By mariyaskhan
Wow, I can't believe this wonderful experience at Oxford has come to an end 🙁 As a creative writer who loves literature and history, I'm really sad to leave a place that holds so much significance. Never mind that thousands of famous faces have sat under the same ornate ceiling of the Radcliffe Camera. I walked pass the lamp-post C.S. Lewis walked by and inspired the Chronicles of Narnia, and I visited in the same pub the Inklings discussed their stories at. My friend even had the luxury of having class in J.R.R. Tolkien's old office!
During my time I enjoyed visiting the little English villages and big palaces and castles, especially places with special literary significance. My all-time favorite trip has to be to Haworth, a tiny village in Northern England by Leeds and York. It's the village where the Bronte sisters grew up and produced their great novels. I ventured there for a couple days with a friend who was a hard-core Bronte fan.
It took a while to get there. We took a train from Oxford to London, switched to another London station, took a train to Leeds, navigated through the local train system and ended up in a village called Kheighly, and then finally rode the "Bronte Bus" until we reached Haworth. I know it seems long and grueling, but I actually enjoyed the journey. We got to travel through lands that contained crumbled factories and mills - remnants of the North's Industrial past. Haworth was such a small village that it mainly consisted of one long street. And I loved its washed-out stone buildings and flower pots.
On our first day there we checked into our bed-and-breakfast and walked four miles through the English Moors. From Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights you get a sense of the brooding, melancholic English Moors, and seeing it in the flesh was no different. You could really see the vast emptiness and natural beauty, and it was breathtaking to experience.
The next day we went to the Bronte Museum, which is the Parsonage the family lived in. The cool thing about this museum was that 90% of the items belonged to the family and it was set up to authentically reflect their living situation. It literally felt like you were living their 19th century world.
That's what I really loved about Haworth (and Oxford in general). A modern girl like me could step into the past with an awareness to the present and the legacy left behind. It motivated me to work on my own creative writing, and made me only dream that I could remain there forever with a legacy of my own.