Haworth

Haworth has been on our visit-list for months and finally on Easter weekend we decided to take the one and a half hour drive North. Once in Haworth, we began with a visit to the Parsonage and on a bank holiday weekend we were far from its only visitors.

Perhaps due to the number of people walking its halls, the Parsonage seemed very small, barely large enough to accommodate three young women, their eccentric brother and father, and their servants. Worthy of note are: the sofa in the dining room on which Emily Bronte died in 1848 at the age of 30; the German text propped up in the kitchen from which Emily reputedly studied; the storeroom Charlotte converted for her future husband, Reverend Arthur Bell Nicolls, which, we understand, she excitedly decorated with matching wallpaper and curtains; the exhibit dedicated to Charlotte's marriage with its stunning collection of letters, garments and other personal belongings; and, perhaps most interesting of all, Branwell's portrait paintings in his old studio.

The village of Haworth, once dominated by an overcrowded churchyard and so dirty and diseased that half of the children died before the age of six, is today populated by numerous tea rooms, souvenir and antiquarian bookshops, restaurants, pubs and hotels (including Branwell's old haunt, the Black Bull). Its High Street makes for an interesting if rather steep walk and there are many public footpaths leading out of the village, inviting ramblers to visit, among other places, the Bronte Stone Chair in which the sisters reputedly took turns to sit and write stories, as well as Ponden Hall ("Thrushcross Grange" of Wuthering Heights's fame) and Top Withens, a desolate ruin apparently the setting for the farmstead of "Wuthering Heights".

Date of Our Last Visit: April 2004