There are, as far as I know, no extant examples of Emily’s footwear. The Parsonage in Haworth has several examples of Charlotte’s, including a pair of fur-lined evening pumps and a natty pair of cloth ankle boots with leather toes, heels and side laces. But we can only guess what Emily might have worn to traipse across the moors. Both upper and sole would almost certainly have been made out of leather and nailed together. They might have included cloth pieces, and she might have worn them with protective overshoes or pattens. I can’t imagine her wearing these iron, leather and wood contraptions for too long. They would have seemed woefully inadequate to us today.
Emily was much taller than Charlotte, by almost a foot. She was the tallest of all her siblings, Charlotte was the shortest, and Anne and Branwell were about the same height. Charlotte at four foot eleven, or thereabouts, was self-conscious about her diminutive size. I suppose, at five foot ten, Emily was self-conscious of her height for different reasons. But her long legs would have given her an advantage over the others. I imagine they struggled to keep up with her as she strode over the moors. She was more of a lone walker in any case, preferring her own company to the company of others.
I’m thinking about Emily’s boots as I stand outside my van lacing up my all-singing, all-dancing, high-performance Merrell boots, with their bellows tongue to keep debris out, breathable-mesh lining, single-density removable footbed, moulded-nylon arch shank and air-cushion heel absorption.
I decide to start my fifteen-mile hike across the moors that surround Haworth not in Haworth itself but in nearby Oxenhope. I don’t think Emily would have liked modern-day Haworth, with its artisan beers, cake and coffee, vintage clothing, and ‘I Am Heathcliff’ tea towels. It’s not quite fair to call her a misanthrope, but she would have shunned the tourist trail up Main Street to the Parsonage. And she would have been bemused by her literary success and the literary success of Charlotte and Anne. She had no interest in seeing her work published – that was Charlotte’s doing. If we are to find the ghost of Emily today, it won’t be in Haworth.
From Oxenhope station I follow Mill Lane past the overflow car park up to the main road and head straight across into Dark Lane. After the chimney, I take the first right up Jew Lane and fork right to Back Leeming. I then walk past Milton House and up by the side of the dam wall, joining the path around the shore of Leeming Reservoir.
I attempted this walk on the bicentenary of Emily’s birth in July 2018 with a group of walkers who had come from all over the world. I remember standing in the Parsonage Museum gift shop with Audience Development Officer Diane Fare and the hikers, watching the rain punch the windows and bounce off the paving stones like maggots leaping from a pan of hot fat. We could postpone it, I said. Until the weather clears a bit. Diane and I shared a look, a hopeful moment passed between us. But there were angry, dissenting voices. A hue and cry. They had travelled over land and ocean to be here. One woman had come from New Zealand, another America. Spain, Australia, France, Canada. I saw the light in Diane’s eyes die – there’s no getting out of this. It was on their bucket list, and they were going to proceed no matter what the weather. We were kitted up in waterproofs and Gore-Tex boots, but as I looked at the rain again, pelting the panes and exploding like grenades on the stone flags outside, I knew that we’d be soaked through in half an hour.
Are you sure you don’t want to put it off till a better day? They looked like they could kill me for merely suggesting it. I glanced over to Diane again. She was putting on her best let’s-make-the-most-of-it face and zipping up her Lowe Alpine jacket. I raised my eyebrows. Come on, I thought, it’s only a bit of ‘watter’, as they say around here.
Now I’m leading the walk for a local walking festival, and it’s raining again, though this time the rain is soft mizzle. At the end of the reservoir, we cross Stony Hill Clough and up to a narrow gate. A decent path leads us straight up the slope of Thornton Moor, the first of five moors we are going to explore. We cross Stubden Conduit before nearing a lone sycamore tree in the ruins of the Hays, where the Book Stones lie. I show the group the small neat letter carving in one corner and tell them about how I’d stood here the year before as the Countryfile camera crew had filmed me and Anita Rani talking about the Emily Stone.
We climb up towards Hambleton Top. A faint path angles up one of the old holloways leading to Deep Arse Delf. There are two significant clefts, labelled Great Clough and Little Clough on modern OS maps, which were originally called Great Arse and Little Arse, and it’s easy to see why: the fleshy folds look like ample buttocks. We pass prominent shelter cairns as we climb Nab Hill. Below us is the Mist Stone, a slab of millstone grit with a poem by Simon Armitage, carved by Pip Hall. It was this stone that gave me the idea for the Brontë Stones project. It’s a fine poem, one of his best, and ideally located here, overlooking Oxenhope and Haworth, although it is often shrouded in the ‘milky breath’ of mist.
There used to be all-night raves up here, Dionysian dances that went on till dawn. As the sun rose, illuminating the windmills at Ovenden Moor, making the blades of the turbines flicker with white light, it was like last orders at the bar, when the landlord switches on the lights and everyone sees how fucked everyone is. I remember watching a farmer with his border collie, standing there one pinking dawn, taking it all in – the repetitive thumping bass, the strobe lights, the Day-Glo sticks, the poi and diabolo jugglers, and the gurning ravers, chewing the inside of their cheeks – scratching his head, wondering what it was all about. Dressed in flat cap, waxed jacket and Hunter wellies, he couldn’t have looked more different from the sweaty and dishevelled semi-naked revellers. These moors have always harboured strange and wild happenings.
We make our way down to Thornton Moor Conduit to the whitewashed Waggon and Horses pub. The ragtag gang of hikers I’m walking with includes Melissa Percell, a psychologist from Adelaide in South Australia, Eileen Prunty Hynes, a dairy farmer from Ireland and a descendant of Patrick Brontë, Alan Hoggart from closer to home in Burnley, Andrew Galloway from Manchester, Kevin Thomas from Brighouse, Paul Maurice from New Zealand and John Newing from Bristol.
I chat with Melissa first. As we walk, she tells me about her first encounter with the work of the Brontës: ‘I went to a girls’ Catholic school. I can’t remember if I read Jane Eyre first or Wuthering Heights. They were both in the family library. I was about thirteen. With Wuthering Heights, I had to write little family trees. All the Catherines. Apparently, Virginia Woolf did that in her copy. I got through it. Then I studied it for English. I always remember being really struck by both the passion and the violence. That toxic love. I wonder what would have happened to them if they had got together. You know, got married, had kids. All that?’
‘I was a bit older than you when I came across it. About sixteen or seventeen. And I think at that age you think that’s what love is. But the older you get, you realise it’s not what you want. You just want to come home from a day at work, build a fire, open a bottle of wine and put your feet up.’
‘I’ve reread it a few times since. I’m thirty-three now.’
‘A significant age.’
‘Yeah. I was thinking about my teenage relationships. That there was something sexy about someone who was a bit mean. But I don’t think that now. It was the same with Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. I remember swooning when he lets on that he’s liked her all this time.’
‘Rochester’s sadism really comes out of his social class. He is aloof. He feels superior. Where Heathcliff is the opposite. He’s a peasant. His sadism comes from insecurity. Lack of social status.’
‘I think Charlotte writes about class too. But she was more conventional.’
I nod in agreement. We head around Horden Clough, past the old route between Haworth and Hebden Bridge until we reach the edge of Haworth Moor. We turn left at a boundary stone marked ‘H’ and follow a path up to Oxenhope Stoop Hill across boggy peat moor. A meadow pipit leads the way, by hopping along a series of wooden fence posts, i
ts white tail feathers flashing like semaphore flags.
‘Does being out here, walking in Emily’s footsteps, walking the same moors she did, does it give you a different understanding of the book?’
‘This is my first time.’
‘First time on the moors?’
‘Yeah, it’s thrilling to be here, even though it’s raining a bit. How wild the moors are and windswept. To experience that first hand is really amazing. It makes sense of the book.’
We follow a faint dike up to Dick Delf Hill. There’s another boundary stone here, and we veer right. It’s easy to get lost round these parts. Aside from the boundary stone, the moor is unremittingly bleak and featureless. In the winter months, when the mist gathers like dragon’s breath and you can’t see your hand in front of your face, you need a decent compass, and even then there’s an element of pot luck. People have died out here. Tripped in the ditches. Sunk into the peat bogs. There was a story on the local news just a few weeks ago about a body found on the moors, pronounced dead at the scene. The tannins in the peat embalm human flesh. Melissa is right, Heathcliff’s cruelty echoes the moor’s indifference.
It’s a relief to reach the flagstones of the Pennine Way. They are deep and solid and bear the marks of industry: cuttings for machine legs to slot into; bolt holes to fix them. They have been reclaimed from the surrounding mills that lie in the valleys, now either derelict or repurposed. There’s something intriguingly circular about the journey of these flagstones, made from stone that was quarried hereabouts to line the floors of factories and mills. I imagine the sound that hobnail boots and wooden clogs would have made on them. Now they have been brought back to their place of origin to be trod on by different types of footwear: rubber lug, Vibram and Michelin soles; Salomon, Merrell, Lowa and Keen.
We follow the flagged path of the Pennine Way to the prominent ruin of Top Withens, the farmhouse that is said to have inspired Emily Brontë’s location of Wuthering Heights. The rain is now a fine fizz. We stop to eat sandwiches and drink hot liquid from flasks. Andrew opens the top of a can of Nourishment. It’s an enriched-banana-milkshake energy drink that comes in a tin can, not an aluminium one – it’s the kind of receptacle that you’d more typically find baked beans or tomato soup inside. The makers of the drink are saying: this might be a drink, but it’s more like food. Look, see, it comes in a food can, not a drinks can. The first tin cans were produced for the Royal Navy in 1813, but it wasn’t until a bit later that canned food became available to the public, so the Brontës would have seen tin-plated cans as a novelty.
We talk about Top Withens and to what extent it was the inspiration for the location of Wuthering Heights. I’m fairly certain that this windswept, remote location matches that described in the book. And it was Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of Charlotte Brontë, who made the claim to the artist who illustrated the 1872 edition of Wuthering Heights. The name ‘Top Withens’ is close enough to ‘Wuthering Heights’ to suggest a connection. But as the Brontë Society plaque states on the wall of the ruin, ‘the building, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described’. Certainly, the description of the dwelling in the book matches more closely that of High Sunderland Hall. Places and people in books are rarely straightforwardly plucked from real life. They may be based on a real person, a real place, but the writer combines elements, invents others, makes stuff up. Despite this, the public appetite for fixing each person, each place, is a consistent one.
The ruin was inhabited during Emily’s lifetime. Then, in 1893, Top Withens was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. The roof was partially torn off, flags were cracked and about thirty windows were destroyed. In the kitchen, the blade of a knife was fused by the heat. The dog and cat fled the building in fear. The incident was reported in the Todmorden and District News. Today, the building is owned by Yorkshire Water, and when the rain brays and the winds howl, it can be a very welcome place to take shelter.
We head up a faint path behind the ruin to reach the trig point on Withins Height. Trig point is an abbreviated form. Its full name is trigonometrical point. They’re known as trig pillars in Ireland, which seems more descriptive of these strange white concrete obelisks. The process of placing trig points on top of hills and mountains was instigated by the OS in 1935 in order to accurately triangulate Great Britain. It should be possible, if the weather is clear, to see two other trig points from any one trig point. There is no chance of that today. On top of every trig point is a brass plate with three arms and a hole in the middle to mount a theodolite – an instrument used to make angular measurements. These days, they have been usurped by aerial photography and digital mapping using lasers and GPS, but they are still marked on OS maps with the symbol of a small triangle. Their presence in the landscape now make them remnants of an analogue age.
We make our way across to Alcomden Stones, which stands on the brink of the wilderness. It’s a stunning location, made up of an extensive scattering of large and impressively shaped stones. It was once thought that these slabs were placed here by druids. And it’s easy to see why, particularly when you contemplate the flat top of what is called the altar stone. But geologists are fairly certain that the stones were placed here by nature. That’s not to say that the ancients didn’t utilise them for pagan rituals, or simply for solace. Or even for protection from the harsh elements. It was the historian J. Horsfall Turner, in his 1879 history of Haworth, who makes the claim of a druidic altar, and there are other stones marked with deep-cupped indentations. But none of them can be said with any certainty to have been carved by people instead of the elements. It is likely, though, that such a place would have attracted those predisposed to occult pastimes.
For me, this is a likely source for Penistone Crag, where Heathcliff and Cathy go to shelter and be together, although it is often said that it is more likely to be Ponden Kirk, which we’re heading towards. But Ponden Kirk is not an obvious place to shelter. It hangs on a dangerous precipice. From where we stand we get a good view of Stanbury Bog beneath Crow Hill. It was here in 1824 where the silence of the moors was shattered by a massive explosion as the bog spewed out rock and earth across the surrounding hillside after a heavy storm. It polluted the River Aire to such an extent that its waters couldn’t be used for some time. According to Juliet Barker, the entire wool industry in the area ground to a halt because the water was so dirty. Patrick Brontë witnessed the event and thought it was an earthquake sent by God. I think about The Great Day of His Wrath, the painting by ‘Mad’ John Martin that hung over Patrick’s table in his study. It shows the earth folding in on itself, as God takes revenge for human sin.
On the day of the explosion, the children were out playing further down the moor. Patrick managed to reach them in time, and they sheltered at Ponden Hall. They would have watched the seven-foot-high river of peat, rock and earth pass by their window. Patrick was so impressed by the event that he wrote both a poem and a sermon about it. In his sermon, he describes how the moor sank into two wide cavities, the larger being three hundred yards in length and two hundred yards in breadth. It is no wonder that for Emily the moors were a place of awe and fascination. It was a land that was alive with a terrible destructive beauty.
Next, we head down into the heather of Middle Moor Clough and pick up a path that follows a line of grouse butts above the stream. Shooting parties can pay up to £3,000 for a weekend of grouse shooting. Nouveau-riche businessmen get to dress in tweeds and pretend that they are toffs. We follow this path all the way, crossing the clough to reach a sign above Raven Rock.
I chat to Eileen Prunty Hynes, the dairy farmer from Tipperary. Prunty is her maiden name, Patrick’s original moniker. He changed his name around the time he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, perhaps to mask his humble origins. ‘My father came from the north of Ireland from Monaghan,’ Eileen says, ‘and his father came from near Belfast, and his father came from Banbridge, near Drumballyroney – Patrick’s place. I can’t really g
o back much further than that. There aren’t any records. My father was always talking about the Brontës. He used to tell us that we were related to them. My father is dead now, since 1993. And I wasn’t really that interested at the time. It was in later years that I got interested. But after he died, I got really fascinated. This is my fourth trip to Haworth. He told me that a relation of his had a stick – tis called a shillelagh in Ireland – belonging to Hugh Prunty. It was sort of a long, thin stick with a big top to it. You don’t see them any more. When I was young, they were all over the place. In shops, you know.’
‘When I was at school, I got the cane a lot. But I think it got outlawed in about 1986, a year before I left school. How about the shillelagh?’
‘I don’t know much about that. I don’t think it was used in that way. In schools, you know. Anyway, my father told me the story of Welsh and how the grandfather brought the child back from Liverpool.’
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it, because the Hugh Prunty–Welsh story is so similar to that of Jack Sharp.’
‘Yes, it is. In my mind, she combined the two stories to create Wuthering Heights. And if you go into the church in Drumballyroney, there’s paintings all over the church, and one of them is a lovely painting of his family all sitting down having great fun. I think that Patrick was passing on all these stories to his daughters.’
‘You can see them, the sisters, as almost substitute wives for Patrick. You can imagine them sat round the dining table, and Patrick having the sort of conversations with them that he might have had with Maria if she had been alive. What sort of age would you have been when your father told you these stories?’
‘I would have been in my late teens. And I would have told him to shut up, you know. Especially when he had a few jars in him. And then, all of a sudden, I developed this mad interest. Before I came, last July, I went to the hairdresser, and I was telling her I was off to Yorkshire for Emily’s bicentenary and all that. And she said, “Oh my God, I would love to meet a Heathcliff.”’
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