Back of Beyond (25 page)

The Pennine Way climbs steeply through Heptonstall, a black, tight-knit weaver’s village huddled on a hilltop. This is one of the most memorable villages in the South Pennines, a cramped cluster of tiny houses edged by crags.

There are two parish churches here. The first, built between 1256 and 1260 and dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, is now a dramatic remnant set in a cemetery of ponderous headstones said to contain the remains of 100,000 bodies. John Wesley was not impressed by the ruins on a visit here in 1772 and described them as “the ugliest I know.” The “new” church, located only a few yards away, was built in the mid-1800s but lacks the somber power of the original.

I moved on, peering over drystone walls at old manors and ornate seventeenth-century “clothiers” mansions and pausing at moorland pubs to listen to the endless anecdotes of the older regulars. As I walked I could smell cow dung over old broken walls; the dark rim of woods rose up against pool-table-green fields and flurries of fern and bracken; clouds floated across the breasty hills like fat fleecy sheep. I was free-falling through my mind again.

A few miles east of the Pennine Way the valley roads converge on Halifax, one of the most visually dramatic of all Yorkshire cities, clustered in a rocky, cliff-edged bowl, with the black grime from long-dead mills still stuck in the pores of its sand-blasted towers. In the sixteenth century, beggars and vagrants were terrified of the city. “From Hell and Halifax, may the good Lord deliver us,” they prayed, alarmed by the city’s strict theft laws whereby anyone stealing cloth valued at more than one shilling was punished by beheading at the gibbet. This gruesome implement was last used in 1650, and a replica stands today on Gibbet Street, above the town center.

I found a city in the process of rediscovering itself. The Victorian town hall now rises glowing golden like a Mayan temple. Even such structures as the castlelike Dean Clough Mill, epitome of the “dark satanic mills,” has retired with grace, like a monster transformed with a kiss into a (somewhat aged) princess. On the outskirts the fifteenth-century Shibden Hall sits in rolling parkland, a rich repository of Pennine crafts and industry.

Most notable of all, though, is the rebirth of the famous Piece Hall, once one of Europe’s most renowned cloth markets. Opened with great ceremony in January 1779, the market consists of a series of balustraded galleries surrounding a large central courtyard. More than three hundred salesrooms provided a barter space for buyers from as far afield as London and Belgium. What a turbulent scene this must have presented on market days. The cloth halls of Leeds, Bradford, and Huddersfield were minuscule by comparison. Today it is a little more serene, full of tiny craft shops and known for its Saturday market, which brings visitors from all over western Yorkshire.

But always, when wandering these valley towns, climbing steep steps between tight terraces or admiring the work of skilled stonemasons so evident on the town halls and churches, always there’s the moor, the sweeping flanks leading upward to the great, empty, Pennine Plateau, those vast wastes, browned by sun and storm, ravaged by gales, torn by tumbling streams. It’s a part of England that should be explored, but explored with respect and care. There’s a power in these hills and these villages that is truly Yorkshire—truly Brontë.

I resumed my 270-mile hike and entered this famous land of literary associations by the roofless walls of Tops Withins farm, said to be the setting for the Earnshaw house in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
.

The wild country for miles around is littered with Brontë associations. Lovers of their books instantly recognize the landscape as the haunt of Heathcliffe, Jane Eyre, and a host of other memorable characters whose fictitious lives were lived around the village of Haworth. The bleak moors were treated almost as if human, lurking ominously behind the tragic tales of fractured human relationships in this wild high country.

There are few trees and no walls here, just the constant rushing of wind across the cotton grass and the occasional cry of a curlew. Lower down, long terraces of stone cottages are packed together tightly; Haworth hides itself like a nervous snail in its shell, on the edge of a steep drop into the valley. The village possesses a somber beauty, even though the steep main street has now become a line of twee shops selling the typical range of tourist goods from overpriced Shetland shawls to “Souvenir of the Brontë Country” ashtrays (from Hong Kong).

Tucked away behind St. Michael’s Church and the graveyard brimming with mossy memorials is the parsonage where Patrick Brontë resided as the village priest from 1820. Now it is the Brontë museum, and a cobbled lane leads to the rear entrance where you leave the twentieth century behind and wander through Victorian rooms graced with memoribilia of the three sisters. Creativity flourished in these decorous surroundings. As children, the sisters lived here in their fantasy kingdom of Gondal and produced an array of tiny magazines, history books, songs, and illustrations describing in minute detail the life and times in “Great Glass Town” and “The World Below.”

Their father was a little concerned at all this imaginative volatility; his housekeeper Tabitha Aykroyd ignored it, and Branwell, ever popular for his learned discourse at the local pubs (particularly in the adjacent Black Bull), gradually wasted his talents as the sisters refined theirs. Under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a selection of their poems was published in 1846, followed quickly by Emily’s
Wuthering Heights
, Charlotte’s
Jane Eyre
, and Anne’s
Agnes Grey
.

Halfway down the steep path from Top Withins, I met a girl “doing literary England” with a group from a Washington State College. She was sitting alone in the heather by the tiny Brontë Falls, her long red hair hanging in tresses over her bowed head, and weeping.

“This is where Charlotte died,” she sobbed. “She’d just got married. After years and years of looking after her cranky father she finally married Arthur Nichols, and they walked up here together, she caught a chill, and she died—just like that.”

The story sounded more Brontë than a Brontë novel.

“Can you believe it? Emily, Anne, Branwell—all of them died in their twenties! It’s all so sad.”

She looked lonely and forlorn, so I stayed to chat. At least that was my intention but Angela (she introduced herself and asked my name) was a compulsive monologuer so that conversation became distinctly one-sided. I merely happened to point out the strangely erratic flight of grouse that leaped squalling from the heather as we strolled down the moor toward Haworth, and her amazingly agile brain butterflied out a string of associations that included references to Prince Charles, the Pope, Mozart, Einstein, the atrocious quality of English coffee and public toilets, the current miners’ strike, hairpins, and the problems of removing dried egg yolk from fine porcelain.

After a string of these remarkable streams-of-consciousness I was exhausted and tried desperately to dream up a way of regaining my solitude. I slowed my pace, complaining of an irritating blister, and she slowed with me. I paused with the pretense of finding my notebook, and she paused too. I said I might break off to sunbathe, and she said she would too. Unfortunately the sun never came out so I had her company all the way down the long path. When we finally rejoined her group of literature-loving companions she said good-bye and then turned to me for what was our first real contact.

“By the way, what do you do?”

I smiled and said it would take too long to explain. A bit rude I suppose but I was looking forward to being alone again.

In subdued mood I slipped and skidded my way into Haworth and bed-and-breakfast in the sixteenth-century Haworth Old Hall set at the bottom of the steep cobbled main street. I had dinner here too at a baronial table in front of a blazing log fire, and then stood outside under a star-filled sky listening to the local brass band race through their Thursday night rehearsal before joining in choruses of old English sea shanties at the folk club next door. Angela was there with some of her tour group. She didn’t see me.

An elderly lady stood in blue woolly slippers on the doorstep of her nearby rowhouse. “Oh, I love to listen to that band. They sound so manly, don’t they? They’ve been playin’ up in that room for as long as I can remember,” she sighed. “There was a time y’know when every village and every factory and pit in Yorkshire had a brass band, but you don’t see so many nowadays.” She smiled and closed the door.

An easy alternative to long and often boggy moorland walks is a trip on the Worth Valley Railroad. I followed the steep main street down past the Haworth Old Hall, through Central Park with its summer brass band concerts, and onto the station platform where a steam locomotive waited to puff its way along five miles of clanking nostalgia. The bar on board serves some of Yorkshire’s finest “real” ales as you wobble along past mill villages set in rolling green hills. All in all—a delightful diversion for this weary bog trotter.

But some experiences were not so delightful.

On the edge of town was a junkyard of some kind, a muddy maze of old windows, scores of scratched doors with rusty hinges, cracked sinks and tubs, piles of bent plumbing pipes, and garden ornaments, half hidden in a jungly patch of elderberry bushes and wild lupins. A wonderful subject for photographs of “accidental esthetics.”

A thin man, with nervous eyes and a face full of middle-age furrows, came out of a hut and, with hardly a greeting, began this amazing monologue (my second in twenty four hours), as if we’d known each other for years:

“Honest. I mean it. If it weren’t for her…she’s bloody eighty-five, no she’s bloody eighty-six now…she don’t live in this world anymore. I mean she’s old. If it wasn’t…look at this…it costs a hell of a lot nowadays to run this place…four thousand pounds for a car park it’s gonna cost me…just to park bloody cars in…council says they’ll close me down if I don’t put it in. I cleaned this out here—it were all steel and ovens and windows. I had two hundred eighty doors here—what I’ve got left I’m selling for five pounds a pop—look at ’em. Whatever you want. Five pounds flat!”

I explained that I wasn’t looking to buy doors and had only stopped to photograph one of his barns now being used as a storehouse for every kind of plumbing fixture imaginable. But he continued on, oblivious, “persistent as a donkey’s fart,” with the facile lachrymosity of a lonely alcoholic.

“If it wasn’t for her, I could clean all this place up. It’s solid. Nice beams. Bit o’country charm, so to speak…I could rent it out to some craftspeople, y’know, little stalls with pottery and all that. She won’t even listen to sense. I could sell the whole bloody place. There’s some fancy poofters from London gonna build in’t back. Course they’ve got so much bloody cash down there. They built a fence, closed all this in. Said they didn’t want people to see into my yard. So I’m going to clean it all out. The hell with it. I’m selling it. All of it. Now look, see what I can do. I’m going to get people on weekends. For crafts and that. Look at t’ traffic. This is where they all come by. It’s a bad corner but I’ll smooth it out. Make it biggest damn antiques and crafts place in Yorkshire. Antique people don’t always like crafts—so I’ll put ’em in different parts.”

“Sounds like you’ve got quite a plan,” I said.

“Aye, it would be if it weren’t for her…I do crafts myself y’know. Dolls’ houses. Victorian. Keeps me busy in’t winter. I don’t design ’em—not yet—I put ’em together from kits. Bad winters round ’ere. Keeps me going y’know. But I mean—jus’ look at this place. Worth a bloody fortune…I got land—and all this stuff. But she just doesn’t see it. She just keeps saying sell the stuff, sell the bloody stuff. She’s bloody mean is what she is. Sets a price and that’s it. She’s got no idea. She doesn’t see it. She doesn’t see what it could be, I could rent out all this—I could rent it tomorrow but she still owns it all and she won’t do bloody nothin’. Just watches me, all around the place—hey look, she’s there! Behind t’ windows—watch that bloody curtain move back. Somebody should just talk to her. Tell her. This could be bloody fantastic. All I need is a bit of cash…but she just won’t…

I wondered if he talked to every visitor like this. I felt I’d walked into a Samuel Beckett monologue, an
Endgame
litany of woes and tarnished dreams that will always be tarnished; a
Waiting for Godot
stalemate with this strange presence of his mother lurking offstage and ruling his destiny. Although, after five minutes more of this, I seriously began to wonder if there really was a mother there at all or whether I’d strolled into some
Psycho
scenario.

The next day, with no regrets, I crossed the boggy fringes, sang farewell to the soggy tops, and descended through gentle valleys and little rounded hills of glacial debris (drumlins). Clouds as dainty as duck down floated over the fells. Trees were bathed in heavy-honeyed sunlight seething with sappy juices; fields were flushed bright green after recent rains.

Tiny villages like Lothersdale still possess active mills. For five generations, since 1792, the Wilson family has been spinning and weaving here but according to Alec Wilson their silk production ceased fifteen years ago: “We had to go into more specialized areas of rayon production to stay alive. Running a small mill like this isn’t easy today.”

Oh, but the walking was. I slipped down into the broad gap of the Aire valley graced with velvet meadows, winding streams, and a canal lined with vacation boats and barges. Nearby Skipton has become a popular center for this recent form of summer recreation but somehow it keeps its market-town charm for all the bustle.

Malham does too in spite of coachloads of tourists, and I approached the tiny village after an arcadian walk alongside the youthful river Aire, moving deeper into white limestone country with white dry stone walls, white farms, and the towering white crags.