Haworth

The cobbled main street climbs to the parsonage where three sisters wrote novels that still shake the reader, and beyond it the moor stretches to the horizon in every shade of brown and purple. Haworth in West Yorkshire 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 contain the sisters' manuscripts, their tiny childhood writings, and Emily's writing desk positioned at the window overlooking the churchyard. Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse said to have inspired Wuthering Heights, lies four miles across open moorland on a walk that crosses the watershed between the Aire and Calder valleys. The village itself — stone-built, independent-spirited, and steeply inclined — preserves its Victorian character through bookshops, apothecaries, and tea rooms that line the main street. The Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, a heritage steam line, connects Haworth to the main network at Keighley.