“With a more passionate love of Mother Earth”: A “scamper on the moors” with Emily Brontë

Reader, I’ll wager you. I bet that if I asked you to name an author that you would most associate with the moors, your answer would be Emily Brontë. And there’s a good reason for that choice: Emily, more than any other Brontë — either her older sister, Charlotte, or her younger sister, Anne — is indelibly entwined with the moors surrounding Haworth, comprising what we today call “Brontë Country”. Charlotte described Emily as a “nursling of the moors”. Locals remembered Emily heading towards the moors regularly, walking in elongated strides and whistling happily to herself with her dog Keeper by her side. Long walks were so important to Emily and her first formal biographer (external to the family), Mary Robinson, described Emily as “elastic of tread”. [...]