• Alston
• Allonby And Aspatria
• Ambleside And Troutbeck
• Appleby In Westmoreland
• Askam In Furness
• Barrow In Furness
• Bassenthwaite
• Borrowdale
• Bowness On Windermere
• Brough
• Buttermere
• Brampton
• Broughton In Furness
• Carlisle
• Cartmel
• Cleator Moor
• Cockermouth
• Coniston
• Dalston
• Dalton In Furness
• Dent
• Grange Over Sands
• Grasmere
• Greenodd
• Grizedale
• Hawkshead
• Kendal
• Keswick
• Kirkby Lonsdale
• Wasdale And Gosforth
• Kirkby Stephen
• Longtown
• Loweswater
• Maryport
• Melmerby
• Milnthorpe
• Nenthead
• Newby Bridge
• Orton
• Penrith
• Pooley Bridge
• Ravenglass And Eskdale
• Sedbergh
• Seascale
• Shap
• Silloth And Solway
• St Bees
• Skiddaw
• Staveley
• Tebay
• The Duddon Valley
• Threlkeld
• Ulverston
• Vale Of Lorton
• Wasdale
• Wetheral
• Whitehaven
• Wigton
• Windermere
• Workington
• Spa Hotels In Windermere The Lake District
• Hotels With Hot Tubs In Windermere
• Hot Tub Hotels In Windermere And The Lake District
• Romantic Breaks In Windermere And The Lake District
• Themed Hotels In Windermere And The Lake District
• Weekend Breaks In Windermere
• Windermere Attractions And Boat Trips
• Boutique Hotels And Accommodation In Windermere And The Lake District
• Windermere In The Rain
• One Way Ticket To Windermere Por Favor
• Horse Riding In The Lake District
• Walks In The Lake District
• Windermere Boutique Hotel Bedrooms
• Holiday Accommodation Wanted In The Lake District

Dove Cottage Grasmere the Lake District

Originally an inn, the Dove and Olive Branch, in Wordsworth's time it had no name of its own and was simply considered part of Town End, the hamlet at the s end of Grasmere Township. The name 'Dove Cottage' has been in common use only since the Wordsworth Trust acquired the cottage in 1890. William and Dorothy Wordsworth must have passed the cottage on their 1794 walk from Kendal to Keswick, but there is no sign that they took special notice of it. In November 1799 William revisited Grasmere with his brother John and Coleridge, and wrote to Dorothy of 'a small house ... empty which perhaps we may take and purchase furniture'; on December 17, after a three days' journey on foot and horseback in bitter cold from Sockburn on Tees, they moved in. The cottage, built sometime before 1617, had only just ceased to be used as an inn. There was little furniture and only 'a dying spark in the grate of the gloomy parlor', according to Dorothy, but 'we were young and healthy and had attained our object long desired, we had returned to our native mountains, there to live.' The Wordsworths repaired and decorated the cottage themselves, put up a slate fence between the front garden and the road 'to make it more our own', and had a door made from the half landing of the staircase into the garden.

Here, between 1800 and 1803, Dorothy kept her journal, an almost daily record of household doings, local excursions and the changing detail of the nearby landscape. Here too Wordsworth wrote many of his finest poems, including 'Michael', 'The Brothers', 'Resolution and Independence', 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', the 1805 Prelude and most of the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes. The 'Preface' to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads was also written here.

The cottage is furnished much as it would have been in Wordsworth's time. The study contains his writing chair and a painting of the poet dictating to his wife Mary. Notice the cuckoo clock over the stairs: it comes from a later phase of Wordsworth's life, when he lived at Rydal Mount. His poem 'The Cuckoo Clock', written in 1840 soon after the clock was given to him, conveys straightforward pleasure in it.

In the Wordsworths' time the cottage had an uninterrupted view across the lake to Silver How now blocked by the houses of Lake Terrace, built in 1860. Dorothy Wordsworth's journal notes (December 12 1801): We played at cards sat up late. The moon shone upon the water below Silver How, and above it hung, combining with Silver How on one side, a bowl shaped moon, the curve downwards; the white fields, glittering roof of Thomas Ashburner's house, the dark yew tree, the white fields gay and beautiful. Wm lay with his curtains open that he might see it.

On March 8 1802 the moon hung over the northern side of the highest point of Silver How, like a gold ring snapped in two, and shaven off at the ends, it was so narrow. Within this ring lay the circle of the round moon, as distinctly to be seen as ever the enlightened moon is. Visitors included Waller Scott and Humphry Davy (both in 1805) and Coleridge, who often came between 1800 (when he revised the Ancient Mariner here) and 1804. Dorothy's Journal records his arrival at the cottage after his moonlight walk over Helvellyn in August 1800 with Part Two of Christabel in his pocket.

There was also much hospitality to neighbors: at Christmas 1805, a fiddler came and 'all the children of the neighboring houses' came into the kitchen to dance. Not many of Wordsworth's poems explicitly mention the cottage. The most detailed reference is in 'A Farewell', written in May 1802, shortly before Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. The poem, addressed to the cottage, describes its future mistress as one who will prize the 'Dear spot' and its 'happy Garden': Farewell, thou little nook of mountain ground, Thou rocky corner in the lowest stair Of that magnificent temple which doth bound One side of our whole vale with grandeur rare; Sweet garden orchard, eminently fair, The loveliest spot that man hath ever found.

Dove Cottage and William Wordsworth the Lake District

A curious fragment (also from 1802) celebrates Wordsworth's quiet joy in the sheer physical solidity and calmness of the house: These Chairs they have no words to utter, No fire is in the grate to stir or flutter, The ceiling and floor are mute as a stone, My chamber is hushed and still, And I am alone, Happy and alone. In 'The Waggoner' (1806) the hero passes the cottage (after laboring over the 'craggy hill' of White Moss Common) and the poet comments Where once the dove and olive bough offered a greeting of good ale To all who entered Grasmere Vale And called on him who must depart To leave it with a jovial heart; There, where the dove  and olive bough Once hung, a poet harbors now, A simple water drinking bard.

The garden (open in good weather only) is a steep nook of land at the foot of the crags and woodland which run up the fell behind the cottage. Dorothy filled it with flowering plants taken from the wild or given by neighbors snowdrops, pansies, wild columbine, foxgloves, honeysuckle, strawberries and scarlet runner beans and it is kept much as she would have known it, with the right balance between the wild and the cultivated. On June 9 1800, according to Dorothy.

In the morning W cut down the winter cherry tree. I sowed French beans and weeded. A coroneted Landau went by, when we were sitting upon the sodded wall. The ladies (evidently Tourists) turned an eye of interest upon our little garden and cottage. The present summerhouse stands on the site of a 'moss hut' or 'bower' built in the spring of 1804 by William and Dorothy (but demolished by De Quincey in 1811). According to Wordsworth it was circular, 'lined with moss, like a wren's nest, and coated on the outside with heath'. Here they read to one another, and William worked at his poems (so much composition was done in the garden that at one time Wordsworth considering using The Orchard Pathway as the title for a group of his poems).

Dorothy too liked to sit here and could hear, on a May morning, The small birds ... singing, lambs bleating, cuckow calling, the thrush singing by fits, Thomas Ashburner's axe ... going quietly (without passion) in the orchard, hens ... cackling, flies humming, the women talking together at their doors. Poems written here and referring to the garden include 'To a Butterfly', 'The Kitten and Falling Leaves', 'Stanzas Written in my Pocket Copy of Thomson's Castle of Indolence', parts of the 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', and 'The Green Linnet' (1802), which shows Wordsworth in the orchard: Beneath these fruittree boughs that shed Their snowwhite blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread Hest Bank Ambleside St John's in the Vale Of spring's unclouded weather, In this sequestered nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard seat! And birds and flowers once more to greet, My last year's friends together.

De Quincey and Dove Cottage the Lake District

De Quincey took over the cottage in 1809. He had first come to stay with the Wordsworths for a few days in 1807 and his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets record the impact of his first glimpse of his hero, Wordsworth, at the door: Through the little gate I pressed forward; ten steps beyond it lay the principal door of the house. To this, no longer clearly conscious of my own feelings, I passed on rapidly; I heard a step, a voice, and, like a flash of lightning, I saw the figure emerge of a tallish man, who held out his hand, and saluted me with the most cordial manner, and the warmest expression of friendly welcome that it is possible to imagine.

His description of the cottage shows it much as it is today: A little semi vestibule between two doors prefaced the entrance into what might be considered the principal room of the cottage ... very prettily wainscotted from the floor to the ceiling with dark polished oak ... One window there was a perfect and unpretending cottage window, with little diamond panes, embowered, at almost every season of the year, with roses; and, in the summer and autumn, with a profusion of jessamine and other fragrant shrubs.

When he returned in 1809, he lived at first on a small private income and then in 1818-19 edited the Westmorland Gazette. After 1813 he was heavily addicted to opium and his Confessions of an English Opium Eater show him relaxing in the cottage with 'a book of German metaphysics and ... a quart of ruby colored laudanum'. The Confessions also describe the sublimely horrific opium dreams De Quincey experienced here. Finding the cottage too small for his library and his family, he moved to Fox Ghyll in 1820: 'Mr de Quinceys Books have literally turned their master and his whole family out of doors', commented Sara Hutchinson.

Since the cottage was opened as a showplace in 1890, sightseeing visits have generated a literature of their own. Inevitably, the best modern poems on the house take a sceptical stance: Geoffrey Hill's 'Elegiac Stanzas On a Visit to Dove Cottage' (1959) acknowledges the power of Wordsworth's language but questions the Customs through which many come To sink their eyes into a room Filled with the unused and unworn.

Tony Harrison's 'Remains' commemorates a stoical message left in pencil by a Victorian paperhanger, briefly uncovered during modern restoration work: 'Our heads will be happen cold when this is found.'

Home >> Interesting Articles about the Lake District