IMS writes:
1801- I have just returned
from a visit to my landlord.
Wuthering Heights is the
name of Mr Heathcliff’s dwelling.
2014- I have just returned from a visit to Ponden Hall. I had
left my car at the bottom of the hill and as I approached the house a light
shone from a small mullioned window. Mist was floating, as cotton wool, over
the waters of Ponden Reservoir, the sky was black and a little rain had begun
to fall.
I thought of the three small Brontë children, Branwell, Emily and
Anne, with their servant Sarah Garrs, hurrying from the high moors, in 1824,
towards the safety of the porch at Ponden Hall, where the Heaton famly lived, as a thunderstorm raged above
whilst they were out walking. The Crow Hill Bog had burst which sent a great
wall of stones, mud and debris more than a mile down the moors.
The lighting flasht, the
thunderstorm crasht and its tremendous bowels burst. ( sic)
Words from a poem relating to the eruption by John Nicholson, ‘The
Airedale Poet’.
I thought also of Patrick
anxiously looking out of an upstairs window at the Parsonage awaiting their
return. As he heard a deep distant explosion, something different from thunder,
and felt a tremor in the window from which he was looking, how thankful he
would have felt when he heard that they had escaped the worst of the deluge and
were all safe at Ponden.
I reached the safety of the Hall before the rain
really came down, passed a plaque above the porch which said the house, whose
origins were in the 1500s and 1600s, had been refurbished in 1801 by Robert
Heaton and remembered the words in Chapter One of Wuthering Heights: above the principal door I detected
the date ‘1500’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw.’
Is it mere coincidence that
Hareton is an anagram of R. Heaton?
I received a warm welcome from Julie and Steve who own the
property and was thrilled to be inside the house with its many Bronte
connections. I was there to ‘take tea with Mrs Bronte’- well not exactly but to
hear expert Angela Crow speak about Maria Branwell who left Cornwall when she
married the Reverend Patrick Bronte in 1812. A few people sat in front of the
fireplace, a fireplace which Branwell is said to have sketched, others sat
around a long table.
Angela gave an informative talk about the Brontës (
Pruntys) who had humble beginnings in Ireland and also about the Branwells. The
Branwells were a respected family who were merchants in Penzance and Angela
gave everyone a flavour of what it was like in a Cornish fishing town at the
time and gave an insight into Mrs Brontë’s early life there.
Seated at the table eating an
absolutely delicious afternoon tea, provided by Julie, I recalled the story of
Emily taking tea at Ponden and how, much to the embarrassment of her host, a
dog was giving birth to puppies under the very table at which they were
sitting. I am sure Emily would not have cared a jot about that! Very much
replete – the veritable feast had included ham sandwiches with lavender cheese,
pound cake with raspberries, plum cake, almond pancakes- we were then given a
tour of the house.
Upstairs we were led into a
large beamed room.
I fastened the door and
glanced round for the bed. The whole furniture consisted of a chair, a clothes-press
and a large oak case with squares cut out near the top- resembling coach
windows. I looked inside and perceived it to be a singular sort of old
fashioned couch. It fact it formed a little closet and the ledge of a window
which it enclosed served as a table.
Julie explained that they had
commissioned a box bed to be made for this room and its position and style were
exactly the same as the one described by Mr Lockwood which he had found in the
room Zillah allocated to him at Wuthering Heights.
I imagined how it would be
very warm and cosy on a cold winter’s night, with the wind howling down the
chimney, enclosed in that bed. In this room, also, was a window which Emily had
drawn when she was about ten which portrays a broken pane of glass with a hand.
Thoughts of the story of Wuthering Heights forming in her mind even at such a young age?
We then moved on to the room which had been the library in
the Bronte’s time and which was supposed to be the finest library in the West
Riding and included a Shakespeare’s First Folio. Julie pointed out the actual
shelves from which the Brontës could have selected books. She told us that when the last Heaton
died, a bachelor in 1898, the books, which would all have a Ponden Hall plate
inside, were sold in the market in Keighley and those unpurchased were used to
wrap vegetables.
Another large upstairs room illustrated how the house had
altered down the centuries, for it was quite easy to see what had once been
outside walls. In the 1600s a two storey peat loft had been built. In the upper
storey the peat was dried from the heat rising from the cattle which were
housed below. In 1801 when the dwelling was refurbished a new section of house
was built between the main one and the peat loft. It has long been thought that
Ponden Hall was the setting for Thrushcross Grange in Emily Brontë’s
masterpiece but it was remarked upon that there are certainly many
similarities to the Earnshaw’s old
home- Wuthering Heights- within the house. What a really
superb afternoon- Julie and Steve were wonderful hosts and Angela had given an
interesting picture of the family and place of birth Maria left behind to marry
the man she loved We had heard about lives and cultures in three differing
places- Ireland, Cornwall and Yorkshire but places all drawn together by
writers who produced some of the greatest novels in the English Language.
