Twenty other queer places

24/03/2026

12/03/2026

The Nab

Heathcliff on the master stone - Artwork By Steve O

( Steve is producing all the art work for The mysteries of the Fairy cave and twenty other q***r places - A Brontë
Tarot map)

The master stone is one of the named rocks that form the Nab on the ridge overlooking Ponden.

From Wuthering Heights

" Linton here started from his slumber in bewildered terror, and asked if any one had called his name.

“No,” said Catherine; “unless in dreams. I cannot conceive how you manage to doze out of doors, in the morning.”

“I thought I heard my father,” he gasped, glancing up to the frowning nab above us. “You are sure nobody spoke ?"

For this project, I’m using the Nab to examine that instability directly — treating it as the landscape analogue of the Moon. Although this duality is a feature of the entire book, the Nab is where I choose to look at it most closely.

At the Nab, paths converge beneath a north-facing escarpment. The ground drops away. Sightlines are partial. The place resists easy passage and clear orientation. In Wuthering Heights, it is also the site of two unresolved disturbances: one auditory, one visual; one before death, one after. Brontë does not reconcile them. She allows them to coexist.

By not resolving these clashes, Brontë forces the reader to remain inside uncertainty. Just one reason why Wuthering Heights remains so divisive.

The Nab, as a node, expresses this same condition. It is not a place of judgement or decision, but of destabilised perception — where multiple narratives coexist without collapsing into a single truth. That is why it aligns with the Moon. Not symbolically, but structurally.

Standing beneath the Nab, certainty never quite settles.

09/01/2026

THE WORLD — MAP OF GHOSTS & LEGENDS

This project began in 2020 with this map.

At the time, it wasn’t a tarot work. It was an attempt to draw Haworth and the surrounding moors as they might have been experienced in the Brontës’ lifetime: removing later infrastructure, keeping the natural landforms, and marking only those places, paths, buildings, and stories that would have been salient, walkable, and known.

The aim was simple: to show how landscape, legend, and lived experience circulate together. How places generate stories, how stories alter places, and how the Brontës both inherited and reshaped that field.

Only later did the tarot structure emerge. When it did, it became clear that this map already occupied a specific role. It is not a node, a path, or a choice. It is the field in which all choices occur.

In tarot terms, this map corresponds to The World — not as an ending, but as the condition of coherence that precedes division. Everything is present here at once: valleys, ridges, paths, ghosts, legends, and lived routes. Nothing is yet singled out. Nothing is excluded.

All later chapters in the book are extractions from this field. This map remains the ground they stand on.

It is informed by the idea of finding resonances between the 22 aspects of the Major arcana with the navigator, the fairy cave and 20 other q***r places.

"The mysteries of the Fairy Cave, and twenty other q***r places." Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights.

09/01/2026

The Nab — The Moon
Top of Flaight Hill, overlooking Ponden.

Under the Moon, different realities do not replace one another; they exist at the same time without resolution.

One of the defining features of Wuthering Heights is its refusal to resolve conflicting realities. Again and again, Brontë stages situations where one character experiences events as betrayal, haunting, or abandonment, while another experiences the same events as necessity, imagination, or closure — and she refuses to decide between them.

This instability runs throughout the novel. It is not confined to one relationship or one scene. It is structural.

For this project, I’m using the Nab to examine that instability directly — treating it as the landscape analogue of the Moon. Although this duality is a feature of the entire book, the Nab is where I choose to look at it most closely.

At the Nab, paths converge beneath a north-facing escarpment. The ground drops away. Sightlines are partial. The place resists easy passage and clear orientation. In Wuthering Heights, it is also the site of two unresolved disturbances: one auditory, one visual; one before death, one after. Brontë does not reconcile them. She allows them to coexist.

By not resolving these clashes, Brontë forces the reader to remain inside uncertainty. Just one reason why Wuthering Heights remains so divisive.

The Nab, as a node, expresses this same condition. It is not a place of judgement or decision, but of destabilised perception — where multiple narratives coexist without collapsing into a single truth. That is why it aligns with the Moon. Not symbolically, but structurally.

Standing beneath the Nab, certainty never quite settles.

30/12/2025

PONDEN HALL

Location node: Ponden Hall, near Stanbury, West Yorkshire

This post introduces the location only.
No interpretation is supplied at this stage.

1. Location identity

Ponden Hall is a late-16th / early-17th-century house positioned above Ponden Water, on a small rise where valleys meet.

The building sits slightly withdrawn from the valley floor, visible but not prominent, with the land falling away below it toward what is now the reservoir.

The Hall was built and occupied by the Heaton family from the 17th century until the late 19th century.

2. Brontë association (documented)

The Brontë children were familiar visitors to Ponden Hall.

They had access to the Heaton family’s private library, one of the largest private libraries in Yorkshire at the time.

Across Brontë biographies and juvenilia scholarship, their reading here is understood to have been:

self-directed

informal

unguided by curriculum or tutor

There is no documentary evidence of instruction, supervision, or interpretive guidance during this reading.

Books were present. Meaning was not mediated.

3. Interior features associated with Wuthering Heights

(widely regarded associations)

A small gable window at Ponden Hall is widely regarded as influencing the window scene in Wuthering Heights.

A historic box-bed within the Hall is commonly cited in relation to the novel’s “oak closet” bed.

These associations are longstanding and continue to shape:

photography of the house

visitor interpretation

both scholarly and popular discussion

They are treated consistently as influential associations, not proofs.

4. Civil War context (documented record and local tradition)

In 1644, Royalist Sir Richard Tankard admitted involvement in the burning of Haworth.
Parliamentarian forces under Oliver Cromwell were active elsewhere in Yorkshire during the same period.

Rural households in the region faced:

requisitioning

shifting control

risk from both sides

Local tradition holds that the Heaton family concealed Ponden Hall by covering it with bracken, allowing the building to blend into the hillside — an act of caution rather than declared allegiance.

5. Access, approach, and the lost avenue

Ponden Hall was historically approached by a tree-lined avenue.

This avenue connected the Hall directly to the Blue Bell Turnpike, functioning as the primary route of arrival.

With the construction of the dam and flooding of the valley in the late 19th century:

the avenue ceased to function

the route was submerged

access was terminated rather than redirected

A short remnant of the avenue remains visible between the Hall and the present waterline.

Ponden Reservoir was constructed between 1871 and 1876.

6. Long term pattern

Across its recorded history, Ponden Hall is consistently associated with:

enclosure rather than exposure

private access to knowledge

caution rather than declaration

survival through withholding

continuity without overt projection

This post establishes the location only.
Further layers will be introduced later.

07/11/2025

Theme: The Living Path - The fool walks on

A path is never just a line between two points. It’s the living tissue of experience — the shared rhythm between fixed moments, the current that carries thought, memory, and companionship.

The points are coordinates, but the path is conversation — the way we walk together toward an unseen horizon. Every step redraws the map.

In the Brontë Tarot, these mutable paths echo the networks between neurons — living routes of connection and anticipation. They are consciousness in motion: aware, adaptive, always becoming.

At the end of the day, all destinations dissolve into the same horizon — oblivion, stillness, the unmeasured point beyond. But the path — the way itself — is where awareness lives.

Each node in the map holds its own small spell.
For the Brontë Altar, the spell is: “You are here.”
Those words collapse uncertainty, fix a moment, draw the wandering spirit into presence — a quiet act of orientation, a spell for not being lost.

For Timmy Feather, we see a vast interweaving of threads — glowing fibres of connection and association, too numerous to comprehend in ordinary consciousness, requiring the altered state of vision-quest perception to navigate.
Spell: “Does this path have heart?”

Ponden water - "The form is temporary; the spirit, eternal."

And always, between the nodes, walks the Fool — the traveller, the question, the unending movement through landscape and self. Each step between coordinates is both an ending and a beginning, a small act of death and rebirth.

06/11/2025

Ponden Water — Samhain 2025

Originally just a pond, as shown on this 1847 map, Ponden Water reservoir was created in 1871.

The submerged Ghost Avenue is one of the elements explored at Ponden Water. With its history of change and transformation, Ponden Water is the location I’ve matched with the Tarot’s Death card.

Much was lost when the valley was flooded — the path the Brontës would have walked, and the first impression of Ponden Hall: the view that once introduced it as a home.

Theme: The Death of Paths

Paths can die — swallowed by reservoirs, fallen away by landslides into valley abysses, or simply changed by human moods, weather, animal movement, and natural drift.

Time and place are firmer, more enduring points, but the ways between them shift, falter, and reform.

The old avenue from Ponden Hall to the Blue Bell Turnpike lies drowned beneath Ponden Water, its course still marked by the remaining trees that once lined it. What was once walked as the main to-and-fro from Ponden Hall was suddenly lost to memory, save for the fleeting, evanescent spectral lights seen moving beneath the surface.

Here, locations align with the fixed points of the unchanging witness — consciousness itself — and paths with the mutable layers of self and circumstance. When the path “dies,” the coordinates remain: awareness persists, but the ways we move through it — the beliefs and emotions that define us — dissolve and reform.

03/11/2025

The full moon in 2 days time - just in time for Samhain

Nodes - Top Withins, the Fairy cave, Trolls gate, Spa Wells, the Church and the Blue Bell Turnpike.

The Wheel of fortune continued ...

⚙️ The Predictive Mind and the Wheel 🧵

The theory that all experience is the mind trying to predict the next moment is known in cognitive science as Predictive Processing — the idea that the brain is constantly generating and refining an internal model of the world.

Perception isn’t passive. It’s an ongoing negotiation between what we expect and what actually happens — a continual attempt to reduce the gap between prediction and sensation.

In this sense, divination is a conscious mirror of what the brain already does unconsciously: it tries to foresee the next moment, to bring order to uncertainty. Systems like tarot, Seiðr, and sphondylomancy are ritualized versions of the mind’s own predictive patterns — ways of noticing connections, regularities, and rhythms in experience.

In the Brontë Tarot, each place, person, and story acts as a node within this predictive network — a point on a map of woven fates connecting the physical and the mental. It’s not elusive like traditional notions of magic, but rooted in shared, repeatable experience across many kinds of people and minds.

The 22 Major Arcana and the paths between them form a kind of narrative topology — a geometry of consciousness where external landscapes mirror internal ones. Once a place or motif is placed upon the map, its associations begin to unfold, revealing the necessary paths that link one experience to another.

🕸️ The result is a living, holographic tapestry — every thread active, every connection necessary — a continuous act of prediction, perception, and participation.

🌿 20 Other Q***r Places: A Tarot Map of the Brontës 🌿
Landscape, memory, and the woven mind — a little q***r, a little gothic, very Brontë.

24/10/2025

🧵 The Wheel of Fortune — Buckley Green, Stanbury

🪡 The eleventh location on the Brontë Tarot map is Buckley Green, near Stanbury — and the figure of Timmy Feather, known as the last handloom weaver. I’ve associated this place with the Wheel of Fortune card.

🧶 Spinning and weaving have long been entwined with ideas of fate. In Norse cosmology, the Norns sit beneath the roots of the world tree, weaving the threads of life. The practice of Seiðr — a form of Norse magic — uses rhythmic, repetitive motion, such as spinning or weaving, to enter trance states and engage with the currents of fate, divination, and wyrd.

⚙️ Traditionally a female practice, Seiðr is taught to Odin by Freyja — a crossing of gendered boundaries to learn the secrets of the Norns. Timmy Feather, working his loom through a lifetime of rhythmic repetition, echoes this same story. Both Odin and Timmy reflect a shared pattern — meditative anchors in the turning weave of wyrd, where craft and consciousness meet.

🪢 At Buckley Green, the loom and the wheel and the weaver and the landscape become part of the weave — a meditation on how fate is both made and met, spun and unspun, through the motion of life itself.

30/09/2025

✨ The Fool walks on… ✨

“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide.” — Emily Brontë

The Fool usually teeters on a cliff edge — but here on the moors, stepping into the unknown is stepping into the mist. Fogs rise from the valleys, descend from the skies, and dissolve the path ahead.

What looks solid fades away; what looks empty may open. Boundaries dissolve, forms flow into one another: hill into hollow, stream into bog, light into shadow.

“Do you know that you run a risk of being lost in the marshes? People familiar with these moors often miss their road on such evenings; and I can tell you there is no chance of a change at present.” — Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights

🌿 20 Other Q***r Places: A Tarot Map of the Brontës 🌿
Pathways of light and shadow, memory and myth — a little q***r, a little gothic, very Brontë.

25/09/2025

✨ Equilux at Top Withins ✨

Today is the equilux — the brief moment when day and night are held in balance.

This sketch of Top Withins (the ‘Wuthering Heights’ ruin) was made in the style I developed with my kids during the pandemic: everything cross-hatched, every element blending into the next. Land, sky, water, air — all the same strokes, all interwoven.

I'm revisiting some of the sketches to include on the Tarot map, jazzing them up a bit with photoshop (actually Gimp which is a free image editing program)

The red trees are Cathy and Heathcliff, rooted together above the ruin. At equilux, light and dark, self and other, past and present, seem to meet the same way.

🌿 20 Other Q***r Places: A Tarot Map of the Brontës 🌿
A journey through landscape, memory, and the ‘other’ — a little q***r, a little gothic, very Brontë.