A Pennine hamlet of old stone bridges and a ruined hall in a wooded valley on the Brontë Way near Colne
You leave the car at the edge and walk in to Wycoller, where a handful of old bridges cross the beck: a twin-arched packhorse bridge, a clapper bridge made of flat stone slabs laid on stone piers, and a single-slab clam bridge that may be older still. Above them stand the ruins of Wycoller Hall, an Elizabethan house left to fall into decay in the early nineteenth century, and the likely inspiration for Ferndean Manor in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It’s an easy, pretty place to potter, with the beck running through the middle. The Brontë Way and Pendle Way both pass through the hamlet, and the moorland climb to Boulsworth Hill begins not far off to the south.
