Journal · Literary Brontë
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Most people who stay in the Lake District for more than a few days begin to wonder what is around the edges of it. The Lakes occupy your attention completely while you are in them, but the train to Windermere passed through something interesting on the way — the Lune Valley, the Pennine edge, the shift in landscape character that happens as you come north. What is out there?
To the east, past the M6, the landscape opens into the Pennines. The Pennines are not like the Lakes — no lakes, no dramatic rocky peaks, different rock, different light, different character. But they have their own literature, and that literature is the most celebrated in the English canon.
Windermere to Haworth by road is approximately two and a half hours. It is not a local excursion. But it is not the beginning of another holiday either — it is a single long day that takes you from one literary landscape to another, from the Lakes that shaped Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter to the moors that produced Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
The contrast between the two landscapes is part of what makes the day work. You leave Windermere in the soft green of the Lake District and arrive in Haworth in the dark gritstone of West Yorkshire, and the difference between the two landscapes explains something about the difference between the writers they produced.
The drive east is not dead time. Your expert storyteller talks throughout — the transition from volcanic Lakes geology to the Carboniferous gritstone of the Pennines, the Lune Valley and the evidence of the Roman road that crossed here, the first views of the Pennine watershed as you approach the county boundary.
Haworth itself is a full morning and early afternoon — the Parsonage, the churchyard, the main street, time on the moors above the village. The drive back through the Yorkshire Dales is a different route from the morning outward journey, and the early evening light on the Dales landscape is, in its own way, worth the detour.
Guests who have been to the Lake District before, or who are staying for several days and want to make the most of the geography they are in. Guests who care about English literature and want to connect the two landscapes. Guests who have read the Brontë novels and want to see where they came from.
Also, occasionally: guests who have no particular literary interest but who are curious about the world beyond the obvious.
The Brontë Country Day Trip departs from Windermere at 9am. £179 per person. Haworth Parsonage entry included. Maximum seven guests. Book here.
Approximately two and a half hours by road.
No — it's a single long day, more like moving between two literary landscapes than a quick side trip.
The Pennines — a different landscape from the Lakes, with no lakes of its own but its own celebrated literary tradition.