Brontë country
A torrid romance: Hannah heads to
T’S THERE ON the horizon, almost as soon as you leave Haworth.
A little grey rectangle just beneath the brow of the most distant hill, with a splodge of sycamore-tree green beside it. A ruin by the name of Top Withins.
For the best part of two centuries, that distant little building has called literary pilgrims forth across the moors. Perhaps it would have a decent degree of magnetism anyway, given its distinctiveness. But then there’s the idea that it influenced one of the greatest novels in British history. Nowhere else in our countryside can landscape and literature merge so immersively as they do here, in the land of Wuthering Heights. Which brings us to Emily Brontë. Born July 30th 1818 – 200 years ago this summer – Emily Jane Brontë wrote only one novel, but it changed the literary landscape and redefined the physical landscape of the West Yorkshire Moors forever.
Fifth-born of the six children of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell; sister to Anne, Charlotte and brother Branwell. Precious little is known about her as a person but that she was painfully shy and didn’t like to venture far away from home – which is a startling revelation when you think of the wild-roaming natures of her characters, in particular Heathcliff and Catherine. But there’s no doubt that she walked these moors.
It’s there in the fabric of the words: a complete, intimate understanding of the moors in general and individual places in specific. She understood the beauty of the place and its cruelty. In a life where familial love was blighted by typhoid outbreaks, brutal school discipline and the addictions of her brother, it’s little wonder she found the bleak beauty of the moors to be a parallel for her own world.
She wrote Wuthering Heights in 1847, aged 29. As with her sisters, she was obliged to write under a masculine – or at least genderless – name. She was Ellis Bell, to Charlotte’s Currer and Anne’s Acton.
Charlotte neatly described Emily’s love of the moors in 1850: “There is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her.”
To see what Charlotte meant, CW has become just the latest of the Top Withins pilgrims, setting out from the Parsonage where Emily grew up – now a world-class museum devoted to the lives of this astonishing family. The Parsonage has been alive with special exhibitions lately, as the period 20162020 covers the bicentenaries of all the Brontë births: Charlotte (1816), Branwell (1817), Emily (1818) and Anne (1820).
The path winds out past the church where Emily and her siblings are buried (there’ll be time to pay our respects later), and out across Penistone Hill. This is an upland country park, a sort of bite-size version of the moors that sprawl beyond.
But cross the Oxenhope road and the world changes. Out here, on the track to Harbour Lodge, everything is suddenly big. Open. Wild. Yes, the hand of man is obvious – the upland is farmed, enclosed and pitted with reservoirs and quarries – but the bigness of the hills remains utterly intact.
And already, Top Withins is on the horizon. Tree and ruin, calling us on. There are a number of ways to reach it: you could go high over the tussocky mires of Dick Delf Hill and pick up the Pennine Way, dropping down on top of the ruins. But we’d rather approach it from below, as that’s how we imagine Mr Lockwood arriving at Wuthering Heights at the start of the story. The Heights should be heights, looming above you, with an air of malice.
So we round Harbour Hill and drop down to South Dean Beck, and from here, the ruins dominate our every upward step. Looking up, it’s hard not to imagine a light up there; Heathcliff staring out in search of Cathy or scowling at the approach of his new tenant. And here it is. Top Withins. Wuthering Heights. There are two things to say at this point. The first is that no-one seems to agree on how to spell it; you will find ‘ Withens’ written as often as ‘ Withins’ ( We’re not sure how they spell it in Japanese, but we’ve been following Japanese signposts all the way so far – Emily’s fame is truly global).
The second is that Top Withins looks nothing like Wuthering Heights as you imagine it from the book. It never did, even when it was complete. The fictional building is a large manor owned by a family with business interests, college educations, stableboys and servants. Top Withins, by contrast, was a meagre homestead where, in the 16th century, the Bentley family eked out a miserable living from subsistence farming on this harsh hillside. It decayed and decayed as the family divided the land between successive generations, the size of the smallholding splitting and dwindling every time ( hence the presence of two other Withinses lower down the hill, called Middle and Bottom, that have since vanished into the landscape). It was a story Emily would have known well.
But it’s the location that firmly, clearly, absolutely makes it Wuthering Heights. It’s no leap of imagination at all to imagine Emily standing here, adding imaginary stable blocks and outhouses to Top Withins; a gothic gable and heavy-lintel doorway. The Earnshaws: one of the most brutal and screwed-up families in literary history. Hindley the jealous, abusive drunkard. Catherine the wild child. Heathcliff the brooding, vengeful foundling. They could only live here, on the edge of a bleakly malicious sort of nowhere.
That said, today the heights are as warm and beautiful as they could possibly be. The view across the moors and back towards Haworth and Keighley is immense; it’s a surprise to discover just how much height we’ve gained since leaving the Parsonage.
The other surprise is that the sycamore, which has stared down at us since we left Haworth, is actually two sycamores, side by side. But they certainly wuther, as per Lockwood’s narration in the book: “Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff’s dwelling; ‘wuthering’ being a
significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.” We do love a provincial adjective on Country Walking.
From here, the path takes us over Delf Hill and down into Middle Moor Clough. Then we strike out across the hillside to the west in search of Ponden Kirk, inspiration for the fictional Penistone Crags which are roamed by Heathcliff and Cathy, and the ‘Fairy Cave’ that lies within them.
There’s a rare and spectacular fail by the Ordnance Survey here. On the map, ‘Ponden Kirk’ is clearly written on the eastern side of the clough, when in fact the rocky turret is actually tucked high up on the western side. Who knows how many walkers have wandered up and down the clough, looking up to the right for some sign of crag and cave, when in fact they’re way out of sight, the best part of a quarter-mile from where the map says they are. (The good news is, you can find it on our route in this issue, because we know where it really is.)
At the bottom of the clough is Ponden Hall, which is much more clearly Edgar Linton’s Thrushcross Grange than Top Withins is Wuthering Heights.
It nestles, comfortable and snug, away from the tumult and temper of the moor. A warm, civilised home, where everything is prim and proper.
Again, Emily knew it well. She spent a lot of time with the Heaton family, who held Ponden Hall while Emily and her family lived at Haworth. A sermon by Emily’s father Patrick describes his children taking refuge at Ponden Hall, having been caught on the moors in a storm. Rumour has it that an old pear tree at the back of the house was a gift from lovestruck teen Robert Heaton to a very much uninterested Emily. It all sounds curiously similar to Linton’s admiration of Catherine in the book.
Heading out onto the hills again, we pick up the Pennine Way for a while, then head down to three modern-day tributes to the local luminaries. The Brontë Falls, Brontë Chair and Brontë Bridge clearly didn’t have those names in the early 19th century; they’ve been rechristened in more recent times. But apparently the sisters loved this secluded hollow. Throughout their youth, the sisters created a series of borderline Tolkienesque fantasy sagas based in the lands of Angria and Gondal; it’s easy to imagine the falls as an idyll of Gondal. It’s also easy to spend a lot of time here.
And now we’re turning for Haworth, back across Penistone Hill and through the churchyard. To find the Brontë graves, we head into the church itself, where Haworth’s First Family have their own vault.
There are eight Brontës beneath your feet. In order of death they are: mum Maria; two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died at 18 and 11; Maria’s sister Elizabeth; then Branwell, Emily and Charlotte, and finally poor old dad Patrick, who outlived them all. Anne is buried in Scarborough.
The siblings all died lamentably young; Emily died in 1848 aged 30, just a year after Wuthering Heights was published. At the time, nobody even knew that Ellis Bell was a woman. Her real name didn’t appear on the cover until 1850.
It’s a sobering end to a walk that has been as much an emotional tempest as the book itself (which of course ends with a similar view of three gravestones; those of Catherine, Heathcliff and Edgar.)
But the joy that Emily gave the world; her delight in the wilderness on her doorstep; the immortality she has given to Haworth and its moors: these are enough to send us on our way with hope and gratitude in our hearts, rather than sadness.
Emily Brontë: enigma, contradiction, genius… and most definitely, walker.
“It’s little wonder Emily found the bleak beauty of the moors to be a parallel for her own world.”