Today you’ll head west towards Haworth, home of powerhouse literary family the Brontës, accompanied by the delightfully knowledgeable Andrew from tour company Expedition Yorkshire. As he guides you around Yorkshire’s literary landmarks, you’ll have a hard time thinking of a question that he can’t answer.
As you move west, you’ll notice the landscape changing (and if you don’t notice, don’t worry—Andrew will tell you exactly what to look out for). While the land just outside York is flat, it begins to get hillier as you move further away from the city, and the geology gets older. It becomes increasingly rugged and wild—less quaint, cosy England and more Wuthering Heights.
Start your day with a hearty Yorkshire breakfast and then it’s time to explore beyond York. If you drive ten minutes in any direction from The Grand, the city just melts away and you are suddenly in the countryside. Today you’ll head west towards Haworth, home of powerhouse literary family the Brontës, accompanied by the delightfully knowledgeable Andrew from tour company Expedition Yorkshire. As he guides you around Yorkshire’s literary landmarks, you’ll have a hard time thinking of a question that he can’t answer.
As you move west, you’ll notice the landscape changing (and if you don’t notice, don’t worry—Andrew will tell you exactly what to look out for). While the land just outside York is flat, it begins to get hillier as you move further away from the city, and the geology gets older. It becomes increasingly rugged and wild—less quaint, cosy England and more Wuthering Heights.
Weather doesn’t really matter in the Yorkshire Dales. If anything, it’s more atmospheric in a howling gale. A bit of lashing rain and screaming wind will put you in mind of Heathcliff and Cathy running to each other across the moors.
The town of Haworth takes about an hour and a half to reach by car, and once you get there you could while away an hour or two just wandering in and out of the various little shops and cafes. Definitely pop into Hawksby’s, a beautifully curated gallery of ceramics, jewellery and gifts made by independent artists.
But the star of the show is, of course, the Brontë Parsonage. A Grade I listed building, the parsonage is perched at the top of Haworth, directly above the church, where the Brontë patriarch Patrick was a minister, and its accompanying graveyard. The house is a site of pilgrimage for dedicated Brontë fans, of which there are many—when it first opened to the public in 1928, people queued all the way past the church for the chance to visit. It is run by the Brontë Society, which was founded in 1893 and is one of the oldest literary societies in the world.
Today, the parsonage is decorated to resemble as closely as possible how it would have looked when the Brontës themselves lived there. You can see the desk at which Patrick Brontë wrote his sermons, you can see the sofa on which Emily Brontë allegedly died of tuberculosis.
There is an air of death about the place: when you stand at the end of the parsonage’s front garden, you look directly onto the overcrowded graveyard. It is estimated that there are around 40,000 bodies buried there, a fact that will be more shocking when you see the size of it with your own eyes. Haworth was plagued by endless death, with the life expectancy being under 25 years. If you walk through the cemetery, you’ll see gravestones that list three, four, five children from the same family who all died before the age of five. Charlotte Brontë wrote once that when the wind blew a certain way, a horrible smell drifted from the graveyard right up to the parsonage windows.
Responsible for burying so many of his parishioners, Patrick Brontë wrote repeatedly to the government asking for someone to investigate. Finally in 1850 someone came, and found that the village’s drinking water was being contaminated by the overcrowded graveyard. The Brontë family were not spared from tragedy; Patrick Brontë ultimately outlived all his children.
Attached to the parsonage is a more recently built library which attracts scholars from across the world, as well as filmmakers and documentarians looking to create new interpretations of the Brontës’ lives. The space is full of curious books, including illustrated early editions of the Brontës’ works, and a guest book featuring Virginia Woolf’s signature when she visited in 1904 (although she signed with her maiden name, Virginia Stephens [sic]). Virtually anything connected to the Brontës ends up there, no matter how tenuous the link—they even have old Monty Python scripts because they once did a Wuthering Heights sketch. (Alice Gawthrop)
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