The rain started as I crossed the pasture above North Lees Hall, the model, it is widely accepted, for Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. It’s a house the author visited more than once, staying with her friend Ellen Nussey in nearby Hathersage, and the intertwining of the names – thorn being an anagram of north and lee derived from the Anglo-Saxon for field – coupled with the detailed description Brontë gives, are persuasive.
This landscape in the Peak District is itself a place of secrets: narrow, steeply sided valleys burrowing down off the domed moor, thick with oaks, and then a sudden glimpse of the wide sky and the crisp, squared-off, gritstone of Stanage.
Getting wet, I ran for the cover of trees, pausing briefly to squint through the shower at the ruins of the neighbouring Catholic chapel, just a wall with a window now, torn down, it is said, during the “glorious revolution” in 1688.
History is not so much layered here as crammed in, like old furniture in an attic, along with Mrs Rochester. In the woods, above a clearing, cupped behind a high retaining wall buried in creepers like some lost Inca ruin, was a chocolate-brown pool overhung with alder and oak. It was long and crescent shaped. The only sound was drops falling off the leaves and rippling the surface.
Waiting for the rain to ease I explored the stubby walls of what was once an adjacent building. The riddle of these structures foxed me when I first came across them. Were they somehow connected to the chapel?
Not a bit of it. The pond was built to power a lead smelting works, probably in the early 18th century. In the 1840s, when Brontë visited, the site was being used as a paper factory. Now it felt somewhere wholly organic, reclaimed.
The rain ended, the air filled with insects and soon after birds – wrens, and a nuthatch, which, as if impatient with the delay, tore at moss covering the high branch of an oak. Then the sound of a distant “tseep”, a flycatcher darting out at the clouds of insects from the branches of a young rowan to fill its beak.
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