Gimmerton Kirk

Gimmerton Kirk is the parish church and burial ground that anchors the geography of Wuthering Heights, a place where the novel's most profound themes of death, memory, and spiritual unrest are literally laid to rest. It is the site of Catherine Earnshaw's grave, the object of Heathcliff's obsessive grief, and the location where the fates of the Earnshaw and Linton families converge in the earth. More than a setting, the kirk becomes a character in its own right—a silent witness to the decades of passion and cruelty that define the story, and a space where the boundary between the living and the dead grows perilously thin.

Location and Physical Description

Gimmerton Kirk lies in a hollow between two hills, near a swamp whose peaty moisture is said to have embalming properties for the few corpses deposited there. The church itself is described as having a roof that has been kept whole, but the clergyman's stipend is only twenty pounds per annum, with a house of two rooms threatening to become one, so no clergyman will undertake the duties of pastor. The congregation is reportedly unwilling to increase the living by a penny from their own pockets. The churchyard is a lonely place, where a moor-sheep may be seen cropping the short turf on the graves. By the time of Lockwood's final visit, decay has made progress: many windows show black gaps deprived of glass, and slates jut off here and there beyond the right line of the roof.

The Burial Ground and Its Graves

Catherine Earnshaw's interment is the most significant burial at Gimmerton Kirk. To the surprise of the villagers, her grave is neither in the chapel under the carved monument of the Lintons nor by the tombs of her own relations outside. Instead, it is dug on a green slope in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry-plants have climbed over it from the moor, and peat-mould almost buries it. Edgar Linton is later laid in the same spot, and they each have a simple headstone above and a plain grey block at their feet to mark the graves. Heathcliff's grave is dug nearby, and his headstone bears only the single word "Heathcliff" and the date of his death. Lockwood, on his final visit, discovers the three headstones on the slope next to the moor: the middle one grey and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.

The Kirk as a Site of Haunting and Grief

The kirk is the epicenter of Heathcliff's haunting. On the night of Catherine's burial, which was accompanied by a fall of snow, Heathcliff goes to the churchyard alone. Conscious that only two yards of loose earth separate him from her, he attempts to dig up her coffin with a spade from the tool-house, declaring to himself, "I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep." He is interrupted by what he perceives as a sigh from above, close at the edge of the grave, and a warm breath displacing the sleet-laden wind. He feels Catherine's presence with him, and this experience becomes the foundation for eighteen years of obsessive yearning. After her death, Heathcliff spends his nights outside the Grange, and on the Tuesday before her funeral, he enters the drawing room through a window opened by Nelly Dean to take a final adieu of the corpse, removing a lock of light hair from a locket around Catherine's neck and replacing it with a black lock of his own. Later, he bribes the sexton to remove the side of Catherine's coffin when he is laid there, so that his coffin may slide out and their dust mingle, declaring, "by the time Linton gets to us he'll not know which is which!"

The Kirk in the Narrative's Resolution

In the novel's final chapter, the kirk serves as the setting for the resolution of the story's supernatural tensions. After Heathcliff's death, local folklore insists that he walks: there are those who claim to have met him near the church, on the moor, and even within the house. A little boy, encountered by Nelly Dean on a dark evening threatening thunder, is found crying because he has seen "Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t' nab" and dares not pass them. Yet Lockwood, on his final visit, lingers among the three headstones under a benign sky, watching moths flutter among the heath and harebells, listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondering "how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." The kirk thus becomes the place where the novel's central paradox is resolved: the dead, who have been so restless in life and in memory, are finally at peace.