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Most guests on the Brontë Country Day Trip are thinking about Haworth before they get there. The anticipation is part of the day. But the journey through the Yorkshire Dales on the way — and on the way back — is worth paying attention to.
We leave Windermere at nine o'clock and drive east. The first forty minutes takes you through the Lune Valley — one of the quietest corners of Cumbria, a broad, agricultural valley between the Howgill Fells and the limestone plateau of the southern Dales. Your guide will point out the transition from the Lake District geology to the limestone landscape of the Dales as the road crosses the Pennine watershed.
The descent into the southern Dales brings the characteristic pale limestone country into view — the dry stone walls running up and over the ridge, the whitish-grey rock visible in the roadside cuttings, the valley floor opening towards Wharfedale or Ribblesdale depending on the route. This is not Lake District landscape. It is something different: older in some ways, more open, more agricultural.
The Pennines between the Lake District and Haworth are not a blank. The road crosses the same watershed that the Norse settlers who named every fell and beck in the Lake District also named and farmed. The lead mining landscape of the western Dales, visible in the raked hushes on the moor sides above Settle, is part of the same industrial story that produced the slate mines of the Lake District in a different rock type.
Your guide connects these stories. By the time you arrive in Haworth, you have a sense of the whole landscape — the Lakes, the Pennines, the Dales — as a continuous country with a continuous human history, not as a series of disconnected tourist destinations.
The return from Haworth in the late afternoon takes a different route when conditions allow — through the upper Dales landscape rather than the motorway corridor. In autumn, the light on the limestone walls and the bracken-covered lower fells on the return journey is one of the finer parts of the day.
We are usually back in Windermere by half past six or seven.
The Brontë Country Day Trip departs from Windermere at 9am. £179 per person. Haworth Parsonage entry included.