Haworth
Haworth in the West Yorkshire Pennines is the home of the Brontë family, the village where Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë lived at the parsonage with their father Patrick throughout most of their adult lives and wrote the novels that have made them the most celebrated literary sisters in English literature. The Brontë Parsonage Museum, the village and the moorland above provide one of the most completely realised literary pilgrimage experiences available in Britain, the combination of the preserved domestic space where the novels were written and the Pennine moorland that inspired them creating an encounter with literary heritage of exceptional power.
The parsonage, now managed by the Brontë Society as a museum, has been preserved with extraordinary care in the condition of the Brontë period, the furniture, domestic objects and personal belongings of the family creating an intimate and immediate connection to the domestic life of the three sisters. The small dining room where the sisters read and discussed their work in the evenings, the study where Patrick Brontë wrote and the bedrooms where illness eventually claimed all three daughters provide the physical context for one of the most creative family environments in the history of English literature.
The moorland above Haworth, the landscape of Wuthering Heights and the freedom that the sisters found in the open country beyond their domestic confinement, is accessible within minutes of the parsonage and the walk across the moor to the ruined Top Withins farmhouse traditionally associated with the Earnshaw's farm provides one of the most charged literary heritage walks in England.