Brontë Sisters Birth and Residence Places - Do you know where are they?

Together with Bursts of Bubbles we are travelling today to West Yorkshire, England as she is going to tell us about Thornton and Haworth, both rural villages within the metropolitan borough of the City of Bradford. Maybe you already know that Thornton is the birth place of the Brontë sisters: Emily, Anne and Charlotte who are well known classic book writers, while Haworth was their place of residence until they died.

Bursts of Bubbles has been into penpalling for the last twenty-one years and she started writing letters when her primary school class made a letter-exchange with children in a different school. She has never stopped ever since.

Thornton is a typical village of the Pennines, with houses built in stone. You can go and visit the Brontë sisters birth place which is situated within the village at 74, Market Street, but there is not much else for you to see there except the view of the most beautiful countryside and an old rail bridge. The remains of the Thornton Chapel (known as Bell Chapel) where the father of the Brontë sisters preached from 1815 to 1820 can be seen in the restored old graveyard off Thornton Road opposite the current Church.

The Brontë family moved to Haworth some years later. The sisters wrote most of their famous novels while living at the Haworth Parsonage (which is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum and a shrine to the family). The surroundings of the family's home were the source of inspiration for the three sisters, a landscape characterized by moorland, which had a deep influence on their writing. In the Parsonage it is possible to see family memorabilia, original furniture and library collections. You can visit it and walk in the footsteps where the writers played when being little children.

Haworth still looks quite old with its cobbled streets and little shops. You can take a ride in the old steam train around the village or lead a path to Stanbury, a small village nearby, where the Brontë Waterfall, Bridge and Stone Chair are located (it is said that the sisters took turns to sit on the Stone Chair to write their first stories). The surroundings of the waterfall, of outstanding beauty, are mainly moorland and farmland. Following the path out of the valley and up on the moors you reach Ponden Hall, a farmhouse which is believed to be the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange (home of the Linton family) in Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" as well as Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse which is said to have been the inspiration of the Earnshaw home in the same novel.

See you in the next travel around the world!