16 Aug 2014. <GB-ENG> Grasmere, & Hawkshead, & Low Wray, Ambleside, Cumbr —
Still in the
Lake District. Today we had a couple of specific destinations.
Dove Cottage, from the garden
The first was
Dove Cottage, in Town End near
Grasmere, the home of
William Wordsworth during one of his most productive periods. The first thing we noticed was that all the buildings in the area are
dry-stone slate. Dove Cottage is small, but William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived there comfortably for 8 years from 1799.
It is in this time that William, after a diary entry of Dorothy's, wrote one of his most famous poems
Daffodils.
There is a
museum associated with the cottage, and this gives a very good overview of Wordsworth's life and works, and of his relationships with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, and others. One funny thing about Wordsworth was that he resisted being appointed Poet Laureate until it was virtually forced on him — and he took the post on the condition that he didn't have to write any poetry in the post unless he was particularly moved to do so. And how many times was he so moved? — precisely none!
The Gallery
Ticket office — from Gallery
We then drove south to
Hawkshead, to
Beatrix Potter country. It was in this town that Beatrix's husband had an office, and this has been turned into a
Beatrix Potter gallery by the National Trust. A delightful little spot — the whole town resonates with Beatrix Potter, and the gallery has displays of her works, with changing displays of much of her work (the Trust has over 7,000 of her paintings, but can only display a limited number at a time), but always a room of the artwork for her children's books, with headphones delivering audio readings of the books for the littlies to enjoy.
After an hour or so communing with Beatrix, we left to go round the northern end of Lake Windemere to other places we had on our agenda.
Didn't make it. Decided to drop off at
Wray Castle, just north of Hawkshead. This is a rather strange National Trust property — it's a property built by a Liverpool couple, James and Margaret Dawson, as a 4-bedroom detached retirement home. Some retirement home!
The staircase
It's a
neo-Gothic (or mock-Gothic) tour-de-force, mainly built as a piece of one-ups-man-ship to the moneyed residents on the opposite side of Lake Windemere. It has two other claims to fame. The first is that Edwin Preston Rawnsley, who inherited the property after James's death, set up his cousin
Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley as vicar of Low Wray, part of the property, in 1877 — and Hardwicke later went on to become one of the founders of the National Trust, in whose hands the property now lies. The other is that the place was used as a holiday let and that in 1882 Beatrix Potter and her family rented the whole castle for their summer holiday.
View from Wray Castle
After an hour or so in this amazing place, we went northwards and, after finding a Co-op store in Grasmere (near Dove Cottage) to replenish our supplies, found ourselves back in the same layby as last night, ready to launch ourselves on the eastern shore of Lake Windemere tomorrow. By the way, it's been raining since about 5pm!
Distance driven — today, 34 miles ( 55 km ); to date, 5,865 miles ( 9,439 km )
Dove Cottage! I am impressed with myself that I remembered its connection to Wordsworth before I read on. I had no idea it would be still around or available to visit, gotta love the sentimentality of the English!
ReplyDeleteI remember Dove cottage from reading about Wordsworth and Coleridge. Didn't Coleridge stay there for awhile until Wordsworth had to kick him out for being, well... himself? haha. A great example of 'opposites attract' in friendship.
How beautiful, Wordsworth was such a brilliant poet, one of the few romantics who lived sensibly (as opposed to sleeping around and being high/drunk all the time) so I have a lot of respect for him.