Wuthering Heights Filming Locations in England: Where Passion Meets the Moors
- Jodi Howe
- Feb 17
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 20
Emerald Fennell's breathtaking adaptation brings Emily Brontë's wild romance to life across Yorkshire's most dramatic landscapes — and every one of them is worth the journey.
Some stories belong so deeply to a place that the landscape becomes a character in its own right. Emily Brontë understood this when she set her only novel against the untamed moorlands of northern England, and Emerald Fennell understood it when she brought that story roaring back to the screen in 2026. Her adaptation of Wuthering Heights — starring Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff — is unapologetically bold, visceral, and visually stunning. But what lingers long after the credits isn't just the performances. It's the land itself: windswept, ancient, and alive with the kind of beauty that demands to be experienced in person.
For those who felt something stir while watching Catherine race across the heather or Heathcliff brood against a slate-grey sky, set-jetting doesn't get more compelling than this. These aren't studio backdrops. They're real places, open to visitors, and they're every bit as powerful as they appear on screen.
A Landscape That Tells the Story
Fennell chose to film almost entirely on location across the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and the decision was transformative. Shooting took place from late January through early April 2025 — a season when the moors are at their most elemental, stripped of softness, raw with wind and weather. The result is a film where every wide shot earns its place, where the landscape mirrors the emotional extremes of the characters who inhabit it.
The Dales provided the production with exactly what Brontë's prose demands: open fells stretching into grey skies, ridges catching every gust of moorland wind, and dry-stone walls snaking through emptiness. It's a terrain that feels untouched by centuries, and walking it today, you'll understand why Fennell chose it over more polished alternatives.
The Ruins of Wuthering Heights
The Earnshaw family home — that brooding, battered farmhouse at the heart of the story — was brought to life at Old Gang Smelting Mill in Arkengarthdale. This collection of stone ruins was once a lead smelting operation in the mid-eighteenth century and is now a Grade II listed monument. Its crumbling walls and exposed position high above the dale made it an inspired stand-in for the fictional house, and the surrounding moorland provided the backdrop for several sequences between Catherine and Heathcliff.
Reaching it requires proper walking boots and a willingness to leave the road behind. The hike from the village of Langthwaite rewards with silence, space, and the kind of solitude that makes you feel genuinely far from everything — the rare set-jetting experience where you're more likely to encounter sheep than fellow fans.
Where Catherine Yearns
One of the film's most visually striking moments — Catherine waiting on a jutting rock formation as Heathcliff storms away — was filmed at Healaugh Crag on the Reeth Estate, near the market village of Richmond. The crag sits on the ridge above where the Wuthering Heights exterior scenes were shot, and from its edge, the views sweep across the full breadth of Swaledale.
This is one of the northernmost dales, known for being wilder and less developed than its neighbors. It's a landscape shaped by centuries of lead mining and sheep farming, and it carries a stillness that feels earned rather than empty. The village of Reeth served as base camp for the production team and offers a welcome stopping point: a handsome green flanked by pubs, bakeries, and sweeping views of the surrounding fells.
Moorland Romance and the Tree Scene
The playful early scenes between the grown-up Catherine and Heathcliff — including the memorable moment where he deposits her on a tree branch in her finery — were filmed on Booze Moor, a stretch of open moorland in the northeastern corner of the Dales. The same location was used for some of the film's most dramatic third-act sequences, including Elordi's galloping rides across the heather.
Nearby, the stone-built village of Low Row appears as one of the film's period settings, its traditional cottages and quiet lanes perfectly suited to the Georgian world Fennell creates on screen. The seventeenth-century Punch Bowl Inn makes an atmospheric place to stop — all oak beams and warm interiors, the kind of place where you can easily picture Heathcliff brooding over an ale.
Ancient Stones and Brontë Country
Not all the filming took place in the Dales. Bridestones Moor, a community-owned nature reserve near Todmorden in West Yorkshire, provided another rugged backdrop for the on-screen romance. Its otherworldly rock formations — bulbous stones smoothed by millennia of wind — carry their own literary heritage: the poet Ted Hughes immortalized them in verse, and the landscape sits closer to Brontë's own West Yorkshire heartland than the Dales locations.
Further south, the production moved to Knole House in Kent — a five-hundred-year-old National Trust property set within a medieval deer park. Once owned by an Archbishop of Canterbury and later by Henry VIII, Knole's courtyards doubled for the film's opening hanging scene and the elopement sequence. It's a place steeped in centuries of English history, and visitors can explore both the house and its sprawling parkland.
The film's opulent interiors — the salons and bedrooms of Thrushcross Grange, the increasingly ruined rooms of Wuthering Heights — were constructed at Leavesden Studios outside London, the same complex that housed the Harry Potter and Barbie productions.
Walking in Emily Brontë's Footsteps
No set-jetting journey through Wuthering Heights country is complete without turning to the source. The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth is where Emily wrote the novel, and it tells the deeply human story of an extraordinarily talented family. The museum holds manuscripts, letters, and personal objects that bring the Brontës vividly to life, and the view from the garden — the same moors that Emily, Charlotte, and Anne gazed upon — remains unchanged.
From Haworth, you can walk the Brontë Way to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse long believed to have inspired the Earnshaw home. The trail passes through Penistone Hill Country Park, descends to the Brontë Waterfall and Bridge, then climbs into the open moorland that is central to the novel. It can get muddy, so sturdy boots are essential — but the reward is a landscape that feels exactly as Brontë described it: fierce, beautiful, and utterly itself.
Exploring Wuthering Heights Filming Locations in England
What makes exploring the Wuthering Heights filming locations in England so rewarding is that they aren't scattered across a map — they're concentrated within a landscape that tells a single, coherent story. This is screen-to-scene travel at its most immersive. You can spend two or three days moving between the Dales, West Yorkshire, and Kent, and every stop deepens your connection to both the film and the novel that inspired it. Stay at Simonstone Hall near Hawes, the country house hotel where the cast stayed during filming, and you'll fall asleep to views of Upper Wensleydale and the foothills of the Pennines.
This is a journey for travelers who want more than a photo opportunity — who want to step from the screen into the scene, feel the wind that shaped a masterpiece, and walk the ground that brought it back to life.
The moors are waiting.
