Brontë Country: Why You Should Visit Now – Beyond the Film

More than thirty years later, on a wet and foggy January day, I climb the steep cobbles of Haworth, the little market town near Bradford in West Yorkshire that formed the Brontë sisters’ imaginations. One of Emily’s great achievements is to have forever transformed the grotty weather here. Conditions that elsewhere may be deemed a bit drab, if not depressing, feel the ideal romantic backdrop.

If you travelled to Byron’s Greece or Wordsworth’s Lake District only to find — in Emily’s words — “pure bracing ventilation” and air that made you “shiver through every limb”, you would be disappointed. Here, the bleak wind and deep-grey rain only add to the general Wutheringness. So too do the dire warnings of the lady with the (extremely convenient) shop selling hats, scarves and gloves at the top of the village. When we tell her we are preparing to head out on to the moor, she mutters, “When it comes in, you’re done for” — “it” meaning the fog, presumably, but perhaps she’d seen an early preview of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation.

Pack your thermals

She advises my husband and me to stay in with a pot of tea — and maybe we would have done, with more time to spare. But no, we have sturdy footwear and now two pairs of thermal gloves and nothing is going to keep us from walking the five miles to Top Withens, the small ruined farmhouse that inspired the location of Wuthering Heights itself. (The actual building that provided Emily with her description was supposedly a castellated manor, High Sunderland Hall, near Halifax, which was demolished in 1951.)

In January there’s a low, twiggy carpet of heather forming layers of russet brown with dying ferns. Near the bottom of the valley the two hills mesh into one another with a craggy river bed. Even when much of the vegetation is dead or dormant, it’s still heart-stoppingly beautiful. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, two other doomed lovers, wrote brilliant poems about their own high-altitude trudge to what Hughes calls a “sodden, raw-stone cramp of refuge”. Plath describes how “the wind/ Pours by like destiny, bending/Everything in one direction”. Hughes captures Plath’s thrill as the wreck comes into view: “It was all/Novel and exhilarating to you./The book becoming a map. Wuthering Heights/Withering into perspective.”

Top Withens farmhouse, which inspired Wuthering Heights

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The fog does not come in — in fact, the weather brightens a little — but the threat of it was enough to keep almost everyone away from the remote outpost. You can’t pretend you’re not on an extremely well-trodden path, rather than the springy peat tracks the sisters would have navigated, but my husband and I are completely alone in this “perfect misanthropist’s heaven”, as the novel’s narrator, Lockwood, calls it. A pair of buzzards circle overhead. We name the birds of prey Cathy and Heathcliff. We eat our sandwiches and descend via the village of Stanbury, where we find Ponden Hall (ponden-hall.co.uk). This is the small-windowed, 17th-century farmhouse that is widely supposed to be the real-life Thrushcross Grange, home of the elegant Linton family. It’s now a cosy bed and breakfast (a Sawday’s property) with four-poster beds.

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Walk in the characters’ footsteps

I manage to meet up with my old English teacher and his wife, who have since relocated to the Yorkshire Dales. He has fond recollections of teaching the novel. We discuss how its two primary houses represent two opposing, almost irreconcilable states of mind: passion and storm vs calm and civilisation. Are you more Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange? We all, perhaps, have elements of the former we’re trying to suppress, we conclude.

You can feel these distinctions viscerally when you walk between the properties. It’s a journey the characters are constantly making, often quite perilously as they attempt to flee some form of incarceration. The way the landscape draws out these urges is what excites me still about the story — even if I now see Heathcliff’s violent behaviour as essentially eroticised abuse.

Haworth is a must-visit for any Brontë fan

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It isn’t my first time to Brontëland, I should stress. My mum was the kind of parent who took us on holiday to places such as Bradford, and I was happy to be reunited with the gift shop at Haworth Parsonage, where 12-year-old me bought some Brontë notepaper and a small book of Emily’s poetry (entry £13; bronte.org.uk). The town is much less tackily twee than I remembered from the 1990s, when its shops would wear their associations with more brass. I seem to remember a Branwell’s Pharmacy named after the sisters’ addict brother, who procured his laudanum there. The only evidence now is an apothecary shop renamed The Cabinet of Curiosities. There’s also an excellent restaurant, The Hawthorn, which serves one of Yorkshire’s finest roasts (£21; thehawthornhaworth.co.uk).

By the fire with 4,000 books

We stay an hour’s drive east in North Yorkshire, near Ripon, in a place called Heron’s Haunt, from Canopy & Stars, which is a freshly constructed wooden cabin on the grounds of Markington Hall. What caught my eye was the wall containing 4,000 books and, also, the profusion of places to read them: a copper bathtub by the woodburning stove; the log-fired hot tub, which really comes into its own after a ten-mile tramp. It’s all been stunningly arranged — there’s even a vinyl player with Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside and we can resist singing about being “too hot, too greedy”. As it turns out, there’s a subtle Brontë connection at the property. For the past 300 years the hall has belonged to the family of William Wilberforce, who, in addition to helping to abolish slavery, paid to put Patrick Brontë, Emily’s father, through Cambridge University.

Heron’s Haunt, a wooden cabin with plenty of books

We discover another Brontë location nearby too: Norton Conyers House (£5; historichouses.org), an eccentrically gabled pink manor house just a few miles outside Ripon. It was while staying here in 1839 that Emily’s older sister, Charlotte, heard the story of a madwoman who had lived in the attic the previous century — which gave her the idea for Bertha in Jane Eyre. It’s thought to be the model for Thornfield Hall in the novel, a fact more or less confirmed by the discovery in 2004 of a staircase connecting the first floor to the attic.

Up hill and down dale

If you’re really intent on following the movie connections, however, you’ll want to head north to the valleys of Swaledale and Arkengarthdale. Low Row, plus the abandoned Old Gang Smelting Mills and the wonderfully named Surrender Bridge served as key locations in Fennell’s version. It’s worth walking there from Reeth, a beautifully situated village in Upper Swaledale, with a sloping green and stirring views. On a day of lovely blue skies, we see hares darting among the dry-stone walls, the pale sun glistening off the river Swale at the foot of the valley.

The remains of Old Gang Smelting Mill in the Yorkshire Dales

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After a round trip, we head for good Yorkshire ales and pies at The Punch Bowl Inn (mains from £17.90; pbinn.co.uk) in Low Row, where the movie crew stayed for a couple of weeks while filming. Margot Robbie and the film’s other stars were put up at the Simonstone Hall hotel — though she did pop in for refreshments, according to the lad manning the bar. He reports that the film-makers chose the Dales over the moors because they thought they would find more raw, unforgiving weather. But when they came to film, it was sunny and they needed to employ fog machines. I am reminded of Emily Brontë’s description in the novel of “so many queer goings on”. Yorkshire will always stubbornly do its own thing.
Johanna Thomas-Corr was a guest of Canopy & Stars, which has one night’s self-catering for two from £229 at Heron’s Haunt; two-night minimum stay (canopyandstars.co.uk)