The mentality of present day residents in those cloughs and valleys through which the peaty brown waters cascade from the high moor-lands of the Pennines, is to define “community” in terms of valleys. Hence people think in terms of Airedale, Calderdale, Wharfedale and so forth. This innate inclination to view the fells that limit the horizons as walls every bit as substantial as their innumerable dry-stone counterparts, has been accentuated by the development in late Victorian times of roads and railways running along the valley floors.
Travel in the Early Nineteenth Century.
People often define community in terms of travel and that today, is along the valley floors. The people now, who live over the hill are a bigger “them” not a cosy “us”. However this perspective was not always so. In former times travel routes ran across the moor-tops, avoiding the valley floors. Merely by tracing the spread of surnames in the Pennine area it is possible to discern how families spread out along the pack-horse trails forming upland communities that superseded any formal questions of county or municipal boundary.
Consider then the Bronte sisters of the early nineteenth century, who already lived atop one such moor, that of Haworth, and who were inclined both by temperament and limited resources to occupy their leisure time wandering across the bleak fell-sides. They would have found the path to Wycoller daunting neither, physically nor psychologically. And what a rich dramatic scene would present itself when Charlotte first stepped across the weaver’s bridge in front of Wycoller Hall.
Wycoller's Ruination.
The hall itself was home to the Cunliffe family who acquired it by marriage shortly before the english civil war. The last Squire of Wycoller, Henry Owen Cunliffe died in the year 1818, by which time the hall was subject to mortgages, one in favour of the Squire’s brother-in-law Mr John Oldham who subsequently foreclosed. The hall then, was held under orders from the Court of Chancery to be sold at the Red Lion Inn, Colne, Lancashire at one-o-clock on the 27th August 1823, but it remained unsold and by 1886 the hall was in a ruinous state unoccupied, unglazed and all woodwork having been removed. There was enough of the exterior of the building remaining though to show that it had been “picturesque and imposing in its time”.
The reason for its ruination, typified by the entire removal of the two-storey porch from the front of the hall to be rebuilt two and a half miles away in the village of Trawden, was money. The mortgagor seeking to recoup his losses and being unable to sell the hall, sold instead the very fabric of the building. This policy, doubtlessly augmented by casual pillaging of the hall’s fabric for other uses, when combined with the ever-growing number of town-based textile mills with which rural hand-loom weavers could not compete, led to the gradual abandonment and desertion of the village itself.
Would They Have Gone to Wycoller.
So visualise a day, probably in the 1840’s, when two sisters, genteel yet impoverished, seeking escape from the rantings of Branwell perhaps, set out again to a haven of solitude away from the squalor of Haworth; out on to the spirit-freeing fell-tops. What a day that would have been. What dramas they likely dreamed; what conjectures; what collaborations.
Of course they may have taken carriage from Haworth via Stanbury, Ponden and Scartop along the old Colne road, but the more whimsically minded, may place Charlotte in company with Emily wandering together across the moor itself ascending to Top Withens (Wuthering Heights) skirting the bulk of Boulsworth Fell and descending into the wooded dene of Wycoller, to discover what at journey’s end?
Wycoller Today.
Wycoller is a tiny hamlet clustered around a ford crossing a foaming beck flowing down from Boulsworth Fell, its icy waters browned by the peat of the high moor bogs. Dominating the hamlet from a pre-eminent position at the head of the lane winding through the cottages stands Wycoller hall. Today it is a brooding, roofless ruin that resonates far more with the ill-fated Thornfield Hall, home to Rochester and his lunatic wife, than to Ferndean Manor to whose isolated walls Charlotte committed her alter-ego and her ideal man. But even then twenty or twenty-five years after the old squire died Wycoller Hall’s dilapidation and seclusion would surely excite the imagination of this unlikeliest of novelists demonstrating that boundaries are too frequently self-imposed and that it requires only imagination to transcend them.
Steven J Smith - Why do I write ? I have so much to say ! What do you want to know about me ? Nothing that will compromise my personal or financial ...
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