The mysteries of the fairy cave and twenty other Queer Places

03/06/2026

01/06/2026

Haworth - The cluster at the top of the village. The parsonage where the Brontës grew up. The school rooms Patrick Brontë built in 1832 — where Charlotte, Branwell and Anne all taught the local children. And St Michael and All Angels, where the family lies in the vault beneath. All but Anne. I grew up five minutes from where they were born. Somehow I ended up here, at the other end of their story, raising my own family on the edge of the same moor. This was taken during lockdown. A homeschool lesson that turned into a walk that turned into standing still for a while. Patrick chose the words over the school door. Train up a child in the way he should go. It's still there. On some spring mornings the light comes directly up Church Street and the whole place just stops.

***rPlaces

30/05/2026

Soil Hill

Two knights returning from the Holy Land came through here carrying a casket.
Thornton and the villages around it were known to be sympathetic to the Knights Templar — there are old safe houses nearby with carved symbols still proclaiming the allegiance. But when the people of Cockham grew too curious about the knights and their mysterious casket, the two men were forced to flee and bury it for safekeeping.
Here the story splits.
One version: the casket held the head of John the Baptist, carried back from the Holy Land as a relic. Centuries later the Thule Society — Hitler's occultists — sent a German agent to find it. He was arrested digging in the grounds of Halifax Cathedral, five miles away. Halifax church is dedicated to John the Baptist. Some say the name itself means Holy Face.
The older version: the knights buried it on Soil Hill, less than a mile from Cockham. Years later a farmer dug up a casket there, found a human skull inside, and quickly reburied it.
When I was a kid doing a school project, a local historian — George Walker — showed me a clipping from the Telegraph and Argus telling the Soil Hill story. I walked over there a few times after that. Looking for clues.
Never found anything. But I never quite stopped looking.

28/05/2026

When the sun is low and the light catches the valley at the right angle, you can see it. The outlines of walls in the fields. A settlement that hasn't existed for centuries. This is Cockham. An entire village, lost. Visible only through these temporal ghosts that appear in the dawn and dusk. The Brontës grew up looking at this view. I could see it from my bedroom window There's a story buried here that most people don't know. More on that soon.

25/05/2026

The Brontë Birthplace - 72-74 Market St, Thornton

Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell were all born in this house on Market Street, Thornton.
Passed it every day on the way to school. There was an old black iron plaque then — period, worn, part of the building.
The shiny blue one is newer. Official. It means well. But somewhere between the iron and the plastic something shifted.
The cobbles have reappeared in front of the house. There are cafes now, galleries, Brontë energies. The village has found its story and is telling it, which isn't a bad thing. It just looks different from the inside — when the place you grew up in becomes somewhere people visit, you notice what gets kept and what gets curated.

23/05/2026

The Brontë bell chapel, Thornton

From our house on Green Lane you could see the Bell Chapel ruins across the field. Nobody went there. Just me — high walls, overgrown everything, saplings coming up through the floor, ivy, grass, nettles. The quiet that belongs to a child who's found something the adults have forgotten about. Next door is Thornton Hall. Some say it was the inspiration for Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre. I climbed those walls too. Broken glass cemented into the top meant I never quite made it over. There was an altar in the Bell chapel, somewhere. Didn't know that either. The colours are mine — added later. But Aldous Huxley wrote that stained glass windows were designed to do exactly this: carry people away from ordinary perception toward something else entirely. The chapel was built for that. The windows have been empty for nearly two centuries.

20/05/2026

St James Church and the
Brontë Bell Chapel Thornton.

Before I Knew It Mattered — 0

St James Chapel, Thornton. Built next to the ruins of the old Bell Chapel where the Brontës were baptised. The font they used is now inside St James — moved here when the old chapel fell out of use. Still there. Not used now, but present.
i was also baptised here.
There was a kitchen table in my grandmother's house, said to have belonged to the Brontë family. It was just a table until it wasn't.
A first edition of Jane Eyre — our family copy, Currer Bell, 1847 — was lent to a centenary display at St James and didn't come back. Stolen. Nobody caught. Never found.
There's a family name too — Bingham, my grandmother's maiden name, a possible connection to Patrick Brontë's siblings who married into local families.

12/03/2026

The Nab

Heathcliff on the master stone - Artwork By Steve O

( Steve is producing all the art work for The mysteries of the Fairy cave and twenty other q***r places - A Brontë
Tarot map)

The master stone is one of the named rocks that form the Nab on the ridge overlooking Ponden.

From Wuthering Heights

" Linton here started from his slumber in bewildered terror, and asked if any one had called his name.

“No,” said Catherine; “unless in dreams. I cannot conceive how you manage to doze out of doors, in the morning.”

“I thought I heard my father,” he gasped, glancing up to the frowning nab above us. “You are sure nobody spoke ?"

For this project, I’m using the Nab to examine that instability directly — treating it as the landscape analogue of the Moon. Although this duality is a feature of the entire book, the Nab is where I choose to look at it most closely.

At the Nab, paths converge beneath a north-facing escarpment. The ground drops away. Sightlines are partial. The place resists easy passage and clear orientation. In Wuthering Heights, it is also the site of two unresolved disturbances: one auditory, one visual; one before death, one after. Brontë does not reconcile them. She allows them to coexist.

By not resolving these clashes, Brontë forces the reader to remain inside uncertainty. Just one reason why Wuthering Heights remains so divisive.

The Nab, as a node, expresses this same condition. It is not a place of judgement or decision, but of destabilised perception — where multiple narratives coexist without collapsing into a single truth. That is why it aligns with the Moon. Not symbolically, but structurally.

Standing beneath the Nab, certainty never quite settles.

09/01/2026

THE WORLD — MAP OF GHOSTS & LEGENDS

This project began in 2020 with this map.

At the time, it wasn’t a tarot work. It was an attempt to draw Haworth and the surrounding moors as they might have been experienced in the Brontës’ lifetime: removing later infrastructure, keeping the natural landforms, and marking only those places, paths, buildings, and stories that would have been salient, walkable, and known.

The aim was simple: to show how landscape, legend, and lived experience circulate together. How places generate stories, how stories alter places, and how the Brontës both inherited and reshaped that field.

Only later did the tarot structure emerge. When it did, it became clear that this map already occupied a specific role. It is not a node, a path, or a choice. It is the field in which all choices occur.

In tarot terms, this map corresponds to The World — not as an ending, but as the condition of coherence that precedes division. Everything is present here at once: valleys, ridges, paths, ghosts, legends, and lived routes. Nothing is yet singled out. Nothing is excluded.

All later chapters in the book are extractions from this field. This map remains the ground they stand on.

It is informed by the idea of finding resonances between the 22 aspects of the Major arcana with the navigator, the fairy cave and 20 other q***r places.

"The mysteries of the Fairy Cave, and twenty other q***r places." Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights.