There is something very evocative about the name Top Withens.  Even without its association with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, it conjures up a feeling of a place, which is both wild and remote.  Arashi Ga Oka, less so, IMHO.

Strange to see the niche bilingualism of way-markings on this far flung north Yorkshire moor, but such is the popularity of Wuthering Heights (Arashi Ga Oka) in Japan, that the area has become something of a place of pilgrimage for Japanese literary tourists.  Not that I saw any on my own walk.  Or pretty much anyone else, if it comes to that.

The route to Top Withens starts along a short footpath towards the rear of the Brontë Pilgrimage Museum in Haworth.  This footpath rejoins West Lane via a very narrow stone kissing gate, and I mean very narrow.  I consider myself skinny and I struggled to squeeze through sideways.

Once on the road, take a slight left-hand veer to join Cemetery Road, and then it is a pretty much straight 3.5-mile route to Top Withens itself.  Simples.

Although the first section of the route is along a car-carrying road, there is not a great deal of traffic, and there are nice views across the Sladen Valley and, once Enfield Side Road is reached, to the Lower Laithe Reservoir.  Here a cattle grid denotes the end of the tarmac, whilst a no-less-easy-to-follow track, running alongside a low dry-stone wall, heads steadily up onto the moors.

Sheep graze at the side of the path, and burnished brown is the prevalent spring-time colour.  It is hard not to imagine myself walking in the footsteps of Emily Brontë; equally hard not to hear a constant soundtrack of a certain Kate Bush song echoing in my head.

The Brontë Waterfalls––not seen at their best after one of the driest Marchs on record––is a convenient place to pause and eat my packed lunch.  Here, there is a relatively modern stone clapper bridge across South Dean Beck, and a sharp right turn, uphill, towards Top Withens.

The path now becomes slightly muddier; slightly marshier, in places––but remember that dry March; maybe it is worse after rain––but it remains an easy ramble, the iconic Top Withens tree a distinctive landmark from at least a mile distant, even if the actual farmhouse that bears the name does not come into sight until the final ascent.

I do not have the summit entirely to myself, but it is still possible to enjoy the isolation of this lonely spot, the likely inspiration for Brontë’s Earnshaw house.  The farmhouse is ruined now; a blasted building, looking out atop an uninhabited landscape.

I would happily linger longer, but my gaze has already travelled to the west, where dark, threatening storm clouds are beginning to gather––it looks as though the March drought might be about to break.  Accordingly, I begin to retrace my steps before I find myself an unprepared traveller ‘out on the wily, windy moors’.

© E. C. Glendenny

E. C. Glendenny is coming home to Arashi Ga Oka.