Walking Through History - Series 3

10 November 2014

Bronte Country - Saturday 25 October, 8pm, Channel 4

The dramatic moors and valleys of West Yorkshire are the backdrop for an unusual slice of the past in the first of a new series of Tony Robinson’s walks.

This evocative landscape was home and inspiration to the Brontes, the remarkable literary family that gave us Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Over four days, Tony heads out from the Victorian wool capital of Bradford, and treks in a giant loop around what we now know as Bronte Country.

From the birth of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell, in the small Bradford suburb of Thornton, Tony traces their childhoods to the much-romanticised Bronte hub of Haworth. But as he finds out, the shocking reality of 1820’s life in the mill town was far removed both from the tourist town of today, and from the fantasy world dreamed up by the Bronte children at their father’s Parsonage home.

Out on the moors, Tony can appreciate both the freedom and the constraints of life around Haworth as the girls grow up. But as adults and famous novelists, it’s clear what an impact the moors made to the whole family. He tracks down the landmarks which inspired locations from their best known books such as the grand Ferndean Manor at the end of Jane Eyre, to Wuthering Heights itself. So much of what the girls’ poured into their books can be found as Tony heads across the moors to the Calder Valley.

But Tony finds that Bronte Country is laced with great sadness too, from the disease and hardships of life around the valley mills, to the failure and demise of brother Branwell, and ultimately the premature deaths of the novelists themselves.

Back at Haworth, Tony discovers that Charlotte alone lived long enough to get a taste of the fame that she and her siblings achieved. The first tourists arrived in the early 1850s... and they’ve not stopped coming since.

 

Executive Producer  Philip Clarke

Series Producer Owen Rodd

Producer and Directed by James Franklin

Wildfire Television 2014