Latest Wuthering Heights hype doesn’t faze Yorkshire residents

The four-mile trail from Haworth to Top Withens is well trodden, the boggy ground marked by numerous footprints from those seeking the view said to have inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The landscape rolls in desolate waves of brown bracken beneath a lone tree; bleak, haunting and familiar to locals.

With Emerald Fennell’s new film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi due next week, Haworth and many sites across the Yorkshire Dales are braced for a rise in visitors. Locals are unruffled. “We’re used to crowds,” says Craig Verity, landlord at the Kings Arms on Haworth’s steep cobbled Main Street.

Brontë connections are woven through the village: ales at the pub bear the sisters’ names, and the street hosts the Brontë Hotel, the Brontë Bar and Restaurant and even a Brontë Balti. The Brontë Parsonage is now a museum of artefacts and manuscripts, runs events such as workshops and screenings, attracts about 75,000 visitors a year and has already sold out a screening of the 1992 film.