Haworth

The Georgian house that was the Brontë home from 1820, where Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey around one small table, kept now with the family’s own furniture and things and looking straight out over the packed churchyard. Grief soaked the place: Patrick Brontë outlived his wife and all six of his children in it.

Best shot Winter sunset across the graveyard toward the parsonage.

• Touristy

The Brontë parish church, where Patrick Brontë was curate for forty years. Under the floor, in the family vault, lie Charlotte, Emily and Branwell with their mother and two elder sisters, only Anne is buried away in Scarborough. The present church of 1879 replaced the one the sisters knew, but the memorial chapel marks the vault.

• Quiet

One of the grimmest burial grounds in England: some forty thousand people packed into a small plot, the flat gravestones blackened with soot and moss under trees that keep the ground from drying. Victorian inspectors blamed the overcrowded dead for fouling the village water and the short lives that went with it. The sisters looked out on it every day.

Best shot Low light raking across the blackened flat gravestones.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A roofless moorland farmhouse on an exposed ridge, long said to have set the scene, if not the house, of Wuthering Heights, reached by a bleak walk across open moor past the Brontë Waterfall and the stone Brontë Bridge. A Brontë Society plaque admits the ruin looks nothing like Emily’s house, but the desolation is exactly right.

Best shot The ruin alone against empty moor and a heavy sky.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

The steep cobbled street that climbs hard from the valley to the church and parsonage at the top, lined with dark gritstone barely changed since the Brontës’ day. Severe, heavy and brooding in mist or rain. The sisters walked it, and coffins were carried up it to the churchyard.

• Touristy

Seventy-odd hectares of open moor straight above the village, scarred by old gritstone quarries, treeless and wind-scoured, the classic desolate Brontë-country view on the way to the waterfall and Top Withens. In bad weather, all low cloud and dark heather, which is when to go.

Best shot Showery light over open moor, heavy sky.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A five-mile heritage steam line through the Worth Valley, brought back by volunteers in 1968, its headquarters and workshops at Haworth Station, restored engines running past soot-stained stone stations and wreathing the valley in smoke. It stood in for the film of The Railway Children, and it leaves the whole valley looking a hundred years ago.

Best shot A steam engine under its own smoke on the valley line.

An inn with rooms in one of the oldest buildings in Haworth, a Tudor stone manor of around 1600 at the foot of the cobbled street, its mullioned windows and two open log fires intact. Seven real ales under low beams. Sleep in the sixteenth century.

• Adults only

A family-run former coaching inn of the early 1700s at the top of the cobbled street, fourteen rooms, low-beamed bars and creaking corridors, steps from the parsonage and tied in local lore to Branwell Brontë. Three hundred years of moorland weather in the walls.

• Adults only

A B&B made from a row of Grade II listed nineteenth-century weavers’ cottages just above Main Street, six rooms keeping their old beams and thick millstone-grit walls, a short walk from the parsonage. Homespun, vintage and quiet.

• Quiet

The pub at the top of the cobbled street, sixteenth-century roots and the present building from the mid-1700s, and infamous as Branwell Brontë’s haunt, where he drank himself to ruin in its rooms. It has since played itself in Brontë-country films. Have one where he had far too many.

• Adults only

A traditional gritstone inn on the cobbled street pouring Timothy Taylor’s ales from the Keighley brewery over the hill, low-ceilinged bars, open fires and home-cooked Yorkshire food, with a few rooms above. Timeworn and warm.

• Adults only

An independent café and pottery-painting studio in a double stone cottage near the top of Main Street, open all day for breakfast, brunch and afternoon tea among the hand-painted ceramics. A warm stop on a cold cobbled hill, going since 2006.

• Quiet

A witchy oddity shop run by a woman named Winter: tarot, protection charms, crystals, sage and made-to-order spell kits and herbs by the scoop, and among the curiosities taxidermy mice, mummified fairies and a pair of supposedly haunted twin dolls, Molly and Polly. Haworth’s most openly gothic address.

• Solo-friendly

A restored Victorian druggist’s and apothecary, mahogany cases and salvaged chemist fittings full of handmade botanical candles, soaps and bath powders, with Cauldron Books, a nook of magical and esoteric titles, tucked at the back. A wonder-room in the middle of the street.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

Billed as the oldest esoteric bookshop in the North of England, trading since 1983, a big range of tarot decks, crystals, runes, pendulums and incense, with card readings and a quiet corner to sit. A long-standing spiritual hub on the cobbles.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A family second-hand and antiquarian bookshop since 1988, one room stacked with collectable, rare and signed books, a strong Brontë shelf among the classics. Proper old-book browsing in Brontë country.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A vintage clothing emporium in the Old Bar House, stacked to the ceiling and far bigger inside than the front lets on: vintage clothes, textiles and period jewellery, forties suits to seventies dresses to leather jackets. Open seven days, the village’s vintage headquarters.

• Solo-friendly