Haworth is first recorded in 1209, its name probably meaning hedged or hawthorn enclosure. For most of its existence it was a small upland chapelry in the great parish of Bradford, scattered across the Pennine slope above the River Worth. When Patrick Bronte arrived as perpetual curate in 1820, the village had no proper sewers. The 1850 inspection by Benjamin Herschel Babbage, son of the computing pioneer Charles Babbage, found waste from slaughterhouses and pigsties stored for months in fenced enclosures, an overcrowded graveyard that drained into the water supply, poorly ventilated cottages, and excrement running down the streets. The report shocked Parliament. Slow improvements followed. The Brontes themselves had already paid the price: all but one of Patrick's six children died by the age of 31, including the writers whose names now bring half a million visitors a year up that same slope.

The River Worth, dropping fast through its narrow valley, was the reason Haworth had a future at all. By the nineteenth century its current powered large worsted mills that gave most of the village its living. Brass bands grew up around the mill yards; one neighbouring band at Ponden was founded by John Heaton as early as the 1850s and played at the celebration that marked the end of the Crimean War. Later the textile trade went the way of most northern English textile trades, and the mills emptied. What replaced them was a heritage railway and a literary museum: the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, kept alive by enthusiasts, runs steam services up from Keighley through Oakworth and Damems to Haworth and on to Oxenhope. The Bronte Parsonage Museum, opened in 1928, draws the rest.

Main Street climbs in a tight curve of setts past the Black Bull pub, where Branwell Bronte's slide into alcohol and opium is locally said to have begun, up to the parish church of St Michael and All Angels and the parsonage behind it. The setts have proved photogenic enough to bring film crews back every few years. The 1970 film of The Railway Children was shot here, as were Yanks with Richard Gere, parts of Alan Parker's adaptation of Pink Floyd's The Wall, Rita Sue and Bob Too, and most recently the 2016 BBC drama To Walk Invisible, for which a full-scale replica of the parsonage as it was in the 1840s was built on nearby Penistone Hill. In November the village stages Scroggling the Holly, when children in Victorian costume process up the cobbles behind a Holly Queen to inaugurate Christmas. In summer it hosts a 1940s weekend, with locals and visitors in wartime dress.

Step out of the village west, and within minutes the Bronte Way leads past Lower Laithe Reservoir and the hamlet of Stanbury, then up to the Bronte Waterfalls, the Bronte Bridge, and the carved Bronte Stone Chair where, by tradition, the three sisters took turns sitting and inventing their first stories. Beyond lies Ponden Hall, often suggested as the model for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights, and finally Top Withens, a ruined upland farmstead long associated, with no proof but plenty of conviction, with Heathcliff's house. None of these places is more than a few miles from the cobbled town. In 2002 Haworth was granted Fairtrade Village status and three years later twinned with Machu Picchu in Peru, an unlikely pairing of upland villages that draw pilgrims for very different reasons.