YORKSHIRE MOORS

Which?	Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
What?	Wild, windswept English landscape, as savage as Heathcliff himself

THE LANDSCAPE is brooding. A gunmetal sky hangs low over the barren, boundless moor, muting its palette to olive greens, tarnished golds, bruise purples. Its apparent emptiness belies secret treachery. This is nature as obstacle course: a hidden gauntlet of engulfing marshes, dangerous roots, deep hollows and dark swamps. The weather is wild too. A north wind whips over the rise by the old stone ruin, quivering the heather, distorting the lone fir tree, making it cower in fright. Or maybe it’s not wind at all that’s blowing but the spirits that haunt this moor, as tempestuous in death as they were in life …

When describing Wuthering Heights, painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it ‘a fiend of a book’ where ‘the action is laid in hell’. That ‘hell’ is the Yorkshire Moors, a swathe of rolling hills, dales and heather-cloaked heath in northern England, bleakly beautiful. But the moors are more than the setting for Emily Brontë’s only novel, a strange, savage tale of love and revenge. They are the actor-director – stealing scenes, shaping characters, influencing action, defining mood.

The moors of Wuthering Heights are far removed from the rest of the world. As well as being geographically isolated, they seem to exist outside of the rules of man. Few niceties are observed here; rather, life is lived at the whim of Mother Nature. At times the moors are nurturing and benign, full of gurgling streams, singing larks, humming bees and harebells. They offer star-crossed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff liberation from domestic violence and social constraints. However, more often the moors are brutal, a Hades howling with gales and ghosts.

It was a landscape Emily Brontë knew well. From 1820, the Brontë family (including Emily’s novelist sisters, Charlotte and Anne) lived in the parsonage at Haworth, a hard-working Pennine village producing worsted yarn and cloth. At the time, industrialisation was rebalancing England, from a mainly rural to a mostly urban society. Haworth – not so far from the powerhouses of Leeds and Manchester – was both: a crowded, polluted centre set high on the moors’ edge, open country just beyond. Emily Brontë would often escape into that hinterland, and it suffused her writing; Charlotte called her ‘a nursling of the moors’. Emily found inspiration in the rocks, crags and waterfalls, and understood nature as both a destructive and soothing force.

The novel’s two main locations, Wuthering Heights (the Earnshaw home) and Thrushcross Grange (home of the well-to-do Lintons), are just 6.5 kilometres (4 miles) apart but distinct in personality – like their fictional owners. The former sits high on the tops, chill and gloomy; the latter nestles in the valley, more civilised and refined.

Wuthering Heights is believed to be based on Top Withens, a long-abandoned 16th-century farmhouse a few miles southwest of Haworth. Its structure doesn’t match Emily’s creation, but its remote, windswept position fits the bill. Walk across the moor from Haworth parsonage – now the Brontë Museum – to reach the exposed stone ruin and it’s easy to think yourself into the pages of a Gothic romance.

Architecturally, a more likely candidate for Wuthering Heights is Ponden Hall, a manorial farmhouse near Haworth, which suits in size and style, if not situation. Actually Ponden is more usually cited as the model for Thrushcross Grange. Built largely in 1634, and extensively rebuilt in 1801 (the year in which the novel begins), Ponden did have a long, tree-lined drive like Thrushcross, but it lacks the grandeur and grounds that Emily describes. However, the Brontës visited regularly, and Emily would read in the extensive library.

Ponden Hall is currently a B&B. Now anyone can book the ‘Earnshaw Room’ to sleep in its 18th-century-style box bed and peep out of the tiny window in the thick stone wall. Though be warned that your dreams might meander the wind-raged moors, and you might hear the ghosts demanding to be let in …