Hila Shachar

These photos were taken on what was one of the best weekends of my life, spent in a tiny English village called Haworth. I call this weekend my literary pilgrimage, to visit the village that the author, Emily Brontë, grew up in, and to see the spot that was said to have inspired her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Let me tell you a story...

6:00 am on a Saturday morning, I woke up in my tiny cottage guest-room to a very cold and windy day. Perfect. So far this was sounding exactly like a nineteenth-century novel and my destination that day was equally literary: to climb to "Top Withins", or, as it is affectionately known, Wuthering Heights. As I climbed and climbed and climbed upon the English moors in my jeans and boots, I wondered how Emily Brontë climbed in the same manner in her nineteenth-century dress. And then I finally reached the top, and the landscape congratulated me with suitably dramatic skies and clouds. You could not find a quieter spot, or cleaner smelling air, or a better place to write. I understood immediately why Emily Brontë climbed there so often. I gave in to my inner romantic and dipped my bare toes in the green grass and opened a notebook. Appropriately enough, this weekend concluded with a typically novelistic ending: with a visit to the village graveyard. I really think this weekend was quite unfair to all my subsequent weekends, after all, how can watching DVDs ever compare?

Hila Shachar
Perth, Australia
hila-lumiere.blogspot.com