Yesterday I drove a heroes journey from Bath to a place called Haworth - in between the Peak district and the lake district and slightly East of Manchester. It was around 10 hours in the car - I think mainly because I was trying to drive on the backroads and avoid the main cities and the motorway.
The landscape kept changing as I drove through lovely rolling green fields around Oxford and south of Coventry then through the urban areas of leicester and a few other places Ive wiped from my memory.
The Peaks District was really pretty kind of like Rivendell for you Lord of the Rings fans. Very soft, English trees on hills on the verge of becoming mountains. In hindsight it would have been good to stay somewhere like that rather than Haworth.
The day itself was pretty hard yacca and I certainly questioned why I was doing it in such a long stretch …. but I think its worth it considering the landscape Ive seen today (Thursday).
I ended up staying the night at possibly the most haunted hostel in England. It was in a town called Haworth which is the home village for the Bronte sisters. I think I have only read Wuthering Height buts the bleakness of the novel certainly suits the bleakness of the landscape. This is probably going to sound harsh but there is a dead spot - well a really dull spot - just east of manchester that is very grey, gloomy and the people that I came into contact with didnt like strangers too much. There are no trees on the hills, the scrub is a wind blown brown and the buildings are all made out of grey brick or bluestone.
But back to the hostel. You can see the image just to the left …. look smore cheerful than it was. I think there were only four people staying in the place and I was on the top floor - alone ….
It was the kind of place where the wallpaper breathed, you could feel people greeting you in doorways and getting up out of the chairs to say hi - but of course there was no one there. I was in a small single room and the night was pretty uneventful except for a few noises that I put down to an old house plus …
… you know that feeling where you have just fallen asleep and you suddenly get a jolt? I had that but only around a minute after closing my eyes and it was kind of very different to every other time Ive experienced that. Its funny the times that you start to pray for intervention - that was one of them ….