This is a post I’ve been dreading.

My dear friend Eric Brown has died.

He had not been well for some time and had borne it with fortitude and good grace (and not a little optimism, or so it seemed when we visited him) but though this outcome was always likely the news nevertheless came as a shock.

A proud Yorkshireman – born and brought up in Haworth – and not shy of living up to the stereotype, Eric was neverthless one of the kindest, friendliest people I have ever met. His writing embodied those attributes and always had a warm, human heart to it but was not appreciated as widely as it ought to have been and never achieved as much success as it deserved.

Among many other things I’ll miss our mutual commiserations about the fortunes of our respective beloved football teams (in his case Leeds United.)

He is a great loss not only to the field of Science Fiction (and with his Langham and Dupré stories to the ‘cosy crime’ genre) and as a friend to the good lady and myself but most of all to his wife Finn and daughter Freya, taken from them far too soon.

Words are not enough.

Eric Brown: 24/5/1960 – 21/3/2023. So it goes.

During the summer we were in South Queensferry in order to take the boat out to Inchcolm Island.

While there I took a few photos. I hadn’t expected to see a building with Deco styling* but this was on the main street.

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There was also St Mary’s Church, one of the oldest in Scotland.

(I remember remarking about buildings in Haworth, Yorkshire and Inchcolm Abbey that, unusually, they had stone roofs. St Mary’s also has stone roofing, shown to best advantage in the above photo.)

The War Memorial is fixed halfway up the wall of another building – the Jubilee Clock Tower – on the main street.

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A couple more photos of South Queensferry are on my flickr.

*Edited to add: Thanks to a comment I have discovered the Art Deco style building was once a cinema, the Regal.

On our recent trip I seem to have passed through, or close to, a fair few towns in England that have or had teams in the Football League, which gave me some idea of their geographic proximity. Starting with Sheffield, we went on through Derby, bypassed Mansfield, then headed back up to Chesterfield where I photographed the famous crooked spire which lends the nickname Spireites to the local side.

Cheterfield had a large street market on the go the morning we were there. It made the place seem thriving though whether it truly is or not I have no idea.

After that it was up north through Huddersfield and Halifax on our way to Haworth again.

Yet in all these travels I caught sight of not one single football stadium – though I had seen a road sign for Brammall Lane in Sheffield.

The reason for going to Haworth this time was we hadn’t seen as much of it as we would have liked when we were there before.

This certainly wasn’t there in the Bronté’s time. It’s now a stop on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway – one of those preservation railways which reflect the British love of nostalgia but are an important reminder of our industrial heritage.

We didn’t do the Bronté Parsonage this time but explored the old street more. There were more shops open this time including the old style sweetie shop where we bought something called Yorkshire Tablet – as sweet as Orkney Fudge but a bit softer – and had a browse round two second hand bookshops we don’t recall from two years ago. The good lady bought three books and I got a hardback of Tricia Sullivan’s Lethe; goodness knows when I’ll get round to reading it.

The main reason to visit Inchcolm Island is to take a look at the Abbey there. This is apparently the finest surviving Augustinian Abbey in Scotland and is one of Historic Scotland’s properties. Apparently it can be hired for weddings.

This is the Abbey from the pier.

This is the well preserved west side. A stitch of two photos. Note the stone roofing material. I’ve only seen this before in Yorkshire, two years ago when we visited Haworth.

It’s possible to walk round the island a bit up towards where the abandoned WW1 and WW2 gun emplacements are. I got this nice shot of the Abbey through trees from the hill there.

The boat trip allows 1½ hours on the island.

Choose a nice day, though. Barring the roofed bits of the Abbey and the shop there’s precious little cover.

And so via East Lancashire and West Yorkshire to Haworth. We came over the moors from Hebden Bridge through Oxenhope. This was very atmospheric as the mist was rolling around the hilltops, though not as bleak as I had been expecting and very reminiscent of moorland Scotland.

While the town of Haworth is well enough signposted the Brontë Parsonage Museum wasn’t until we had almost passed it. The village from their time we would have completely missed were it not for the museum signpost. The photo is of the original part of the building as it was in the Brontë’s time. An addition to the right was made by a later incumbent who had a sizable income.

The museum society’s web site is here.

The rooms are/were tiny. How they crammed two adults and four children plus servants in there is a miracle. It’s worth a visit on its own and the staff (all volunteers I believe) were very friendly. The talk and more especially the tour outside afterward were very good indeed.

When the Brontës lived there, Haworth was essentially one cobbled street on a steep hill. The old village was more or less shut when we were there, though. I think the shops – almost all Brontë or tourist related – do most of their trade on a weekend.

The church was/is down the hill a wee bit from the parsonage, separated from it by the cemetery but still uphill of the village, though. At that time table top burials (with flat, not upright, gravestones) remained in use in Yorkshire though they’d been phased out elsewhere. Apparently Haworth was the unhealthiest place in England then. The Rev Brontë was never done taking funerals. We were told that there were 42,000 dead in the cemetery – this in a space not much bigger than a penalty area!

The nature and density of the burials meant that the corpses didn’t decompose properly. Sometimes they were dug up and burned to make room for later bodies. When it rained, ground water from the graveyard would drain under the church and rise up through the floor. The smell must have been appalling. This stuff along with raw sewage would also have flowed down the street. What with that and the overcrowding – Haworth was extremely densely populated with loads of mills and such – no wonder the death rate was so high.

The views now are not at all bleak, rather pleasant actually, but it was hopelessly remote in the early nineteenth century and must have seemed like the end of the earth. Modern Haworth lies mainly across the valley from the old village.

There was a nice (twentieth century) park at the bottom of the hill, too.