Step into Norton Conyers, in North Yorkshire, and you are immediately surrounded by riches almost beyond imagination. With the hall boasting a table dating back to the Middle Ages, and main rooms heaving with seventeenth and eighteenth century furniture, the majesty and history enclosed in its walls can create a breathtaking spell.

But it isn’t just the lavish furnishings which draw countless people to Norton Conyers each year. I, like countless others, am lured to the house by the story it inspired.

Situated three miles north of Ripon, this house is also close to the quaint village of Haworth, once home to the Brontë sisters. The eldest of the sisters, Charlotte Bronte is said to have visited the hall herself in 1839, finding Norton Conyers so inspiring and exciting, she would base the Thornfield Hall of her novel Jane Eyre upon it. I visit the hall hoping that by retracing Jane’s steps, I might stumble upon an adventure as exciting and romantic as hers, or at least, like Bronte, find inspiration for a best selling novel of my own!

Secret staircase

Whilst the Graham family, who have owned the house since 1624, have always maintained that the house was the setting for the novel, the discovery of a secret staircase mirroring Charlotte’s description has further confirmed this suspicion. Bronte’s heroine, Jane, discovers that Mr. Rochester has some kind of secret in his attic, and watches as he ascends the secret stairs to visit her:

“He passed up the gallery very softly, unclosed the staircase door with as little noise as possible, shut it after him, and the last ray vanished. I was left in total darkness."

This eerie depiction of a secret staircase leading to the ‘madwoman in the attic’ was an aspect that once had no correlation with Norton Conyers. However, after taking up floorboards in the attic after clearing it for the visit of a TV crew in the 1980s, the secret staircase was discovered.

Surely this coincidence has to further prove that the house is the template for Bronte’s creation. Walking around the hall, I can picture the events of Jane and Mr. Rochester, as clearly as you might imagine Bronte herself pictured it in her imagination.

Employed as a governess

Bronte’s Jane begins life with nothing, eventually finding employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall. This was a common career choice for a girl of Jane’s circumstances in the nineteenth century. With so many prospects available today, it is pretty difficult to imagine that the best an intelligent woman could hope for in life was to find employment caring for a stranger’s children. But Bronte doesn’t depress us for long in her story as Jane’s fortunes take an upturn.

Jane’s employer at the hall is the dark, saturnine Mr. Rochester, with whom she falls swiftly, but secretly, in love. Despite the difference in their rank he also falls for her and when he proposes marriage it looks as though her dreams were going to come true. However her wedding is dramatically interrupted by a claim that her fiancée is already married: to a madwoman, locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. He begs her to stay but she responds that to do so she would be his mistress. She runs away and falls destitute before she is rescued by the would-be missionary St John Rivers. She cannot forget Rochester and when she has a telepathic experience that he is calling her name she returns to Thornton to find that the place has burnt down by the mad wife who herself was killed in the fire.

As most readers will know, love does eventually triumph, with Bronte’s famous line ‘reader, I married him’ indicating the novel’s happy conclusion. But such a dramatic turn of events cannot fail to ignite the imagination, and leave one staring at the walls of Norton Conyers attempting to bring the story back to life. The characters of her novel come alive in the halls of the home; being within its walls is almost like being within the mindset of the astonishingly talented authoress.

But the true history of Norton Conyers holds every bit as much intrigue, excitement and romance as the fiction of Charlotte Bronte’s novel. Official records of the hall show that in 1569 it belonged to a Richard Norton, father to three sons. This was an ownership that was not destined to last.

Rebellion crushed

It was the year the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland joined together in a religious rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. Norton played a heavy part in the rebellion, which Elizabeth soon crushed. Norton Conyers’ owner was executed among with scores of others, and the house passed around, from owner to owner, like an unwanted child, rather than the stunning building it was.

The building eventually came to rest in the hands of Sir Richard Graham. Not satisfied with being the home to an attempted coup and a political dissident, the house had now taken on a hero of the battle field. A very active officer, Sir Richard Graham, fought for royalty, not against it. Records remember his participation in a battle on Marston Moore as an event worthy of place within a heroic medieval tale of Sir Arthur. After having received twenty-six wounds he retreated to North Conyers, before finally meeting his end an hour later.

If only the walls of Norton Conyers could speak. Yet even without the power of language, the home tells more than one great story. Walking through the hall is like taking a stroll through history. The only thing missing is my very own Mr. Rochester; unfortunately, I find that I have left the hall without a romantic, swashbuckling, tale of my very own to tell!