1 Bridgehouse Mill

With Haworth Station behind you, follow Station Road to your right and walk along until you reach a bend in the road and a bridge on your right hand side. Cross over the road and stop at the site of Bridgehouse Mill.

This handsome five-storey stone building was once a cotton spinning mill. Built in 1790 it was also the first textile mill to be powered by water. Notice how many windows there are. Spinning yarn into cotton required a lot of light.

As well as cotton, local work was centred specifically on the woollen industry, and the washing and weaving of wool. There were 5 large woollen mills and 1200 handlooms in Haworth and Oxenhope alone.

So why were there so many woollen mills in this area of Yorkshire? Haworth, like nearby Keighley, Bradford and Thornton benefitted from locally available coal, stone and wool. The deep valleys and climate of heavy rainfall created a plentiful and powerful water supply. These naturally occurring resources and the local workforce, created the textile industry.

Living conditions for workers however were often poor and there was little sanitation. Houses were overcrowded by large families and mortality rates were high. Much piecework was done at home or in long working days in the factories.

Although their lives were very different, The Brontës would have experienced the noise, smoke and smells from these ‘dark Satanic mills’ and been aware of the lives of the workers. Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley published in 1849 is set against the backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire cotton mills. 

2 Remains of water channel

See if you can spot the remains of a long, low, man-made water channel. This channel (or goit) was built to re-direct the water flowing from Bridgehouse Beck (the beck just below us) down towards a water-wheel which powered Bridgehouse Mill where we started the trail. But was it necessary to dig this trench?  Surely with a regular rainfall the beck itself would provide enough water to power the factories?

Although the local climate provided regular rainfall it wasn’t enough to guarantee a constant, powerful flow. For the mill owners periods of low rain fall were not good for production. This water channel helped feed a constant supply of water from the beck into a dam which in turn powered the water wheel and kept the looms working and the workers busy.

Now take in the view around you, down into the valley and towards the beck, and then behind you at the steep hillside opposite Haworth. During the last Ice Age around 18-25,000 years ago a layer of thick ice covered the north of Britain. Both the ice itself and the torrents of meltwater that were unleashed when it melted, helped to carve the steep valleys we see in the landscape. 

Steep-sided valleys like the one you are standing in now were perfect sites for industries relying on waterpower, well before electricity was developed. Natural forces created the ideal conditions for industry to thrive and in turn formed the particular character of this area of West Yorkshire where mill towns nestle in deep valleys. This combination of rugged scenery and smoking factories must have helped form the strong imaginations of the Brontës and were evocative settings against which their dramatic novels could unfold. 

3 Rocky outcrop

You’ll often see outcrops of hard rock on and around the hills of West Yorkshire. The Cow and Calf rocks on Ilkley Moor are perhaps one of the most well-known examples. 

Such rocks were formed in the Carboniferous period around 360-290 million years ago, when this was a swampy area. Over time layers of sand and mud were laid down and compressed together to form hard rock layers – these are the millstone grits that formed the Pennines. Look closely and you’ll see the layers, rather like a millefeuille pastry.

Here the rocks lie directly along the line of the Hewenden Fault, a small fracture line in the earth’s surface and part of the Craven Fault pattern that stretches across North Yorkshire and Lancashire. Towards the end of the Carboniferous Period a distant collision of continents created the power and the stress to generate earthquakes, open up fault lines and force the rocks upwards to form the hilly and rocky Pennine landscape. The rocks here aren’t particularly high (around 200 metres), but in other parts of the region the uplift was 1,500 metres.

But why are some rocks like these found in outcrops or left standing in isolation? When the ice melted much of the softer rocks were washed away by the melt-water. Over the years these rocks were further eroded by wind and rain, leaving only the harder lumps of rock, like this outcrop, exposed.

In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, these outcrops of gritstone rock become symbolic of a dead, barren landscape:“The abrupt descent of Penistone Crags particularly attracted her notice; especially when the setting sun shone on it and the topmost heights, and the whole extent of landscape besides lay in shadow. I explained that they were bare masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish a stunted tree.”

4 Meadow looking up to bank

The rising bank of land you can see ahead is another feature shaped by water during the Ice Age. If you look carefully, you may notice that it slopes slightly, and is curved at the top.

The bank is made up of boulder clay. The glaciers that once covered the land here actually flowed very gradually, like slow-motion rivers of ice. As it travelled over the rocky landscape the ice picked up debris and gradually wore it down into fine particles and silt. When the ice finally melted, streams flowed across the country, carrying with them the silt. It is thought that several rivers flowed together to form a river delta here.

When the water reached the lower part of the hillside it had less energy so deposited the silt - forming boulder clay. This created the bank we see today. Where the water stopped suddenly then trickled immediately downwards, it left a sharp, curved edge to the bank.

5 Oxenhope railway station

Here at Oxenhope station you can take the train back to Haworth where we started the trail. Built in 1867 to bring factory workers to the mills from Keighley, Bradford and beyond, this railway line was instrumental in the success of the textile mills and the huge profits made by the mill owners.

The line follows the path of the river towards Haworth along the bottom of the valley. Today the station and railway line is a key part of the local tourist trail. Oxenhope station and this line were used in the popular film version of The Railway Children. 

Thousands of visitors come to Haworth, Top Withens and Oxenhope from all over the world. Some to follow in the footsteps of Brontës’ characters but many are compelled by the drama and ‘wildness’ of this rugged moorland. Our perceptions of this landscape are indelibly caught up with the vision they created of a wild, untamed place carved from ice and eroded by rain and wind.

On this trail we’ve gone beyond the fiction to find out how physical processes that happened thousands of years ago have given this area its novel character that we cannot help but think of a ‘Brontë Country.’