On a May Day with the Brontë sisters, a parsonage and lots of shops

Now I have read my fair share of the novels of the Brontë sisters although not as many as I should and on balance have probably seen more film and TV adaptations.

And until this week I had not been to their home in Haworth in Yorkshire.

So with the promise of some early May sunshine and a wish to escape the city we headed east into Yorkshire and Brontë country.

It is a stunning location and the row of shops, pubs and restaurants do not over intrude on the parsonage which was where the sisters grew up and is now a museum.

The house is small but then country parsonages were not I suspect lavish places.

The ground floor consisted of just three rooms with a stone stair case at the rear which twists back on it to give access to another four rooms.

During their stay two rooms were added by opening up what had been a store room on the ground floor and creating an internal door into the room above which originally had only been accessed by an outside staircase.

Now even with these additions it was hardly a spacious property given that Patrick and Maria Brontë had six children and at least one living in servant.

But then many of their neighbours would have lived in far humbler buildings and brought up as many or even more children.

And by comparison here was comfortable living.

The rooms may have been small and most walls painted rather than papered but even given the dependence on candles and coal fires I suspect most of us would have felt at ease.

The house fronted onto a small garden which led directly into the church yard and the church itself.

Today of course many of the surrounding properties have been given over to the business of selling the Brontë’s but step into the graveyard or better still out of the village and the sense of open raw countryside is all around you.

So even given that this was a bright and warm May Day it was easy to get a sense of what the place might have been like on a cold February day with a biting east wind and the promise of snow.

Nor could all those bright shops hide the grim reality of a village where the death rate at one point so high that it prompted a Government visit.

All of which is today a long way in the past, and I doubt even the most knowledgeable Brontë visitor will allow that to intrude on the day.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson