Bronte's Day

Yesterday was all about visiting Pride & Prejudice sites, today was Bronte's day.

We started off with a little tour of Eyam, a town ravaged by the plague in 1666, half of the inhabitants died.  Not that this has anything to do with literature, but the town was unique in that they self-imposed a quarantine on the town and no one was allowed to leave or enter the village as long as the disease raged.  Nowadays there are nice little plaques on all the historical buildings, and a really old Saxon cross in the churchyard.

8th century Saxon cross

Then it was time for some scenic driving up to the north of the Park: up,  around, and over Mam Tor for fantastic views, and we were surprised by paragliders taking off right beside us and soaring overhead like giant condors riding the thermals.

Next we drove thru the amazing Winnats Pass to Castleton for a Cream Tea lunch.  The idea was to hike up to the ruin of Peveril Castle afterwards but the scones weighed heavy in our bellies so we drove on to Hathersage - Bronte territory.

I found on the National Park's website a Jane Eyre/Hathersage walk that seemed to give us a good taste of the scenery and a good workout too, 8km in about 3+ hours.  Goodness knows we needed some exercise after all our feasting on the cruise!

We started right from town at The George Inn where reportedly Charlotte Bronte had frequented, and walked along a public footpath out into the fields, right alongside a grand estate's backyard!  In England the walking paths are sacred rights-of-way and cut across farms and private property, as long as you're respectful of their holdings, they have to let you pass.

Anyway, this first megalith with a forest of chimneys is reputed to be Vale Hall, owned by the Oliver's, the wealthy family of the little village where Jane finds work as a teacher after running away from Mr. Rochester.   We then walked a short way up a private driveway to pass by Rochester's Thornfield (actually North Lees Hall), a small crenellated manse, not quite as imposing as we had imagined from the book's descriptions.  But how cool was this?  Obviously Charlotte came this way for a visit at some time and here, all within a mile or two, was the infrastructure of her novel!  Coincidentally I had just finished reading "Jane Eyre" on my Camino, not realizing I'd soon be walking in her footsteps!

"Thornfield"

Then we hiked up and up thru heavy woodland till we popped out at the base of Stanage Edge, a magnificently cruel cut in the earth, where the world just falls away ....60' to the valley below. 

Here Bronte meets Austen, for another favorite P&P movie scene is where Kiera Knightley stands on the edge, looking so glamorously into infinity, I could have sworn it was done on a movie set, but look....

We tried to replicate it but Hair & Makeup failed to show....

We walked a kilometer along the Edge, me with a tight hold on Sheila as she has a height-thing, heads bent into the blustery wind that buffeted us about.  The sky was blanketed with billowing grey clouds and the occasional spotlight of sunbeams breaking through. So Bronte-esque. 

To our left a flat field of low scrubby windswept heather extended as far as the eye could see.  Bronte envisioned Jane struggling through this moor for 2 days & a night when she ran away from Thorncliff, and a more brutal environ could not be imagined.  The only relief to all the relentless brown were the small tufts of cream sheep's wool attached to the odd bush from the poor animals' huddling against the cold.

Eventually the trail sloped down again from the Edge (I actually asked a rock climber about how to get down but his offer was a bit too quick).  Down thru a fern forest,

past Moorseats (Moor House, where Jane lived with St. John and his sisters), with the current owner's Mercedes and Land Rovers in the drive and helicopter landing pad in the lower field, and thru steep woods to finally end our hike in Hathersage's churchyard.  Charlotte Bronte's imagination brought the world the story of Jane Eyre, and Hathersage and the Peak District brought her story alive for us.

Saw this in the church graveyard...

is another literary walk in order?