Wednesday 30 November 2016

Photos from Haworth

In September we went to Haworth in Yorkshire. It was home to the Brontë family in the nineteenth century. We visited the Parsonage, which was their home and is now a museum to their often very sad lives. The place has a bit of a feel of death and unrequited love about it. Notable exhibits were Charlotte's tiny dress and impossibly miniature-seeming shoes. People were smaller then, evidently. Also, apparently the dress has shrunk a bit over the course of 150 years.

Jo and I listened to this audio drama in the Parsonage's churchyard. It definitely added to the atmosphere of the place, since it was well-written and had good sound editing.



Apart from the Parsonage, there are lots of old-fashioned looking shops in Haworth. This chemist sells bath salts (like Epsom salts, not the designer drugs) and other potions and lotions. There was a sign in Japanese by the door warning about the uneven floorboards.
We went to the tourist information office, so that we could plan the route of a walk we wanted to take through the countryside back towards Hebden Bridge (where we were due to take a train back to Manchester). We were directed to a path that runs alongside the old railway line, where some of the film The Railway Children was shot. Jo has seen this film and spent a lot of the walk describing it to me. I now feel like I've seen it.

The man in the tourist information told us about the Tour de France's 2014 visit to Haworth's cobbled streets. He then spoke about the vast numbers of Japanese tourists who visit Haworth. He made them sound like a nuisance, which seemed odd for a man employed in the tourism industry. According to this man, Japanese people are particularly interested in, and indeed travel around the world to Yorkshire in search of, sheep. He expressed bewilderment at this. The tourist information office at Haworth does, by the way, sell postcards on which pictures of sheep are printed beside Japanese characters.

view from the tourist information centre - there's a lovely view from that cobbled street, trust me


one of Haworth's many independent shops - there wasn't a chain store in sight



view from a cosy pub which I'd recommend if I could remember what it was called

on the walk through the country to Oxenhope, where we literally got on the bus to Hebden Bridge - again, there were good views all around - not  pictured: streams, railway lines, dales and sheep


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