Exploring Britain
“I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry
that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights” WUTHERING HEIGHTS, EMILY BRONTË
and Amazons books around Coniston Water; and the childrens’ author Beatrix Potter (1866-1943). Potter’s house, Hill Top, near Hawkshead, is a very popular tourist attraction. The countryside is immediately familiar from the books: from Lingholm House on the shore of Derwent Water, where Potter holidayed with her family during the 1880s, and the view across the lake to St Herbert’s Island is clearly the stretch of water over which the squirrels paddle their rafts towards Owl Island in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. To the east in Yorkshire is another famous literary
setting: the bleak, haunting moors that appear in many of the books written by the Brontë sisters Charlotte (1816- 1855), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849). It was Emily Brontë who did most to create the enduring
image of the wild, windswept moors, in her only novel, Wuthering Heights, a tale of doomed love and brutal
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revenge. Many of the visitors to the former Brontë family home, Haworth Parsonage, come because they are looking to feel closer, in some way, to Wuthering Heights itself, an isolated stone house high upon the moors. The bleak landscape that Brontë describes is still very much evident today: “... one may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun...” says Mr Lockwood, one of the narrators of the novel, “... the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall...”. Far to the south the unique county of Cornwall, really a
country in its own right, with its own language and traditions, served as the muse of Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989). Many of her novels and short stories were dreamed up as she walked over the hills and around the coves and rocks of the shoreline. There is now an annual
Above: The ruined farmhouse of Top Withins on Haworth Moor in West Yorkshire is said to have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights
BRITAIN 63
PHOTO: © VISITBRITAIN/BRITAIN ON VIEW
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