Haworth

 

In the village, the old post office is now a general stationers run by Margaret Hartley, whose family have been in business in the village for more than 350 years.
 

'My great-great-great-grandad was the postmaster and served the Brontes,' says Margaret, 74. 'And this is the counter that the girls passed their manuscripts over.' 

'The girls' is how the people of Haworth refer to Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, as if they were family.

Leaving behind the parsonage and the post office and heading along a steep footpath into the hills, the church bells (curate Bronte's old church, but rebuilt) and the steam engines running on the Keighley and Worth Valley railway are all I can hear.

The path is riddled with nettles - I imagine Emily's long skirts would have saved her from stings. As it winds around the hillside and narrows, the fields on the high side are replaced by rough moorland. Then slowly, the fields on the low side fade away too, and either side is no longer luxuriant green but browned, waist-high bracken, tough grass and blushing heather.

 

 

There's a single huge, upright grey stone, shaped like a throne, where Emily sat to gather her thoughts.

Google.nl/ Ponden Kirk
 

She took the natural features around her home and worked them into her novel, so every pile of stones holds a heavy meaning: the real-life Ponden Kirk became fictional Peniston Crag, where Cathy ponders her troubled life, and Ponden Hall became Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family that Cathy marries into, tearing her away from her true love.