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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/21/organic-forces-take-over-brontes-land-of-secrets
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| Organic forces take over Brontë's land of secrets | Organic forces take over Brontë's land of secrets |
| (2 days later) | |
| The rain started as I crossed the pasture above North Lees Hall, the model, it is widely accepted, for Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. It’s a house the author visited more than once, staying with her friend Ellen Nussey in nearby Hathersage, and the intertwining of the names – thorn being an anagram of north and lee derived from the Anglo-Saxon for field – coupled with the detailed description Brontë gives, are persuasive. | The rain started as I crossed the pasture above North Lees Hall, the model, it is widely accepted, for Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. It’s a house the author visited more than once, staying with her friend Ellen Nussey in nearby Hathersage, and the intertwining of the names – thorn being an anagram of north and lee derived from the Anglo-Saxon for field – coupled with the detailed description Brontë gives, are persuasive. |
| This landscape in the Peak District is itself a place of secrets: narrow, steeply sided valleys burrowing down off the domed moor, thick with oaks, and then a sudden glimpse of the wide sky and the crisp, squared-off, gritstone of Stanage. | This landscape in the Peak District is itself a place of secrets: narrow, steeply sided valleys burrowing down off the domed moor, thick with oaks, and then a sudden glimpse of the wide sky and the crisp, squared-off, gritstone of Stanage. |
| Getting wet, I ran for the cover of trees, pausing briefly to squint through the shower at the ruins of the neighbouring Catholic chapel, just a wall with a window now, torn down, it is said, during the “glorious revolution” in 1688. | Getting wet, I ran for the cover of trees, pausing briefly to squint through the shower at the ruins of the neighbouring Catholic chapel, just a wall with a window now, torn down, it is said, during the “glorious revolution” in 1688. |
| History is not so much layered here as crammed in, like old furniture in an attic, along with Mrs Rochester. In the woods, above a clearing, cupped behind a high retaining wall buried in creepers like some lost Inca ruin, was a chocolate-brown pool overhung with alder and oak. It was long and crescent shaped. The only sound was drops falling off the leaves and rippling the surface. | History is not so much layered here as crammed in, like old furniture in an attic, along with Mrs Rochester. In the woods, above a clearing, cupped behind a high retaining wall buried in creepers like some lost Inca ruin, was a chocolate-brown pool overhung with alder and oak. It was long and crescent shaped. The only sound was drops falling off the leaves and rippling the surface. |
| Waiting for the rain to ease I explored the stubby walls of what was once an adjacent building. The riddle of these structures foxed me when I first came across them. Were they somehow connected to the chapel? | |
| Not a bit of it. The pond was built to power a lead smelting works, probably in the early 18th century. In the 1840s, when Brontë visited, the site was being used as a paper factory. Now it felt somewhere wholly organic, reclaimed. | |
| The rain ended, the air filled with insects and soon after birds – wrens, and a nuthatch, which, as if impatient with the delay, tore at moss covering the high branch of an oak. Then the sound of a distant “tseep”, a flycatcher darting out at the clouds of insects from the branches of a young rowan to fill its beak. | |
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