Chimney Sweep

Nice Learn: Unfettered Yorkshire

Story of Raphael Kadushin; Photographs by John Kernick

Only about 15 minutes west of York, at the beginning of my drive through Yorkshire, I realize that I have stepped deep English country.

The clues are hard to miss. There’s the billboard for the local chimney sweep. There is the lamb, the sheep, and finally the whole herd that wanders across the road. And then there are the signs for Gordale Scar Gorge and Stump Cross Caverns, brooding place names that seem to signal a spooky world ahead of us.

In fact, that’s exactly what I hope for. Yorkshire starred for the Brontë sisters and Bram Stoker, whose 19th century Gothic fiction Scratch the surface of every popular contemporary fantasy, from the Twilight saga to True Blood, and you’ll find the direct descendants of Emily Brontës Heathcliff, Stoker’s Dracula, and all the vampires, ghosts, and undead that materialized on Yorkshire’s moors.

So I came to England to drive from the Yorkshire Dales, through the North York Moors and on to the east coast to scare myself a little. I’m also here to understand why some of our deepest nightmares spread across this homely neighborhood of tea rooms and follies.

Highland cows stroll down a country road. (Photo by John Kernick)

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My first stop is Haworth, 80 km west of York. Here in the first half of the 19th century, the three Brontë sisters imagined a world of demonic villains, crazy women in the attic and dispossessed spirits in novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

The Brontë family’s rectory is at the top of the hilly town. As soon as I park my rental car and climb the stony ridge of Haworthschen Hauptstrasse, I immediately notice how the house appears to be swallowed up. Photos show the house framed by a few small graves. But in reality the cemetery floods the rectory, the tall, jagged tombstones lined up in wild, sloping rows that document the number of corpses in the city.

Typhus, cholera and tuberculosis plagued Haworth in the 19th century, and more than 40 percent of children died before they were six. Her short life is engraved all over the sprawling cemetery. A tombstone features the names of six babies, all of whom were lost to a stonemason father who modeled a sleeping child with its tiny doomed head resting on a tassel pillow at the base of the grave.

Obviously the Bront sisters were drawing from life when they wrote about death. Perhaps they also saw their own fate. Emily Brontë was buried under the desolate town church at the age of 30.

Ann Dinsdale, the collections manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, later explains to me that the local drinking water flowed from the bog spring through the cemetery grounds to the village wells and pumps. Historians associate this polluted water with Haworth’s high death toll. “The Brontës had their own private well,” notes Dinsdale, “but since the rectory is bordered on two sides by the churchyard, it is possible that their drinking water was also contaminated.”

The house now owned by the Brontë Society does not offer much relief. As I stroll through the gloomy rooms, I can’t help but feel a little claustrophobic, especially in the tiny dining room where the three sisters were writing and sharing space at a small central table. “They would walk around the dinner table every night and discuss their writing,” says Dinsdale.

Only when I go outside, into the sea of ​​wild grass, do I breathe freely again. It’s easy to imagine Emily’s ecstasy, embodied by the unrestrained passion of her characters Heathcliff and Catherine as it broke into these moors.

The town closes at dusk, so I flee 11 miles north to the Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel & Spa, an early 17th century coaching house in Bolton Abbey. Everything here is a British comedy by comparison: my guest room, which is anchored by a four-poster bed; my late afternoon tea with scones; and the dog lounge, an ode to the English love for dogs. Terrier portraits hang by the fireplace like furry pin-ups, and the flocked wallpaper is embossed with the silhouettes of Labradors and poodles. “The other night,” says chief concierge Eddie Styles, “we had ten dogs here.”

Still, it takes more than leaving Haworth to escape Yorkshire’s ghosts, which I realize the next morning when Styles starts talking again. “A bedroom here is always a bit cold and a lot of guests ask for steps even though there’s no space above,” he says. “Some say it is the ghost of a little girl who is lost in the moor and is looking for some warmth.”

She doesn’t have to look for company, as I learn when guide Alan Rowley picks me up on a marathon tour of the county. We zigzag through the moors and valleys and don’t seem to escape the ghosts. Almost every hut, every village and every sight has its own fairy tale or apparition.

Rowley, who sold his pub in York to get interested in local history, has heard all the legends over the years. “Yorkshire people are naturally storytellers,” he says as we drive 45 km east, past the quirky follies and the water garden of Fountains Abbey, where a phantom choir of monks is said to sing at night.

Forty miles to the east we pass Castle Howard. Here in 1940 the collapse of the house’s central dome was a terrifying warning; the family’s two sons would be killed in action during World War II and join the long line of Yorkshire’s lost youth. Finally arrived in the North York Moors National Park, we circle a squat block of stone on Danby High Moor that seems to have a head.

The market town of Helsley, England borders the North York Moros.  (Photo by John Kerknick)

The market town of Helmsley, England borders the North York Moors. (Photo by John Kernick)

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“This is Fat Betty,” says Rowley, pointing to what looks like Yorkshire’s own combination of Easter Island boss and wife von Lot. “She is centuries old and is said to be a farmer’s wife who got lost in the misty moor and turned to stone. But Betty still has to eat, and if you stop and feed her, that counts as happiness. “

As I look at the pile of lollipops and candy bars on the floor (though park officials disapprove of the tradition) I can’t help but think that Betty could really use a sleeping pill after such a long watch. Her blank white face stares rigidly over the moor.

At least she scans a moody look. As we continue east, it is easy to see how the Yorkshire countryside has captured the vivid imaginations of its residents. The tumbling of low hills and bog meadows conjures up a feeling of agitated drama. Curved rows of old dry limestone walls stretch like spikes through the fields. Stranded villages, a duo of sandstone and slate, suddenly rise from the rocky ground and just as quickly merge again in the dappled light.

The scene brightened up at Helmsley. A typical moorland market town that shows the three laws of almost every Yorkshire village: people hang by a dog (Labs and Terriers preferred), tea rooms frame a paved square and the bakeries sell “millionaire’s shortbread” (caramel-covered cookie squares) . and covered with chocolate). But just a few kilometers outside the city, when we stop for dinner at the Star Inn, the mood darkens again.

“I was born in Whitby,” says Andrew Pern, part of a growing group of chefs who have made Yorkshire a serious culinary destination. “We went to the abbey as children and played hide and seek among the graves. We didn’t like to show that we were scared, but when someone didn’t come out … “

I had postponed my visit to Whitby – also known as Dracula’s house – to end my journey on a high pitched note of macabre melodrama. At dinner Pern’s black pudding and foie gras had distracted me from his warnings. But that evening as I lay in bed in Swinton Park, a stately property that was converted into a hotel by a baronial family, I can’t shake the image of the abbey cemetery.

On the edge of the rugged Yorkshire coast, the horseshoe town of Whitby rises in stony layers to the graveyard of St Mary’s Church and the vaulted 7th-century ruins of Whitby Abbey. In the soft midday light, the city looks like the finished cover of a horror novel. Bram Stoker chose this as his backdrop for Dracula when he stayed in a guest house across the street from the abbey in a guest house in August 1890.

In fact, the original edition of Dracula, published in 1897, follows local geography so closely that you could still map the area just by reading the novel. The vampire’s ship, the Demeter, runs aground in the sands of Tate Hill. In the cemetery of St. Mary’s Church, the parched Dracula digs into the doomed, sleepwalking heroine Lucy Westenra.

And the fictional protagonist Mina Murray, Lucy’s friend, climbed the real church stairs to the cemetery just in time to see a gruesome sight: “… My knees were trembling … something raised a head … a white face and red, shining eyes.”

The cemetery of St. Mary's Church has crowned the coastal town of Whitby since the 12th century.  (Photo by John Kernick)

The cemetery of St. Mary’s Church has crowned the coastal town of Whitby since the 12th century. (Photo by John Kernick)

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Panting, even with weak knees, I walk up the 199 wide stone steps to the church. Then I go back down to the lap of the city that makes a prosperous life from its Dracula family tree. I pass the Boo Tique boutique and shops that sell chocolate coffins and skull bracelets. Such souvenirs sell out during the town’s regular Gothic festivals, when a whole pack of Drac’s revelers dressed as vampires, zombies and ghouls haunt Whitby.

“It used to be underground, but now everyone comes,” says Elaine Horton, who stands in her Pandemonium Gothic shop, surrounded by satin corsets and vampire T-shirts as she runs her fingers through her blue hair. “I’m not sure why.”

I can only guess. When I climb the steps to the church one last time at dusk, I end up in a cemetery again, a suitable bookend for the first cemetery of my trip, in Haworth.

It occurs to me that the High Gothic stories, with all their vampires and ghosts, may now resonate so strongly because they allow us to fantasize at a time when so many of our stories, blog posts and tweets have become prosaic. Or maybe it’s because the best horror stories capture something profound: the bogeyman under the bed, our nameless fears, an elegiac sense of inevitable loss.

Whatever the reason, some constants remain. Whitby’s tiled roofs, glowing red in the setting sun, seem firmly rooted. So also the old Gothic street that carries all these stories down to the North Sea – only to be churned by the waves and washed back to the shore.

This feature, penned by Raphael Kadushin, first appeared in the November 2015 issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine.

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