From its wild moorland to its timeless villages and vales, the scenic county of West Yorkshire teems with literary connections
WORDS CATHERINE JONES
Britain’s breathtaking scenery has inspired generations of artists, musicians and writers, from Wordsworth’s Lake District to Elgar’s beloved Malvern Hills. And it’s the wild, rugged beauty of West Yorkshire’s Pennine moorlands that is embedded in the compelling worlds created by the Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
When Cathy Earnshaw, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, says: “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary,” you can hear Emily Brontë’s own passion for the landscape that moved her.
The young Brontë siblings moved to Haworth in 1820 when their father, Patrick, was offered the living of the church of St Michael and All Angels. The parsonage, perched on the edge of the village with the moors beyond, was a far cry from their birthplace in Thornton, on the outskirts of Bradford, where the house now boasts a blue plaque.
The wide skies and expanse of heath and heather punctuated by stone walls and gnarled, wind-blown trees made a deep impression on the sisters – though along with capturing this visceral natural world in names such as Moor House and Wildfell Hall, their writing would embrace other, more homely, influences too.
Charlotte visited Oakwell Hall at Birstall, near Batley, in the 1830s, later using it as a model for Fieldhead in her novel Shirley. Now the Elizabethan manor house, surrounded by beautiful period gardens, is open to the public too.
In the years following Charlotte’s death, Haworth Parsonage itself became a place of pilgrimage, and in 1893 the Brontë Society was founded. The building opened as a museum in 1928 after it was bought by local industrialist Sir James Roberts and donated to the society. Today’s parsonage is furnished with genuine Brontë artefacts, and its library contains the world’s most extensive collection of their letters, manuscripts and early editions.
If Haworth remains the most famous, there are also a host of other picturesque Pennine villages and small market towns whose stone-built houses nestle invitingly among West Yorkshire’s folding hills and deep valleys.
The Pennine Way tracks through moorland west of the parsonage, and for the energetic there’s no better way of making the nine-mile journey to quirky Hebden Bridge, which has been attracting creative souls to the banks of the River Calder for 50 years.
The route passes Top Withens, a farmhouse believed to be th
