Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. Emily Brontë was twenty-eight. She had written the novel over the preceding two years, in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage, in the evenings after her father's eye surgery had been completed and the household had settled. She had rarely left Yorkshire. She had walked the moors above the village every day since childhood. The landscape of the novel — the wind, the moorland, the house exposed on the ridge above the valley — is the landscape she knew better than any other.
The novel is not set in the Yorkshire Dales. It is set on the moors above Haworth. But the intensity of her feeling for the specific quality of that landscape — the open fell, the howling weather, the sense of a terrain that resists domestication — is what the 2026 film, and every adaptation before it, has been attempting to reproduce.
The Haworth Moors are not dramatic in the way that the Lake District fells or the Yorkshire Dales are dramatic. They are not steep or enclosed or visually varied. They are open and horizontal and unrelenting — a plateau of heather and peat bog stretching north and west from Haworth toward the Lancashire border, interrupted only by the occasional gritstone escarpment and the deep-cut becks running down to the valley floor.
This horizontality is what Brontë was describing. The specific terror of Wuthering Heights — the exposure of the house on the ridge, the impossibility of shelter, the weather arriving from every direction without obstruction — is the terror of a landscape where you can see for miles and there is nowhere to hide.
The Heights of the title is not a conventional fell-top. It is a ridge house: exposed above the valley on a flank that catches the wind from every compass point. The name itself — wuthering is a Yorkshire dialect word for the sound of wind in exposed places — tells you what the house endures.
Top Withens is a ruined farmhouse on the moor two miles above Haworth, reached by the Brontë waterfall walk. The building's roof fell in decades ago; the walls stand to about head height, the interior open to the sky, the stone dark with damp and lichen.
The connection between Top Withens and the fictional Wuthering Heights has never been confirmed. A plaque placed by the Brontë Society states that the building bears no resemblance to the house Emily Brontë described, while acknowledging that the position of the building — on the exposed ridge above the valley, with the moor dropping away on all sides — matches the spirit of the novel's location.
This is the right way to think about it. Top Withens is not the fictional Wuthering Heights. But standing on the ridge beside it, with the moor extending in every direction and the wind coming off the Lancashire hills to the west, you understand in a physical way what Brontë was describing. The landscape explains the novel. The novel explains the landscape.
The walk to Top Withens from Haworth takes approximately forty-five minutes on a clear path through the village and up through the Brontë waterfall valley. It is not a difficult walk, but it is an exposed one — weather changes quickly on the moor and waterproofs are appropriate on any visit.
The landscape of Wuthering Heights is not simply a setting. It is a character — one that shapes the psychology of everyone who grows up in it and that reasserts itself over every attempt to impose civilised order. Heathcliff belongs to the moor in a way that the Linton family, with their comfortable valley house at Thrushcross Grange, do not. Catherine's tragedy is that she belongs to it too, and knows it, and marries Linton anyway.
This is why the novel has generated so many adaptations and why the landscape pilgrimage to Haworth is one of the more emotionally charged in English literary tourism. The readers who come to Haworth are not simply visiting the place where the book was written. They are visiting the landscape that the book argues cannot be replaced by anything more comfortable or more civilised.
Emerald Fennell's adaptation, released on 13 February 2026, has significantly increased interest in both the novel and the real landscape. The film was shot in the Yorkshire Dales — Arkengarthdale, Swaledale and Low Row — rather than at Haworth, for reasons of visual scale and remoteness. The Dales landscape is visually consistent with what Brontë described but is geographically distinct from the actual Haworth Moors.
For visitors who have seen the film and want to understand the real landscape behind the novel, Haworth and Top Withens are the authoritative destination. For visitors who also want to see the specific places where the film was made, our private Brontë Country tour can incorporate both — Haworth and the Parsonage Museum in the afternoon, with a morning in the Dales film locations.
The Brontë Country Day Trip covers Haworth, the Parsonage and the moorland landscape. Private tours can incorporate the 2026 film locations in the Dales.
Where was the 2026 Wuthering Heights film filmed?
Emerald Fennell's 2026 Wuthering Heights was filmed primarily in the Yorkshire Dales National Park — Arkengarthdale, Swaledale and Low Row all feature. The cast stayed at Simonstone Hall in Hawes during production.
Who stars in the 2026 Wuthering Heights film?
Margot Robbie plays Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff. The film was directed by Emerald Fennell and released on 13 February 2026.
Is Wuthering Heights a real place?
No. Wuthering Heights is fictional. Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse on the moors above Haworth, is most commonly associated with the fictional building. The real landscape that inspired the novel is the Haworth Moors in West Yorkshire.
Can I visit the 2026 Wuthering Heights filming locations?
Yes. The primary filming locations — Arkengarthdale, Swaledale and Low Row in the Yorkshire Dales — are fully accessible. Lake District Tours offers private tours combining these locations with Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage Museum.