Haworth

A family and a landscape

Patrick Brontë became perpetual curate of Haworth in 1820 and moved his family into the parsonage at the top of the village. Within eighteen months his wife was dead. Within five years two of his six children had died too.

The four who survived to adulthood, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, grew up in that house with the moors beginning at the garden wall and the graveyard directly outside the window. Between them they produced Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, three novels that permanently altered English literature, and all three were published in 1847.

The parsonage is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, but the more revealing walk is the one the sisters took almost daily, out of the back gate and onto the moor.

The moor as character

Wuthering Heights is not set on the moors, it is made of them. The weather, the isolation, the exposure and the sheer indifference of the landscape are the engine of the book.

Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse on the moor above Haworth, is traditionally associated with the Earnshaw house in the novel. The Brontë Society is careful to note that the building itself bears no resemblance to the house Emily describes, but the setting is right, and it has drawn readers for well over a century.

The Brontë Waterfall, a modest fall in a small valley on the way there, was a favourite spot of the sisters. Charlotte wrote about visiting it.

The industrial village

It is easy to walk Haworth's cobbled Main Street and see only literary heritage, but the village the Brontës knew was an industrial one. The textile trade dominated the surrounding valleys, mills drew workers in from the countryside, and the living conditions were genuinely appalling.

A government report in the 1850s found Haworth's sanitation and life expectancy comparable to the worst districts of industrial London. The graveyard the parsonage overlooks holds thousands of burials. That context makes the Brontë story darker and more comprehensible.

What you will see

We walk the cobbled Main Street and the village, visit the church and churchyard and the parsonage exterior, then head out onto the moorland paths the sisters walked. We cover the family's history, the literary landscape, the industrial reality of the village, and the moorland ecology you are walking through.