Bronte Vintage Gathering 2012

It was the Bronte Vintage Gathering at the weekend, vintage cars, motorbikes, commercial vehicles and traction engines. My kids would have loved one of these scaled down traction engines, one that you could actually sit on and drive around, they both had Mammod traction engines when they were little, in fact I still have them in the house somewhere.  I had thought that all these scaled down traction engines were built by steam enthusiasts, but apparently some were built by the traction engine manufacturers themselves. They were sent, along with a sales agent to far off places such as Africa.  The smaller version was much easier to transport and was used as a kind of demonstrator for the full sized machine, and to show the customer the kind of workmanship the manufacturer was capable of.

Top Withens - Haworth

We have had our first winter snowfall here in Yorkshire recently, it didn't snow very much and it didn't stay long on the ground and unfortunately I didn't manage to get out and capture it with the camera.

The picture above was taken two or three years ago when I had my film camera and shows the ruin of Top Withens (or Top Withins) which is believed to be the Earnshaw house in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The building has been unoccupied since 1926 and I can quite understand why, it's usually cold, wet, and windy at this location, the clouds seeming to cling to the hilltops. I'm hoping to walk the Bronte Way this winter, it's approximately 40 miles long and passes through the Bradford area on its way from Gawthorpe Hall near Burnley in Lancashire to Oakwell Hall in West Yorkshire. I will be doing the walk in short sections over several weeks which should give me plenty of time to take pictures along the way and write a little bit about them.