Days Out: Visiting the home of the Bronte sisters
THE ROADS seemed to be going on forever, so I knew we had to get a move on.
Just a day after the clocks had changed it was inevitable that our evening would come closing in far quicker than we had been used to for months.
What’s more, at 1pm, it already seemed dark. Unseasonably so, even for late October.
The cloud cover had been flat and low for miles.
And, the higher we drove, the more it began thickening into a ground mist.
If we’d been at home in Birmingham, such half-term Monday afternoon weather might have felt like a crushing disappointment.
An easy excuse to stay indoors ready to slump in front of the TV. Another miserable day wasted.
But not in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
The more the fog tightened its grip around autumn’s thinning canopy, the more I felt invigorated by a sense of opportunity.
And the more I felt comforted by its cloak, the more I knew that our journey beyond 13 miles of teeth-grinding M1 roadworks had been worthwhile.
As we climbed up a few steps from the nearby car park, here, before us, was a house – and cemetery – of genuine legend.
Perhaps it was even just as the Bronte sisters had left it.
Today, the girls’ former home from 1820-1861 is better known as The Parsonage Museum, a building so resolute in its Yorkshireness that it probably won’t look any different in 500 years’ time.
Under these heaven-sent atmospheric conditions, it didn’t take much imagination to picture the girls still there, writing stories that more than 150 years of history would later declare them to be the single most talented literary family that ever lived.
Although our book-loving 12-year-old daughter Holly read every exhibit, she was was probably a touch too young to fully appreciate the jewels of information before her, still less her younger sister, Madison, now six.
But the finer details don’t matter. What counted on the day, was that they were having the opportunity to embrace the Bronte’s lifestyle as they would have known it, isolated from metropolitan life by a character-defining mixture of harsh landscape, stone walls and invasive climate.
This is what continues to make Haworth so special, lifting it above and beyond the experience you will get at Shakespeare’s Birthplace Museum on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, or Jane Austen’s house at Alton, Hampshire.
Whenever they read books like Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights (both 1847) or Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in the future, they will know that they’ve been there.
Built in 1778 from local stone, the Georgian house was presented to the (1893) Bronte Society by Sir James Roberts in 1928.
Share
