This is Stone Gappe Hall, Lothersdale, in West Yorkshire. We’ve just spent a week living a couple of doors up the road. Despite almost continuous rain and /or snow, it was a wonderful few days – partly because the house we were staying in has superb views and is very comfortable, and partly because the landscape is stunning.
We visited the lovely Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale; and Haworth, home of the Brontes, where we visited a superb museum in the Parsonage where the family lived. We discovered that Charlotte had been a governess at Stone Gappe Hall, and it seemed that much of the inspiration for Jayne Eyre came from there. Coincidentally, our waitress at the Cavendish Pavilion, Bolton Abbey, was called Charlotte, and it was her first day: she seemed nervous (but was very good at her job). So I wrote this poem:
JANE AND THE WAITRESS
At Stone Gappe Hall, Charlotte like us looked out
across the valley towards home,
created something new â something transformed
called from the tension of unfamiliar air
but close to the moor
If I reached out I could almost touch her
Today Charlotte brought me bread and wine:
it was her first day in the valley of desolation,
shoulders tense at the strangeness of it all,
she stood in white and waited to be called, transformedâ¦
Anything was possible
I reached out and almost touched her
Anyway, on the way home from Yorkshire, after the snow melted, we called in at Harlestone, near Northampton, where my great-great-grandparents’ grave stands near the entrance to the church. First time Dot had seen it. We then went on to East Haddon, where we saw the grave of one of their sons and his wife, and found a couple more graves that mnay or may not be significant. When I have the pictures processed and can check with the family tree, I may reveal more.
We also realised that Harlestone is right on the edge of the Althorp estate and may even be part of it. So I am almost certainly related to Princess Diana. Ho, ho. But perhaps our ancestors met.