Train coming

The interesting and historical village of Haworth is about half-way up the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway line.  There is a footbridge over the railway line beside the station that provides a good vantage point, though you do get wreathed in smoke and steam when a train arrives!  On Gala Weekends like this one, the combination of steam trains and real-ale (served all day in the trains' buffet cars) guarantees a large and predominantly male audience.  Keen photographers can get line-side permits and it was amusing to see little groups gathered at all the best spots - orange high-vis vests, tripods and DSLRs with massive lenses seemed to be de rigeur.  There must have been many thousands of pounds worth of gear walking about the Worth Valley that day!

(Don't ask me why, but some of the locomotives seem to be hitched to the carriages backwards, as I think this one was.  I think they go up the line forwards and down it backwards, no doubt due to the lack of a turning circle at the top terminus.  I was worried that the driver wouldn't see where he was going... but then I remembered they can't anyway in a steam loco!)

Haworth

This is the main street in Haworth, still very olde-worlde and cobbled, although the village itself is far from being 'a museum'. It's a lively modern community, which cheerfully makes the most of the throngs of tourists who arrive at weekends. The steps on the right lead up to the church and the Parsonage behind. The pub (behind the phone box) is The Black Bull, famed as being one of the places Branwell Brontë frequented. Brother of the Brontë sisters, Branwell was an artist and writer. He held several different jobs but managed to be dismissed from all of them - one of them for having an affair with Mrs Robinson, his employer's wife. He died aged only 31, from drink and opium abuse.

I now have some more photos of Haworth and the surrounding moors on my other blog 'Seeking the Quiet Eye'.

Brontë Parsonage, Haworth

Haworth, sitting on the edge of the Pennine moors about eight miles west of Saltaire, is famous as the home of the Brontë sisters - Charlotte, Anne and Emily - all of whom wrote novels that have become classics. The family arrived in the village in 1820 when their father Patrick became the vicar, and they lived in the Parsonage behind the church. They had, in many ways, a very tragic life - their mother died a year later and the two oldest daughters died in 1825. The three remaining girls and their brother created a rich imaginary life, writing in tiny books. Later, to earn much-needed income, the girls trained as teachers and all three published novels under male pseudonyms. Their story is in itself the stuff of novels - there is a lot of information about them on the Haworth website.

The Parsonage is now a museum, furnished much as it would have been in the 1800s, although the gable wing on the right was added by Rev Brontë's successor. Even on a sunny summer's day it has an air of melancholy, overlooking the graveyard and the church where the Brontës are interred.

Brontë Falls

About halfway between Top Withens and Haworth the path passes through this little valley, past the Brontë Waterfall. Referred to by the Brontës themselves as 'the meeting of the waters', it is usually quite a tranquil spot. But when heavy rain has soaked the surrounding peat moorland, huge torrents can pour down the stream. One cloudburst swept away the old stone footbridge, which has now been replaced by a replica.

"We set off, not intending to go far; but though wild and cloudy it was fine in the morning; when we got about half-a-mile on the moors, Arthur suggested the idea of the waterfall; after the melted snow, he said it would be fine. I had often wished to see it in its winter power, so we walked on. It was fine indeed; a perfect torrent racing over the rocks, white and beautiful!"

Charlotte Brontë, 29 November, 1854

The surrounding moorland seems very wild and isolated these days but at one time there were many dwellings around the Falls and the moors were dotted with farmhouses and weavers' cottages. There are many 'erratics' - large boulders that litter the moors, brought down here from the Dales and the Lake District by glaciers in the Ice Age. These were crushed and burned in kilns to make lime to fertilise the acidic moorland. The moors were also mined for coal until the coming of the railway in 1867 meant it was cheaper to bring in coal from the bigger mines further south. So these moors were a hive of activity, with many people living and working in the area.

Top Withens

And here we are, at our destination right up high on the Pennine moors, amongst the heather and the sheep. The ruin called Top Withens is not much to look at, definitely seen better days - but it is a literary shrine and every year thousands of tourists make their way up here. (There are so many Japanese visitors that the signposts are in English and Japanese!) Malyss's grasp of English Literature (see her comment yesterday) is very sound - This old farmhouse is reputed to be the place that Emily Brontë had in mind when in 1847 she wrote her gothic novel, 'Wuthering Heights' , about the smouldering but doomed romance between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

There is a plaque on the wall which says 'This farmhouse has been associated with 'Wuthering Heights', the Earnshaw home in Emily Brontë's novel. The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described, but the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.' Certainly, Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne would have been familiar with the moors and the farmhouses around here; the village of Haworth, where they lived in the parsonage with their father and brother, is about four miles away in the valley.

In a moment of serendipity, I later found (in an exhibition in the Old Schoolhouse in Haworth) this old photo of the farm when it was inhabited - and discovered that I had unwittingly taken my photo from almost exactly the same spot.