Haworth 2

The town of Haworth has a thriving business at the heart of Yorkshire’s Brontë Country, near Keighley, focused on the Parsonage Museum where the women lived, daughters of the strict Reverend Patrick Brontë. Being unmarried females it was a lonely life. Charlotte travelled, going to London and also to work in Belgium twice (once with Emily) where she fell disastrously in love. The three were very close, but remained in Yorkshire and worked in solitude. 

Haworth still has its cobbled street, old dwellings and weavers’ lofts on its hillside, the church and the Black Bull Inn where their brother Branwell caroused. There is also the Worth Valley Railway from Keighley (Haworth Station was used as a location in the film The Railway Children) with regular services by vintage steam trains.

From Haworth you can walk out on to the moors that the sisters loved so much, and less than four miles’ walk away is Top Withens, the inspiration for Emily’s Wuthering Heights. In fact the well-marked Brontë Way footpath is 40 miles long, from Haworth to Wycoller Country Park. Wycoller’s ruined hall was the model for Ferndean Manor in Jane Eyre.

Near the historic market town of Ripon in North Yorkshire is Norton Conyers, a mid-14th century house, home to the Graham family since 1624 (limited opening, tel. +44 0 1765 640333). The story of a mad woman who, a century before Charlotte’s visit in 1839, had been confined to the attic, was used by her as the basis for Mr Rochester’s house, Thornfield Hall, in Jane Eyre. On the coast is the lively seaside resort of Scarborough, where Charlotte took her dying sister Anne on her last journey: she is buried at the town’s St. Mary’s Church. 

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