Wuthering Heights: Tourist Destination

This week, A Canadian blogging pal, Rebecca of Rebecca’s Reading Room reflected on re-reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It made me think of a post which I wrote six years ago, in which I described a walk in Emily’s footsteps. Now it’s not really playing fair to re-post something I published before for the Lens-Artists Challenge: Tourist Attractions Near and Far. But I’m going to do it anyway. How many walking routes does anyone know in the UK where the way-marking is in any language other than English? Here, they’re in Japanese. This wild and often unforgiving part if England has become an unlikely tourist Mecca for devotees of Brontë’s story of the passionate and tumultuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

Wuthering Heights

28th July 2018

Haworth: a charming village on the top of a high and steep hill, in an area of high, bleak and steep hills; home to the Brontë sisters and the surrounding moorland countryside of Wuthering Heights.

Cottages near Haworth. Cosy now: possibly less picturesque back in the Brontë’s time.

Everyone knows that you can expect ‘weather’ when you come here,  whatever time of year you arrive.  As you stumble along the church path to leave the village, slashing rain tumbling from sullen hostile skies needles your skin, slicks your hair to your face and saturates your clothes.  As you set your face against the wild wind, your boots sink into the sodden peaty turf as you trudge onto the moor.  If you dare to glance up, you see unending moorland before you: bleak, barren and bare, with sheep huddled against the dry stone walls which march across the landscape.  This is Nature-in-the-Raw, and we expect no different.

I went there earlier this week.  None of the above applied.

We are in Week Five of a heatwave.  I doubt if either the Brontës or even Heathcliff himself had ever seen the like.   Brittle coir matting now carpets the brooding moorland fells: and several weeks early, the heather is almost in flower, rich and purple.  Yellowing grasses replace the dense green turf the sheep prefer, whispering and rustling in the light breeze.

Beyond Howarth, coir matting stands in for moorland turf.

There’s a little brook in the valley here.  Angry peaty water jostling officiously along its path has been replaced by still, clear shallow pools.

The brook by Brontë bridge.

The Brontë sisters would cheerfully have paused here to rest, reflect and write a little.  Then, like me, they would have slogged on, up the peat-and-stone pathway that leads upwards, ever upwards, towards Top Withens.

There’s Top Withens, up there. Beside that solitary tree.

Top Withens may have been the isolated upland farmhouse that Emily Brontë pictured Cathy Earnshaw and family living in when she wrote Wuthering Heights.  It’s a ruin now, the roof torn off in a violent thunderstorm in the 1890s.  Just as you’d expect.

It was the perfect picnic spot for me.  The moorland stretched before me, its hillsides rhythmically rising and falling.  The world was silent: not that silence in which there is no sound, but that of the living countryside: the low susuration of the swaying grasses; the humming of the wind in my ears; the occasional complaint of a bird sweeping overhead.  Beyond the moorland, greener fields lay, chopped centuries ago into rough rectangles by drystone walls.  Some held sheep, some cattle, others recently cut hay. The sun warmed my rocky seat, and I was perfectly content.

Except for the sky.  The day was sultry, sweaty, but freshened by a soft breeze.  I knew the sun might be chased away by gusty rain.  Ash-grey clouds swelled and receded, revealing granite tones behind: and beyond that, cornflower blue once more. It was a signal.  Haworth takes weather seriously.  Never be tempted to climb these uplands without a very capable waterproof in your kit.


 The moorland I saw this week was not the Brontë’s moorland.  It’s been a little sanitised.  There are helpful finger posts pointing the way at every junction, in English and … Japanese.  

Top Withens or Top Withins? Take your pick. I don’t know which the Japanese choose.

The pathways the sisters trod are no longer springy peat tracks, or sticky muddy gullies.  Instead, heavy slabs line the way, to prevent footfall damage to this fragile area from the hundreds of people who tramp these paths looking for the Real Brontë Experience.

My day was far too comfortable for that.  I was not returning to a draughty parsonage with self-destructive brother Branwell to worry about.  If you want to see the Brontë’s life through his eyes, read Robert Edric’s ‘Sanctuary’. You’ll be glad to get back to bustling tourist-destination Haworth for a nice cup of tea.

This post should qualify for a mention in Jo’s Monday Walk, I hope.

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Author: margaret21

I'm retired and live in North Yorkshire, where I walk , write, volunteer and travel as often as I can.

50 thoughts on “Wuthering Heights: Tourist Destination”

  1. Love it, Margaret! But what is that Japanese signage about? I should pay more attention to signs. I keep meaning to reread some of the classics. Missed that post of Rebecca’s so I shall go and take a look. Heatwave continuing? James had 28C yesterday!

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    1. Um, slightly further north we had 26.5. It’s very humid today. I’m going to alter the post so it links to Monday Walks. I had to dash out as I was about to do it.

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  5. Love it, Margaret. It is a beautiful walk and you write it so well . I felt I was there again. Some ten years ago I walked but never saw the Japanese sign! I don’t remember the slabs either, but surely they must have been there?

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    1. The signs didn’t look that weathered, so maybe they were fairly new. The slabs too. They showed few signs of being ‘lived in’ by mosses and things. So glad you know this walk too.

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    1. Oh don’t worry. I always have my trusty OS map with me. Usually two actually, ‘cos you can bet your life that my chosen route starts at the edge of one map and finishes at the edge of another.

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  8. I love your comments on the setting for the novel. I’ve never read Wuthering Heights, or seen the movie. Your descriptions and photographs of the topography provide background that would help me if I were to pick it up, but I way too many books on my reading list. I hope you get a break in the heat. We have cool breezes off the lake this morning and sunshine is in the forecast. Peace.

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  11. I for one am glad you reposted this as I didn’t see the original (before my blogging days, on WP at least!) Your text beautifully evokes this rare fine weather day on the moors 🙂 I visited Haworth decades ago before it had really been discovered as a tourist destination, although the Parsonage was already open as a museum. I think I’d be reluctant to go back as from what I’ve seen it is much busier and ‘sanitised’ – much like the laying of those new slabs!

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    1. Honestly, Sarah, it didn’t feel sanitised. It’s still wild and unforgiving countryside, and I think they’ve done the slabs (which aren’t at all omni-present – I saw very few) quite sensitively.

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  13. Oh, this is so beautifully written Margaret. Took me right back to me as a 15 year old walking this route on an English trip with school. Ah, those were the days.

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  14. Many, many thanks, Margaret for granting me the privilege and opportunity to explore the world of the Brontë sisters virtually with you. I believe that the connection between literature and physical settings is vital in enhancing the reading journey. What you have done in this brilliant post is truly a gift to me. I have experienced the setting that conjured up the gothic narrative of Wuthering Heights

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  15. P.S. I think reposting previous posts can provide opportunities to repurpose content, and remind followers of valuable information they may have missed or forgotten. As well, new bloggers may never have seen the original post. I am grateful that you alerted me to this post, which I had never seen before.!!

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  20. Love your descriptions and photos – that heatwave and dryness were quite something. I hope the moors survive such episodes and the influx of tourists. It is amazing that the Brontes captured imaginations in the apparently worldwide and enduring way that they have.

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    1. It is indeed. I think the moors will survive the tourists who tend to stick to just one well-known trail, which is therefore well managed. Not much dryness here this summer unlike for my daughter and family in Spain who’ve had very little rain of any kind all this year.

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