Some of the Ramblers’ Association’s bitterest and most exhausting and yet most tediously miniature struggles have involved signposting. These footpath signs – planted next to hedgerows or stiles, by red telephone boxes or simply at the gates to fields – are not merely practical; they have symbolic weight. For when such signposts have been quietly removed, by farmers or anti-rambling landowners, as they so frequently have been, this has been the signal that battle has been joined. It is a sneaky semiotic trick that the landowners play: if there is no sign indicating a path, then the path therefore cannot exist. In huge numbers of cases, in every single county, ramblers have then had to carry the burden of proving that the path does exist; the restoration of the signpost is the unfurling of the victory banner.
Happily, in Haworth, Yorkshire, the authorities have gone to the rather mad opposite extreme. The wooden signposts are not merely plentiful; they are also carved in Japanese. For here we are in ‘Brontë Country’ and this part of the world has a particular cult appeal to visitors from Japan. What makes ‘Brontë Country’ unusual is that it seems specifically angled at walkers, as opposed to just coach-inhabiting snappers. We are being invited to sample a flavour of what Kate Bush winningly described in her 1978 hit ‘Wuthering Heights’ as ‘the wily, windy moor.’ And you can’t really help getting sucked into the spirit of all of it: after all, this particular chunk of landscape is merely the logical conclusion to a process that has been evolving in more subtle ways right the way across the country.
It is the opposite of the thrilling trespass on to unknown, untasted land. It is, instead, land being thrown open to as many people as possible, and marketed like any other commodity. From the wilds of Wales to the Cornish coastal path to the Pennine Way itself; from Ben Nevis to Snowdon, there is a growing element of Disneyfication creeping in to a number of areas; the sense that the land has been pre-packaged for ramblers, and projected with a pre-determined identity. If that sounds a little disapproving – perhaps even the protest of an authentic walker searching after authentic experience – then I should apologise. I do not disapprove in the slightest. For one finds in Haworth and on these moors something that is paradoxically every bit as healthy as a walk on virgin paths. Veteran ramblers may snort with disdain but there is sometimes virtue to be found in the most sugary of theme parks.
That tasteful theme starts not too far out of Leeds, on the vintage railway line that runs from Keighley to Haworth in the summer months. Here, steam engines toot, the tea shop till tinkles, and extravagantly moustached guides shout ‘all aboard!’ As the engine splutters under a bridge, an open window admits a dense cloud of tasty vapour into the carriage. In this non-smoking age, the very idea is met with horror by several passengers, who rush to close the windows as though an entire nest of wasps had got in. Just a few minutes later, you are at Haworth station, which has been lovingly titivated to remind you of every black and white film you have ever seen. So we walkers – and there are many of us on this train, admiring the frowsy old fittings – are thoroughly primed through this welter of imagery. It is not enough to walk in these parts, you must step into a larger narrative. Ideally you should, from the point of view of the local tourist board, buy into it. The village itself sits dourly aloof from its neighbouring town atop a steep hill, facing out over the Pennine moors. This faux village is a vortex of genteel tearooms and little museums with attractions along the lines of ‘The Very Desk At Which The Brontës Wrote!’; a forbidding church and quaint second hand book dealers; and a pub, The Black Bull, that proudly and rather tastelessly makes known the fact that it was here that Branwell Brontë drank (omitting the detail that his fatal alcohol dependency was fuelled here). Here is the very post office from which the Brontë sisters posted off their manuscripts to their London publishers. If Haworth did not have the Brontë connection, one wonders if that post office would have survived the closures programme.
We are not here for museums; we are here for the paths that lead out to great Brontë landmarks, such as the house that suggested Charlotte’s Thrushcross Grange and more importantly, Top Withens – the old ruin that is said to have inspired Emily’s Wuthering Heights itself. This is where those rather wonderful signposts come in. One can leave the village by several means but the path that leads out by the side of the church – through the ‘kissing gate’ – seems as good a one to follow as any. The churchyard seems to be filled with mad escaped hens; perhaps this is some Brontë novel detail that I have missed. After just a few minutes on a paved path pointing upwards, you are suddenly out in the open. For anyone who has a taste for the bounce of heathland, or the knee-deep struggle of peat, this walk will seem somehow a little deodorised. The path is perfectly ordered, neatly levelled and in some places paved. Great care has been taken with steps and stiles. There are some slopes, to be sure, but nothing that requires any huge effort. The point is that you are now out in ‘Brontë Country’. You are invited to imagine that you are seeing this world through the eyes of Heathcliff or Cathy or Jane Eyre or Rochester. Even in the summer months, you should be able to summon the sensation of icy exposure, the bitter knuckle-throbbing brutality of the cold and the wind. Even if you consciously resist, it is still difficult to avoid doing it: after all, the entire narrative of Wuthering Heights is set into motion by a walk. Heathcliff’s tenant Lockwood, having already once visited the Heights, claims to be spurred into a return visit by his own house being filled with the ‘infernal dust’ of a servant girl cleaning the fireplace.
I took my hat, and after a four miles walk, arrived at Heathcliff’s garden gate just in time to escape the first feathery flakes of a snow shower. On that bleak hill the earth was hard with a black frost, and the air made me shiver through every limb.
Lockwood has only intended his visit to be a brief one; the snow puts paid to that. And his notions of walking back home provoke Heathcliff’s heavy mockery:
I wonder you should select the thick of a snow-storm to ramble about in. Do you know that you run a risk of being lost in the marshes? People familiar with these moors often miss their roads on such evenings.
Obviously, for the summer daytripper, such bloodcurdling warnings are not necessary. And even in the most outlandish conditions, there would be precious little opportunity now for a walker to lose the road. In the far distance loom several remote hillside farmhouses, any one of which might serve as Top Withens. Yet despite the sunshine and the mild air, you still can’t help imagining Lockwood approaching such a bleak prospect; or indeed imagining a night spent in such a place, with the tempest howling across the moor, and the knocks at the casement window as spectral Cathy plaintively tries to get in.
Actually, I have judged the day for my walk nicely; that point just after mid-summer when the first pinky dots are showing on the heather and the whole moor is about to explode into purple. Unfortunately, thanks to scattered dung, there is also an orgy of horseflies, dancing and capering. Anyone who has ever been stung by a horsefly will know to be wary of them. Even a town-dweller like myself knows better than to attempt to provoke them. Thankfully, there are a great many other walkers here other than myself, so their attentions are diluted. And as we pick our way in the direction of the ‘Brontë Waterfall’ – just exactly how far will the local council take this Brontë theme? – there is an empty dilapidated cottage, the dark windows glowering reproachfully at those seeking to peer in. For dedicated ramblers as opposed to casual visitors, there is another, competing narrative in this landscape, not two miles off on Haworth Moor. It is a rather more recent narrative but – to walking enthusiasts – no less intense. Because access to a particular stretch of land not far from here has only been permitted for the last few years or so. Even as late as 1995, the Ramblers’ Association was compelled to hold a rally there – attended by the then shadow environment secretary, Frank Dobson, and by Ramblers’ president Janet Street-Porter – both there to demand that walkers be allowed to set foot on this turf.
The land was owned by Yorkshire Water. And in fact on the day of that Rally in the mid 1990s, it graciously permitted access to walkers. But it is an illustration of how, in the 1980s and the 1990s, the final great battle between ramblers and landowners reached a new peak of rancour. We shall return to these venomous disputes in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that the disparity between the use of permissible and non-permissible walking routes can be comically great. From the determinedly commercial Brontë paths – what tourist, having seen these moors, is not going to return to Haworth and ransack the gift shops? – to the unbranded swathes of moorland seemingly there for the purposes of harbouring great reservoirs alone. It’s not that the personal is political; it’s that the personal is now commercial. Every form of leisure activity is now a form of economic transaction. That goes for walking as much as anything else; from the money spent on train fares to the amount laid out for specialised anoraks and boots. So why then do we flinch from the more openly commercial side of walking? Many walkers do so not out of snobbery, but more to do with a sense of aesthetics. There are those, for instance, who argue that some beautiful rambling landscapes have been deformed by the demands of mass tourism.
There is the instance of Mount Cairngorm in the Highlands, with its mountaintop Ptarmigan restaurant (these rare birds can sometimes be spotted on this peak). There is also the extremely distinctive purple funicular railway that helpfully runs up the side of this mountain, delivering visitors efficiently to the lavishly stocked gift boutique in the Blofeld-style bunker at the top. At the time this funicular railway was built, about ten years ago, the protests were banshee shrill. The train was considered a desecration of the pure white and grey mountain, an indigo excrescence that would also disfigure much of the untainted landscape around.
Ranged against these were the practical facts: for about four months of the year, these trains would be bearing skiers, rather than hoisting them aloft on chairlifts, which were more vulnerable to the extremes of weather. No one would deny the town of Aviemore that fundamental wellspring of funding. And the remaining months? The trains would be carrying the walkers – for this was the way that the town would be paying for itself out of season. The tougher walkers, of course, would hoot at the idea of taking a ride on such a thing – and they are still free to hoot, since there is no bar to walking up the mountain from its base. In fact, there is a perfectly helpful path, carved right into the side of that pure, untainted granite.
The key point about this new railway was that it made it possible for less mobile walkers to enjoy the summit. Walkers, in fact, like my grandmother. She was always not merely keen, but almost compulsive about walking. Even in her nineties, her appetite for getting out into the country never diminished. Obviously, a 3,000-foot climb up to the peak of Mount Cairngorm would not really have been practical. The funicular railway, however, made such a trip to the top possible. Once up there, you can of course give the gift bazaar the slip and instead wander around outside, supping in those sumptuous views, gasping at the way the frozen wind snatches the oxygen straight from your lungs. My grandmother absolutely adored it, as I am sure countless thousands of other visitors have done in the years that it has been in operation. Added to this, the sheer scale of Scotland’s hills and moors means that such a contrivance on just one mountain is really not too much of a loss to the more purist walkers.
There have been similar controversies surrounding Mount Snowdon in North Wales. First concerning the little railway that gamely chuffs up the hill, and then about the café-restaurant at its summit. The railway has been there for over 100 years, a thing of wonder in its own modest right, so any initial controversy has rather died down a little there. The café is a different matter; its first incarnation appeared some sixty years ago. Then the unlovely concrete structure began to disintegrate under the force of so much wild weather. The Prince of Wales – normally so exquisitely wrong about anything architectural – eventually declared it ‘the highest slum in Britain.’ Just several years ago, the café was rebuilt, this time in rather dignified and austere granite. Now the train had somewhere a little swankier to deposit its passengers. When it first opened, it was not recommended to delicate bon viveurs; among the menu choices was Knorr’s Cup-a-Soup – having said that, there are those for whom, upon reaching the summit of such a mountain, the very idea of this instant steaming soup would be absolutely wonderful. In a rather wider sense though, the wail has continually gone up about the mountain’s very integrity having been snatched away from it. But there is another way of approaching this: whatever integrity Snowdon had was pretty much starting to crumble as soon as the eighteenth-century walker and chronicler Reverend Gilpin set eyes upon it and added it to the growing list of picturesque treasures to be sought out by visitors from all over. Whether a cafeteria or an unadorned summit which is still none the less milling with brightly clothed walkers, it’s difficult to see the difference if you are talking about distractions.
Over in Derbyshire, many were concerned about the recent paving operation that took place over the opening stages of the Pennine Way. For this, in its own way, seems every bit as blatant as a funicular railway. You walk with almost absurd ease and speed over vast smooth slabs, glancing at the mulchy peat on either side of this supremely helpful walkway. There are now two issues here: one, again, is the question of opening up a difficult – though hugely popular – piece of land to as many walkers as possible, at whatever stages of ability. The second is the preservation of the land itself. The paving has been necessary not just for access, but also to avoid further erosion of the peat. With so many thousands of walkers trailing along this route, there was a real possibility of the hills being worn away into the ground. So with the paving, you lose authenticity. Without it, however, you are in danger of losing the path altogether, authentic or not.
In Haworth, though, authenticity occasionally comes off the rails completely; for instance, you can’t help frowning a little at such contrivances as the ‘Brontë Bridge’, a modest little stone effort crossing a mere gurgle of a stream deep in a little valley. Even if the spot seems to be popular with families and picnics on a refreshing summer’s day such as this, it seems somehow a slice of cheese too far. It is only when one starts clambering up the other side of this valley that the old ‘Wuthering’ sense returns; for just a mile away from here is the wreck of Top Withens. For the walker, then, there is this dilemma: you become peeved if some Brontë landmarks seem insufficiently austere, then doubly peeved if you are coshed into seeing this area through that one prism alone. The solution is to take a deep breath and simply enjoy it for what it is: an exhilarating prospect of deep green, with the immanence of rich heathery purple. The Brontë connection might be what brings you here, but it could have been worse. They might have lived in Croydon.
The other slight difficulty for this part of the world – in the eyes of a purist rambler at least – is the way that this once wild, rugged county has been so ruthlessly domesticated by competing works of popular fiction and memoir, and by television. Wuthering Heights at least painted this area in Gothic brush-strokes of wild freezing tempests. But in the twentieth century, when the country vet James Herriot began publishing his wry diaries, the Yorkshire moors started to take on what looked like an element of caricature. Like the people, the land was perceived as having the qualities of ‘gruffness’, a certain sort of ‘no-nonsense’ feel. When the 1970s BBC TV series All Creatures Great and Small, based on Herriot’s books, came along, the harsher edges of this landscape were smoothed and moulded into a sort of souvenir teapot heritage vision. Admittedly, these good-hearted memoirs and fables were set a little further north in the county. But the Yorkshire image was all of a piece. Now the moors and the dales came to mean something quite different: vintage cars, fairisle sweaters, bathos-laden farmers with obstinate cows, hearty open spaces. The glowering menace summoned by Emily Brontë became a Sunday evening property advertisement.
The serious, hardcore walker will always scoff at such examples. None the less, it cannot be denied that these popular books and television shows have inspired vast numbers of people to leave their cars and explore the Dales. Who can really argue with their inspiration for doing so? Whether they admit it or not, even the most hardcore walkers pick their cues from art and literature – their defence will be that the art in question will be slightly more highbrow than TV sitcoms. To an extent, art still has the power to claim ownership of certain vistas and views. We have only to point to Constable: how many times has ‘The Haywain’ been used not only as an example of landscape art, but also as a template to measure the same area against today? Vast numbers of walkers in Suffolk eager to see that exact spot cannot deny that they are pulled in by a perfectly reasonable curiosity. Moreover, there is something to be said for artistic and literary connections opening up areas of Britain that might otherwise be withering economically. An example in the north of the country is that of the Borders area, which follows the course of the River Tweed. There is a new, relatively long-distance path, called the Sir Walter Scott Way. Many of his novels were either set in, or inspired by, this region, and the trail itself features many Scott-themed souvenir opportunities – houses lived in, taverns visited, Woollen Mills selling his tartan.
Meanwhile, the Suffolk coast – and the genteel seaside towns of Southwold and Aldeburgh – have benefited enormously from the dual draw of Benjamin Britten and the annual Aldeburgh music festival. This is the upper-middle class walking equivalent of Last of the Summer Wine Yorkshire expeditions. Here we have a landscape – both the shingly beaches, and the flat, gorsey heathlands and boggy marshes that stretch inland – that seems calculated to appeal to those sorts of walkers who either have their own weekend places, or who rent properties off the Landmark Trust. The Disney flavour is still there, but because of the rarefied class aspect, it somehow seems just a little less vulgar, a little less ‘mass appeal’. The totemic walking figure of this class is the late W. G. Sebald, whose exquisite and ghostly prose flitted through this region in The Rings of Saturn. His account of one such walk from Southwold to Dunwich is a powerful evocation of eerie alienation – a cross between Britten and M. R. James. Having done the same walk – about three miles, if that – I’m pleased to say that my own impressions were a little more cheerful, not least because of the sharp clear light on that particular day. Even the tricky-to-negotiate banks of shingle, over which you have to walk at a constant cambered angle, could not detract from the mood; every footstep sounded like the crunching of crisps, while above, the marsh birds circled and sang their idiosyncratic rising songs.
Back up on the highlands of ‘Brontë Country’, we can see that these areas, no matter how they are labelled, attract subtly different types of walkers, and that Brontë Country is at the more determinedly populist end of the scale. But places like Haworth illustrate the terrific importance of the outdoors, and of walking, to the modern rural economy. In the last few decades, the notion of leisure in the country has been led firmly by ramblers. What are the protests of water boards now when walkers can keep entire villages and communities afloat?
It’s time to weave back, past happy hordes of various ramblers – some in huge family groups – back down the slopes to Haworth to get in a pot of tea before the train home. Brontë Country has thrown up an interesting paradox for the rambling movement generally. The more the land has been brilliantly opened up, the more the land has been carefully – even chummily – signposted. But the rambler, by tradition, chafes at the very notion of being instructed which direction to head in. Instead, he or she prefers either to rely on finely detailed maps, or to vault over a stile and extemporise his explorations. The very notion of ‘Brontë Country’ – or indeed ‘Sir Walter Scott Country’, or ‘Jane Austen Country’ in Hampshire – wraps all of these beautiful paths up in quite another form of ownership: an ownership of imagination. The walker may wander about with an unprecedented amount of freedom, but the price is that quite a few of these territories now come with tags and labels hanging off them. As a result, the walker’s own imagination and thought processes as they wander up and down can potentially be quite dramatically impeded. There are two options: either shake the head firmly, increase the pace, draw deep breaths into the lungs and ignore those footpath signs. Or you might simply abandon your natural snobbery about such things, and revel in it. After all, a good blustery Wuthering walk is hardly going to detract from your enjoyment of the Brontë sisters’ works. It is altogether more likely to deepen your reading. So what the walker sacrifices in terms of freshness of impressions, the reader gains by being able to see a landscape through the eyes of such authors.
As a postscript that should make most Brontë fans feel rather better about any sense of commercialisation, I nipped into the Haworth tourist office to see if I could pick up leaflets to do with other local walks. As I did so, I saw a family standing at the information desk. The father was asking: ‘Can you tell us where it is they film Emmerdale? We want to visit Emmerdale.’ The speed – and the sheer detail – of the information officer’s answer suggested that he had been asked this same question concerning the venerable ITV soap opera a great many times before. You might even be interested to learn that Emmerdale is now filmed on a closed set to which there is no access; but the original village that the serial used as a location is still very much there, and open, and nearby. Where? I forget. Ask the information officer yourselves. And take heart: there are worse reasons to be drawn to a footpath than the footsteps of literature’s greatest lovers. You might instead be drawn by a desire to be close to the shade of Annie Sugden.