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Haworth

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Haworth, Main Street
File:Haworth2.jpg
Haworth, Main Street
For alternate meanings see Haworth (disambiguation)

Haworth is a small village and tourist attraction, in the English county of West Yorkshire, best known for its association with the Brontë sisters.

Description

With its situation above the Worth Valley amid the bleak Pennine moors, Haworth is internationally famous for its connection with the Brontë sisters, who were born in Thornton, Bradford, but wrote most of their famous novels while living at the Haworth Parsonage (which is now a museum owned and maintained by the Brontë Society), when their father was the parson at the adjacent Haworth church.

Other attractions include the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, an authentic preserved steam railway which has been used as a setting for numerous period films and TV series, including The Railway Children (starring Jenny Agutter), Yanks (starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave), and Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall (starring Bob Geldof). Every year the village also hosts a very special 1940s weekend where locals and visitors don wartime attire for a host of nostalgic events.

Many public footpaths lead out of the village, and there is much scope for rambling, though perhaps the most famous walk leads past Stanbury Reservoir to the picturesque (but unspectacular) Brontë waterfalls, the Brontë Bridge, and the Brontë Stone Chair in which (it is said) the sisters took turns to sit and write their first stories. This path (which forms part of the 64 km (40 mile) long Brontë Way) then leads out of the valley and up on the moors to Ponden Hall (Thrushcross Grange in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights) and Top Withens, a desolate ruin which was (reputedly) the setting for the farmstead Wuthering Heights in the novel. (Top Withens can also be reached by a shorter walking route departing from the nearby village of Stanbury.)

In Haworth itself there are many tea rooms, souvenir and antiquarian bookshops, restaurants, pubs and hotels (including the Black Bull, where Branwell Brontë's decline into alcoholism and opium addiction allegedly began). As such, Haworth is a good base for exploring the principal attractions of Brontë Country, while still being close to the major cities of Bradford and Leeds. Further afield lies the historic city of York, and the spa towns of Harrogate and Ilkley - popular spa towns on the edge of the beautiful Yorkshire Dales National Park to the North.

Haworth is a very popular destination for Japanese tourists, and many of the signposts are in Japanese as well as English. (Wuthering Heights has a cult following in Japan.)

On November 22, 2002, Haworth was granted Fairtrade Village status. On October 21, 2005 Haworth Fairtrade officially signed an agreement to twin with Machu Picchu in Peru.

Location

Template:GBdot Haworth is located in the high Pennine moors, some 3 miles south-west of the larger town of Keighley and 10 miles west of Bradford. The surrounding areas include Oakworth and Oxenhope. Nearby villages include Cross Roads, Stanbury and Lumbfoot.

grid reference SE030372

See also

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