House portrayed in Jane Eyre set to lose public funding

Wycoller Hall, Charlotte Brontë’s model for Mr Rochester’s Ferndean Manor, due to have Lancashire county council’s support removed in 2018

A country house that provided the model for Mr Rochester’s home in Jane Eyre is under “dire threat”, say campaigners. More than 6,000 people have signed a petition calling on Lancashire county council to reconsider plans to scrap their management and maintenance of Wycoller Hall, near Colne.

The ruin of the 16th-century manor house, at the centre of a country park, was immortalised by Charlotte Brontë as Ferndean Manor in her 1847 novel – the property where romantic lead Mr Rochester relocates after fire destroys his home at Thornfield Hall. Wycoller Hall is just over the moors from Haworth in West Yorkshire, where the Brontë family lived. It is believed that Charlotte and Emily visited Wycoller village frequently.

The manor-house of Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood. I had heard of it before. Mr Rochester often spoke of it, and sometimes went there. He would have let the house, but could find no tenant, in consequence of its ineligible and insalubrious site. Ferndean then remained uninhabited and unfurnished with the exception of some two or three rooms fitted up for the accommodation of the squire when he went there in the season to shoot.

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