Wycoller

No cars reach Wycoller: you walk in, as Charlotte Brontë is thought to have done from Haworth over the moor. The hamlet sits in a green fold of Pendle country, its beck crossed by seven bridges — among them a twin-arched packhorse bridge, a clapper bridge, and the clam bridge, a single gritstone slab believed to be over a thousand years old. Above the water stands the ruin of Wycoller Hall, widely held to be the model for Ferndean Manor in Jane Eyre. Nearly abandoned by the twentieth century, the village was saved and quietly restored, and now dozes among ancient fields, weavers' cottages and the memory of a vanished world.

A vehicle-free hamlet with thousand-year-old bridges, a romantically ruined hall and a genuine Brontë connection — few English villages carry this much atmosphere in so small a space.

• History Lovers
• Walkers
• Photographers
• Peace & Quiet