indeed corresponded in some measure to the description given in Emily Brontë's romance."

Readers and visitors must, of course, make up their own minds.

On the east gable end of the house, a tiny single-paned window is said to be the one Emily used in her novel, where Cathy's ghost, memorably, scratched furiously at the glass, trying to get in.

"I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!"

Finally, in the back garden are the withered remains of a now-dead pear tree, supposedly the gift of a lovesick teenage Heaton to an older, uninterested Emily.

Categories: Brontëana, Haworth, Wuthering Heights