Haworth

The cobbled main street climbs to the parsonage where three sisters wrote novels that still shake the reader, and beyond it the moor rolls unbroken to the horizon in shades of brown and purple. Haworth is where the Brontë imagination was forged — the landscape is the text.

The Brontë Parsonage Museum preserves the family home where Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — the rooms hold their manuscripts, the miniature books of their childhood, and Emily's writing desk at the window over the churchyard. Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse long associated with Wuthering Heights, lies four miles out across open moorland on a walk that crosses the watershed, wind for company the whole way. The village itself — stone-built, independent-spirited and steeply inclined — keeps its Victorian character in bookshops, apothecary windows and tearooms along Main Street, and the Keighley and Worth Valley heritage steam railway still connects Haworth to the outside world, as if reluctant about it.