The new Piers Tempest production 'Emily' opens in cinemas this week. Farfield Quaker meeting house in Addingham was one of the locations for the film. Chris Skidmore, author of the book Quakers and their Meeting Houses, reports.

THERE is such a buzz on a film location. So many people and so much equipment appears as it were overnight and by the next day it is all gone! So it was on 4 June 2021 when Tempo Productions took over Farfield Friends Meeting House for the day to film a scene from the recently-released film, ‘Emily’, based on the life of Emily Brontë.

Farfield Meeting House, a preserved 1689 meeting house belonging to the Historic Chapels Trust, is normally a peaceful, secluded place, a place for a quiet sit down while walking the Dales Way between Addingham and Bolton Bridge. The film company had scouted it the previous autumn and felt that it could represent a small Sunday schoolroom where Emily taught. The majority of the filming had been centred on Haworth and the moors and this was, I believe the only location in Wharfedale.

When I arrived that day, the field on the opposite side of Bolton Road had been taken over as a car park and an assortment of portaloos and catering trucks. The meeting house itself was surrounded by cables and lighting rigs, the plaques on the wall had been removed and anything that looked remotely out of place covered with convincing artificial ivy! The interior of the meeting house had its benches removed and replaced by rows of school desks and on the east wall were a couple of boards with biblical texts, which would have been out of place in a Quaker meeting house but perfectly in keeping with a Anglican schoolroom!

The scene was one of a meeting between Emily [Emma Mackey] and William Weightman [Oliver Jackson-Cohen], her love interest for the film’s purposes. Every so often the actors would appear, the lights would be switched on and directed through gauzes to provide the ‘sunlight’ though the windows, and the cameras would roll. Between times there would be talking, adjustments to lighting, make-up and costumes and a lot of waiting around. The photo shows one such period, a conversation between the two actors, sitting on the 17th-century chest tombs in Farfield burial ground.

It was fascinating to watch – and a little anxious, in case any harm should come to the building, but all was well and when I returned the next day to check there was only a bit of dust and the odd sad piece of ivy to show that they filmmakers had been there!