Visit Us - Explore Brontë Country

While you're in Haworth you might like to visit St Michael and All Angels church next to the Parsonage, where all the Brontës except Anne are buried. (Anne is buried at St Mary's church, Scarborough.) Please be mindful that St Michael's is a busy, working church and we ask that you take care not to disturb other visitors who may be worshipping.
 
Very worthwhile is a trip on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, where the film The Railway Children, based on E Nesbit's popular  novel, was shot. Read more about it on their website, here.

For details of a good local walk around Top Withens, the traditionally accepted site of Wuthering Heights, click here; a variety of other local walks are covered in detail here.

Nearby is Keighley, the Brontës' nearest market town, where you can visit Victorian Gothic Cliffe Castle, now home to a museum of the local area, with playground, extensive gardens and aviary. Also of interest is National Trust property and 17th-century manor house East Riddlesden Hall, with its children's playground, herb garden and maze.

The fascinating village of Saltaire, nine miles distant (and now a designated World Heritage Site), is home to Victorian mill-owner Titus Salt's model village, built to house his many workers, and the world-famous Salt's Mill complex, which houses the world's biggest collection of work by Bradford-born artist David Hockney, as well as a variety of shops and restaurants.

Nearest city Bradford - nine miles away - is worth visiting for the National Media Museum, a jewel of a resource for anyone who loves TV, films, photography or more modern media such as videogames. Massive working dray horses and beautifully detailed period interiors are the main draws of Bradford's Industrial Museum, on the other hand, which tells the story of the city that built its fortune on the textile industry. And 15th-century Bradford Cathedral is always worth a visit.

Local town Halifax, 11miles away, is worth a visit for 15th-century, timber-framed manor house Shibden Hall, set in lovely Shibden Park with its model ride-on railway; also award-winning children's science museum Eureka, beautiful Halifax Minster, where astronomer William Herschel was once organist, and the world's only surviving 18th-century cloth hall, now home to a host of specialist local shops, the spectacular Piece Hall.

And if you fancy visiting a medieval castle, taking a trip along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal or visiting the animals at Thornton Hall Farm Country Park, you can head towards Skipton - 14 miles from Haworth by road - where you can also drop into the market on Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Saturday to buy excellent local produce.

Other local sites of interest to Brontë aficionados include the Thornton Church St James's, eight miles from Haworth on the road into Bradford, where Patrick Brontë was priest at the time of his children Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne's births. You can also see the outside of the house where they were born (not at present open to the public), and take a virtual tour of it here.

Only two miles across the moors is Ponden Hall (now a B&B) widely considered the model for Thrushcross Grange in Emily's novel Wuthering Heights, and also to have inspired interior descriptions of the house 'Wuthering Heights'. Geographic location of 'Wuthering Heights', however, is believed to be the ruined moorland farm of 'Top Withins', which you can read about here.

Nearby is the Red House, Gomersal, where Charlotte's great friend Mary Taylor lived, and which Charlotte used as the model for the house 'Briarmains' in her novel Shirley. Unfortunately, the Red House is no longer open to the public. Oakwell Hall is another Brontë-lined property open to the public, and model for the house 'Fieldhead' in Shirley.

The Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum can not take responsibility for information or advice given on websites other than our own.

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