Keighley and Haworth museums could play a leading role in a planned Pennines arts programme.

The South Pennines Watershed Landscape programme aims to encourage more people to become creative.

Over three years it aims to bring professional artists and writers together with residents and visitors.

They will draw on the Yorkshire and Lancashire countryside as inspiration for new artistic works.

The £106,000 project will heavily involve Cliffe Castle Museum and the Bronte Parsonage Museum.

Bradford Council's museums service is also heavily involved in the programme.

Funding will come from The South Pennines Leader rural development programme -- funded by the government and the European Union -- and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The proposed launch is this March (2010) at the opening of Cliffe Castle's planned Ways of Looking at our Landscape exhibition.

Visual artists will spend three months at single venues -- including Cliffe Castle -- creating new work, running community workshops and hosted exhibitions. There will be similar writers-in-residence projects, the first one based at the Bronte Parsonage, with workshops, readings and publication of work.

Each year there will be a photographic competition open to local people, who will be asked to capture the uniqueness of upland and reservoir landscapes.

Work will this year be exhibited at Ilkley Manor House Museum, featuring pictures of nearby Rombalds Moor, and a future year's exhibition may be at Cliffe Castle.

A spokesman for the Watershed Landscape said that in past centuries writers and artists had found the South Pennines moorlands a rich source of inspiration.

The spokesman said: "The projects are proposed as a means of celebrating a long tradition, to bring the wealth of creative activities associated with the uplands to the attention of a wider audience.

"Short courses will encourage aspiring artists and writers to find out more while developing their own creativity."

The project will also help more people appreciate the landscape and encourage them to make their own visits.

The South Pennines Leader programme covers areas including Rombalds Moor and the Brontë countryside, and funds. schemes which are innovative, long lasting and improve the quality of people's lives, the environment or the local economy.