Begin at the famous parsonage in Haworth, now a museum. Emerge, leaving tourists bent over the glass cases filled with minute manuscripts written by Charlotte and Emily and Anne and Branwell. Left is then west, taking one up the hill to Top Withins, the Brontë Falls, the trysting places. But turn instead east, down the hill to Patrick Brontë's church, a hundred yards adjacent. Skirt the west end of the church and strike out on a path leading out of Haworth to the south. Once clear of the churchyard, the paved path peters into a track and a wide valley opens to the left with its busy road running from Keighley, some distance behind, to Hebden Bridge. Our track remains on the western side of the valley, following its contours but hardly rising, only a flash of heather on the right-hand hilltop promising wildness. The contour-line says 750 feet, hardly mountainous, and lush pasture fills the fields marked out by dry-stone walls. Suddenly, one crests a mild rise in the path and uncovers the south-western horizon as an assault of moor: bleak, etched, dark. And as the valley curls round from the left a scatter below of grey-black houses and roofs catches the eye; a single mill chimney among them. This is Oxenhope, just a mile and a half along the valley from Haworth, and the place where the subject of this biography spent his first nineteen years.