# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë | Symbols

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë | Themes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The annual Exmoor Dark Skies Festival gets underway in mid-October, with a range of tours, activities and stargazing events for those of all ages. Covering 267 square miles, explore the vast expanse of moorland, woods and valleys, while looking out for elusive dormice among the hedgerows and listening to the bellows of passionate stags. Autumn signals rutting season for the park's herd of red deer, while Atlantic salmon fill the rivers as they return to their spawning grounds.

A number of spots across Exmoor allow you to see thousands of stars with the naked eye on a clear night. Popular areas include around Holdstone Hill, where purple heather and richly-coloured bracken provide a spectacular autumnal sight, and Haddon Hill, which overlooks the shores of Wimbleball Lake. Other locations for exceptional views include Webber's Post, in Somerset, and the area around Brendon Two Gates.

Embark on a Land Rover safari at dusk to discover the magical sights and sounds of the National Park during the festival, as well as some of its myths and legends. Stargazing walks and educational sessions are some of the other activities set to be available, alongside guided ranger walks and astronomy presentations. Those wishing to learn more about the magnificent surroundings and the skies above them can also join several virtual events and talks, or visit some of the region's farms to mix stargazing with a chance to sample the delicacies of the harvest. For more information about some of the events included in the Exmoor Dark Skies Festival, visit the Exmoor National Park website.

The North York Moors and Yorkshire Dales Dark Skies Festival is scheduled for 12-28 February 2021, with a distinct focus on nature at night. A packed itinerary of events is set to provide a glimpse into the lives of the region's nocturnal creatures, while delving into how the area's dark skies impact upon their very existence. The celebrations in 2020 saw both National Parks feature their largest programmes of events since the inaugural event in 2016, with events for 2021 set to be unveiled in due course.

North York Moors will also host its first Dark Skies Fringe Festival, running from 23 October to 1 November 2020, giving stargazers another opportunity to enjoy the jewels of the park's dark skies. Set to echo the larger celebrations seen in February, details of the events, alongside information on how to book, will be released soon. Here you can enjoy the striking landscapes of the North York Moors, relax in an array of picturesque market towns and villages, and gaze out over dramatic seascapes. Soak up the autumnal scenery from aboard the North York Moors Railway, a heritage line crossing the moorland, or venture to Ashberry Nature Reserve to catch a glimpse of the wild deer herds that wander around the ancient woodland.

Another Dark Skies Festival is held in the South Downs each February too, with details set to be announced later in 2020. With a stellar line up of talks, observation sessions and family-friendly activities planned, you can also wander the fairy-tale battlements of Arundel Castle and explore Britain's longest and deepest dry valley at Devil's Dyke within the stunning surroundings of Britain's newest National Park.

In addition to the four International Dark Sky Reserves, Britain is also home to a number of International Dark Sky Parks. One example is the 45,000 acres of the Elan Valley International Dark Sky Park, in mid Wales, roughly half way between the Snowdonia and Brecon Beacons International Dark Sky Reserves to the north and south. Scotland is home to a further two locations, with Galloway Forest Park and the skies above Tomintoul and Glenlivet in the Cairngorms both awarded International Dark Sky Park status. With its shimmering lochs and forested glens, Galloway is a mix of spectacular colours in the autumn, while the Cairngorms is the most northerly Dark Sky Park in the world. Both provide stargazers with a chance to be at one with nature while taking in the wonders of the night sky. The Northumberland and Kielder Water and Forest Park provides ample opportunity to spy the stars too, as well as ospreys that call the region home. Alongside this International Dark Sky Park, there also more than 150 Dark Sky Discovery Sites across Britain to explore.
Different attractions will have varied measures in place. You are encouraged to check all locations, attraction and event websites before travelling, so you can explore Britain with confidence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Celebrating Britain's Dark Skies and outdoor spaces

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The annual Exmoor Dark Skies Festival gets underway in mid-October, with a range of tours, activities and stargazing events for those of all ages. Covering 267 square miles, explore the vast expanse of moorland, woods and valleys, while looking out for elusive dormice among the hedgerows and listening to the bellows of passionate stags.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Situating Emily Brontë in her hometown of Haworth - a small Yorkshire mill town surrounded by moors - Professor John Bowen reflects on the representation of landscape in Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë lived not in a mythical moorland fastness but in a rapidly industrialising world. Her home, Haworth Parsonage, looked down on a small Yorkshire mill town and backed onto the moors. The bleakly beautiful West Yorkshire moors have often helped to define in important ways how readers and critics have interpreted Wuthering Heights - as a strange and wild book about a remote and unfamiliar landscape. Yet it is important to remember that Haworth was a modern working town, with several mills and a good deal of industrial unrest. Although it might have seemed distant from London, it was not so far from Manchester (the 'shock city of the age') and the bustling metropolis of Leeds. It was part of a world in rapid motion that witnessed the dramatic mid-Victorian transformation of nature and work in both town and country, changes powered by the railways (for which Branwell Brontë worked) and by the mills that surrounded them.

Photographs by Fay Godwin of Howarth Parsonage, home of the Brontës, and Top Withens

Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse believed to have influenced Wuthering Heights, photographed in the 20th century by Fay Godwin.

Usage terms: Public Domain

But this was not simply a change of landscape. As Terry Eagleton writes:

It was not just a question of cotton mills, rural enclosures, hunger and class-struggle, but of the crystallising of a whole new sensibility, one appropriate to an England which was becoming for the first time a largely urban society. It was a matter of learning new disciplines and habits of feeling, new rhythms of time and organisation of space, new forms of repression, deference and self-fashioning. A whole new mode of human subjectivity was in the making ... both aspiring and frustrated, rootless and solitary yet resourceful and self-reliant.

This new world, and the landscapes and townscapes it brought with it were decisive presences in Emily and her sisters' lives and writing.

Sanitary report on Haworth, home to the Brontës

Sanitary report about the Brontës's home town of Haworth, Yorkshire, revealing the extent of industrialisation, poor living conditions and high death rates, 1850.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Nature and destruction

The moors mattered too, of course, particularly to Emily, who was fascinated by their austere beauty and by the destructive and consoling powers of the natural world that they embodied. An early essay by her saw nature as essentially destructive and indifferent to human purposes and needs: 'All creation is equally mad... Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live, yet nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world.' Wuthering Heights has at its heart these contradictory qualities and constantly binds together the deadly and regenerative qualities of nature: even the level-headed Nelly Dean is 'seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death' (ch. 15).

The landscape of Wuthering Heights is very different from the 'carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers' that Charlotte Brontë criticised Jane Austen's fiction for depicting. Nature is often deeply inhospitable in the book, not easily subdued to human purpose, comfort or design. Landscape is thus never simply a setting or something to be contemplated in Brontë's work, but an active and shaping presence in the lives of its characters. Lockwood has to learn to find his way to and from the Heights before he can begin to understand the extraordinary story that he is about to be told.

So when thinking about Wuthering Heights, we should not see it as a novel that simply depicts or belongs to the moors. The final stanza of one of the Brontës' most celebrated poems (we do not know if it was written Emily or Charlotte) begins 'I'll walk where my own nature will be leading'. It is concerned with both an essential human 'nature' and an absolute freedom that goes beyond any particular place or time. The speaker's deep sense of embodiedness and place is seamed with the hope of radical freedom. At the very end of Wuthering Heights, a little shepherd boy who is 'crying terribly' tells Nelly that he has seen the dead Heathcliff and Cathy 'walk' on the moors (ch. 34). It confirms how they remain simultaneously deeply identified with the landscape and sinister and alien presences within it. Their own deep sense of belonging to the moors is a source of terror and estrangement for others. Belonging is the way not to belong.

Usage terms: Some rights reserved
Held by: © By arrangement with the Estate of Clare Leighton

Footnotes

[1] Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës: Anniversary Edition (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. xiii.

[2] Emily Brontë, The Belgian Essays: a critical edition, ed. and translated by Sue Lonoff (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 176.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Walking the landscape of Wuthering Heights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Situating Emily Brontë in her hometown of Haworth - a small Yorkshire mill town surrounded by moors - Professor John Bowen reflects on the representation of landscape in Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë lived not in a mythical moorland fastness but in a rapidly industrialising world.