The Haworth Moor and Top Withens. Click for the full-size shot.

Here’s yet another example of how Google Earth serves as (a) a memory catalyst and (b) a Place for Your Stuff. I’ve just inflicted another travelogue on my fellow Earth Oglers drawn from my visits to Britain, and now it becomes part of the Dorseyland lore. This episode: A tour of the main points of interest in the lives of the beloved sisters of early-19th-century English literature, Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte.

I had a good gawk round the Bronte household in Haworth, Yorkshire, in 1991. It’s quite close to my hometown of Burnley actually – just across the moors, although that’s quite a hike, as I discovered in attempting to traverse the Bronte Way, as the hilly signposted hike is called. I seriously doubt the sisters ever got much further than I did, although they did write more books than I have, a couple of which (of their books, not mine) I have in our little library here in Bangkok, fully intending to read someday.
Pick up the Google Earth post here.

@ @ @ @ @ @

Thornton
Birthplace of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Bronte.
Charlotte was born on April 21, 1816, Emily on July 30, 1818, and Anne on January 17, 1820. The family moved to nearby Haworth in 1820 when the Reverend Patrick Bronte was appointed curate of that village. Charlotte, the eldest of the children, was five.

Haworth Parsonage
Haworth Parsonage, now the Bronte Parsonage Museum, was the family’s home from 1820 to 1861. Charlotte’s novel “Jane Eyre” (1847), Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847) and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (1848), which remain among the best-loved books in the English language, were written here. Their father, the Rev Patrick Brontë, and brother Branwell also saw their own works in print.
The Bronte sisters, published under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, were acknowledged at the time for their directness and powerful emotional energy. At the parsonage the young sisters’ creativity was nurtured, and they devised imaginary lands called Angria and Gondal. This was among the largest houses in the village, though the reverend, who was pastor at St Michael’s and All Angels’ Church next door, earned little, and the girls all worked for a living long before they published their books, Charlotte and Emily at schools in Mirfield and Halifax, respectively, and Anne as a tutor to a local family.
Emily died here from tuberculosis on December 19, 1848, aged 30. Charlotte published two more novels, “Shirley” in 1849 and “Villette” in 1853, and the following year married her father’s curate, but she died, pregnant, on March 31, 1855, aged 38. Patrick Bronte continued to live at the parsonage, and died there on June 7, 1861, aged 84.
All of the family except Anne were buried in a vault beneath the Haworth church.

Top Withens
Although there are no known record of a Bronte connection to Top Withens, it’s been passed down locally that the ruins are connected to Emily’s “Wuthering Heights”, which was the name of Heathcliff’s dwelling, “Wuthering being a significant provincial adjective,” she wrote, “descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.”

Sitting at 1,400 feet above sea level, the farmhouse known as Top Withens was last occupied a poultry breeder in 1926. A plaque was attached to the ruins in 1964 by the Bronte Society.

Lower Laithe Reservoir
The 64-kilometre Bronte Way is a well-marked and much-trodden path that takes hikers from the Haworth parsonage past Lower Laithe Reservoir and on to Bronte Falls, Top Withens and eventually Wycoller.
These stops, though evocative, are not in themselves very compelling. Instead, the walk itself, through gorgeous rolling moorland layered with heather and hawthorn, is the genuine source of enchantment.

Bronte Falls
The picturesque, but unspectacular, Bronte Falls, Bronte Bridge and Bronte Stone Chair, this last in which, it’s said, the sisters took turns perching and writing their first stories. Also nearby is Ponden Hall, believed to be the house called Thrushcross Grange in “Wuthering Heights”.

Wycoller Hall
Wycoller Hall is thought to be the inspiration for Ferndean Manor in Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre”. It was built by the Hartley family at the end of the 16th century, but by the early 1900s was largely unoccupied and much of its stone reused elsewhere. Restoration work began in 1950.

Oakwell Hall
This 16th-century manor house, now part of a 110-acre country park, was immortalised by Charlotte Bronte in her novel “Shirley”, in which she named it “Fieldhead”. Its wooded areas, ponds, streams, walks and abundant wildlife make it a natural oasis in the northern industrial zone – and a quiet refuge for the ghost of William Batt, who owned the house in 1684.
Charlotte’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, wrote about the twenty-something bachelor suddenly appearing here on the night of December 9, 1684, when he was believed to have been in London. He stalked in the door and up the stairs to his room, leaving a bloody footprint in the hall, and vanished. He’d been killed in a duel in London that afternoon.

Anne’s grave
Emily Bronte died from tuberculosis in 1848, and when her sister Ann also become consumptive the following year she moved to Scarborough in the hope that the sea air might cure her. She died four days later, however, on May 28, 1849, aged 29, at No 2 the Cliff, the home of a local family where she was lodging. The site is today occupied by the Grand Hotel, which has a marker in her memory.
She’s buried at St Mary’s Church at the foot of historic Scarborough Castle. When her sister Charlotte visited the grave three years later she ordered five errors on the inscription corrected, but failed to notice that Anne’s age was given as 28.

@ @ @ @ @ @ @

There are innumerable websites about the Brontes, but one of the best belongs to the Yorkshire village with which they are most readily identified, Haworth. Particularly in regard to the Scarborough connection, Mick Armitage has an amazing site here.

The Haworth Moor and Top Withens. Click for the full-size shot.