Skip to main content

"There is no life higher than the grasstops": A Walk to Withens

The following is a guest blog post by Gail Crowther on visiting Haworth and Top Withens, Yorks, England. Thank you Gail!

Haworth and Top Withens feature in a number of Plath's poems, letters and journal entries along with pieces of published and unpublished prose. Most of her writing stresses the lonely and blustering nature of the place – blackened gravestones paving the ground in front of the Brontë Parsonage, withered trees, open moors of heather and sheep, a tumble-down building clinging to the moor side at Top Withens. In an account of a Withens walk published in The Christian Science Monitor on 6 June 1959 (12), Plath describes there being "as many ways to get to Withens as there are compass points" (12). Yet she had just tried two approaches – one from the town of Haworth and another across the moors from Heptonstall. Last weekend, I walked to Withens from Haworth. No dour skies or lonely howling winds accompanied us as we trecked from town to moor, but rather a blistering sun and a warm wind that took the edge off the May heat-wave. I have been to Withens twice before, both in much sterner weather more fitting for the supposed inspiration of Wuthering Heights. It is always an odd experience as I feel myself following the traces of two women writers years apart – Plath following Emily Brontë and me following Plath following Emily Brontë. Much is unchanged – the beginning of the moor spreads away from Haworth behind Penistone Hill gradually becoming browner and increasingly bare. The "grandmotherly" sheep still graze amongst grass and heather. Staring into their eyes is still like "being mailed into space."


Not so far along the stony path from town to moor is the Brontë waterfall and bridge. Plath describes this bridge in "A Walk to Withens" as "a wooden footbridge" (12). Today it has undergone some changes. At some stage the wooden bridge became a stone bridge which was washed away in a flash flood in 1989. Rebuilt in 1990 it is now a humpbacked, slabby path over the river resting on the remains of the older stone bridge beneath.


It is at this point according to Plath that the "sheep are separated from the goats" (12); meaning the walk becomes tougher, more lonely, a little more challenging. The trees become sparser and up a slight slope I see a sign which I suspect would not have been present when Plath walked these moors: directions to Top Withens in both English and Japanese.


Soon after this point, you get your first glimpse of the remains of the house at Top Withens, the only building in sight on the moor flanked by two tall trees. For readers of Wuthering Heights, this small, stony house bears no relation to the sprawling mansion Emily Brontë describes so vividly. A plaque on the side of the building acknowledges it is most likely the place that inspired her, not the house. Plath too felt this discrepancy and yet there was some thread of recognition, a feeling or atmosphere perhaps that led her to write "And yet so strong were my impressions of the book, I felt at Withens that presence which endows places long loved and lived in with a radiance subject to no alteration or ruining by wind and rain." (12)


The house itself at Top Withens is a ruin, yet it has clearly been cleaned and tidied, the stone no longer black or really showing much signs of weathering. The foundation and outline of each room is still visible, window arches look out across purple slopes and the remains of fireplaces and chimneys are now grown over with tufts of brown, scratchy moor grass. Plath writes: "Two sizeable trees rise like natural pillars before the house, oddly tall in the lee of the windswept hill where nothing else grows higher than a gorse bush." In the poem "Wuthering Heights" which Hughes includes in Birthday Letters, he describes Plath sitting in the crook of one of these trees sketching the ruin at Top Withens. Now somewhat taller in the fifty years that have passed, I wonder if this is the crook in which Plath sat and drew?


As Plath surveys the scene at Top Withens, she writes that suddenly lines from Dylan Thomas spring to mind: "the bracken kitchens rust" (from "In the White Giant's Thigh"). Indeed, she states, rust coloured bracken grows everywhere "where housewives of a century ago tended their kettles and roasts over fires bright as today's grouse and rabbit-peopled hills" (12). As I stand surveying the scene, suddenly lines from Plath spring to my mind: "There is no life higher than the grasstops" – and indeed there is not as the moors wuther away and the heat ripples amongst the gorse and the grass.




_________
Again, thank you Gail. The drawing of "Wuthering Heights" by Plath was recently sold in the Mayor Gallery's exhibit "Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings," and can be seen both below an in the "Biographical Note" in the back of American editions of Plath's novel The Bell Jar.

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last