The Heaton family of Ponden Hall

Ponden Hall in the 1920s

Haworth

Emily and her family were regular visitors to Ponden Hall and would walk across the moor to the Heaton family home. Branwell Brontë’s short story The Thurstons of Darkwell is based on it. The Heatons, who owned nearby Ponden Mill, also had what was reputed to be “the best library in the West Riding” and Emily certainly used it.

yorkshirepost/yorkshire-living

An influential though far from prosperous family in the Haworth area during the Brontës’ time. The large family included the elder Robert and his wife Alice, née Midgley and among their children the younger Robert (b. 1822), William, and John. The younger Robert has been linked romantically with Emily through a tenuous family tradition, and it has been noted that Hareton is an anagram of R. Heaton. The elder Robert was a church trustee at the time of the row over Patrick’s appointment to Haworth. Gerin (1971, p. 32) claims that the younger Brontës had access to the library at Ponden, but this has not been proved. During Ellen’s visit to Haworth in July 1844 she seems to record in her diary “fun and fatigue” with the Heaton family, but the entry is ambiguous. The Heatons’ fortune and position declined steadily in the later nineteenth century. blackwell reference

We know that Emily visited and read here, and scholarly studies have been made of the catalogue, working out what she might have read that could have influenced her work. It's highly likely that Anne, Charlotte and Branwell visited too, as the Heatons (together with the Taylors at the Manor House in Stanbury) were one of the foremost families in the area: for generations they acted as JPs and churchwardens at Haworth Church.

In the back garden are the withered remains of a now-dead pear tree, supposedly the gift of a lovesick teenage Heaton to an older, uninterested Emily.

There is another, important link between Wuthering Heights and Ponden Hall. In an account by William Davies (published in 1896) after a visit he made to Haworth in 1858, he tells how, after meeting Patrick Brontë ("a dignified gentleman of the old school"), he was taken on a tour of the area:
"On leaving the house we were taken across the moors to visit a waterfall which was a favourite haunt of the sisters… We then went on to an old manorial farm called 'Heaton's of Ponden', which we were told was the original model of Wuthering Heights, which indeed corresponded in some measure to the description given in Emily Brontë's romance."
wuthering-heights/locations/ponden-hal

everydaylife 

A lot of photograph's Ponden Hall