Brontë Country

I love the drive over to my daughter's home in the summer, across the moors between the Aire valley and the Calder valley. I had to stop the other day just to drink in the wonderful view. This is truly 'Brontë country', as the tourist brochures would have it. The village of Haworth, where the famous writers, the Brontë sisters, lived in the parsonage in the early 1800s, is in the dip in the middle right of the picture below. Some of the village is visible from this viewpoint but the oldest part is hidden by the trees right in the centre of the photo. In the picture above, the water on the left is Leeshaw Reservoir, one of a series built in the late 1800s/early 1900s to provide fresh water for the town of Keighley and its environs. It wasn't there when the Brontë sisters roamed the moors, and the rough moorland made famous in their novels may well have extended further than it does today. In the picture above, you can see a dark patch on the left beyond the reservoir, which is just the edge of the heather moorland that is Haworth Moor, leading up to the ruined farmhouse at Top Withens, reputed to have inspired Emily Brontë's novel 'Wuthering Heights'.