• 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
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Loughrigg the Lake District

To reach this delightful nook, which has a rich literary history  leave Ambleside following signs for Coniston and Langdale, then as you cross the bridge over the Rothay look for a small sign, 'Under Loughrigg'. This leads to a narrow and most beautiful road which runs along the riverside under the wooded slopes of Loughrigg Fell to Rydal. If possible walk along it: one of its charms is lack of traffic. The road was a favorite with Dorothy Wordsworth, who often chose this way between Ambleside and Grasmere (she calls it 'Clappers gate' because the road branches off the Coniston route at the edge of Clappers gate). On May 14 1800, she noted Came home by Clappersgate. The valley very green; many sweet views up to Rydal head, when I could juggle away the fine houses; but they disturbed me ... one beautiful view of the Bridge, without Sir Michael's.

('Sir Michael's' was Rydal Hall then an obtrusive new house.) It was on this walk that she resolved to 'write a journal' a resolve she kept until 1803%m along the road, on the w side, is the gate to Miller Bridge House. In the early nineteenth century this was the school run by Parson Dawes for the sons of local gentlefolk. Pupils at various times included the future minor poets Owen Lloyd (son of Charles Lloyd) and Aubrey De Vere; Hartley and Derwent Coleridge; and Wordsworth's sons Willie and John.

Another 314m brings us to Fox How, on the N side of the road. This was the holiday home of Dr Thomas Arnold (17951842), Headmaster of Rugby School, who bought the land with Wordsworth's encouragement and had the house built in 1833. Wordsworth himself advised on the architecture, insisting on a local vernacular style with unflustered stone walls, cylindrical chimneys and traditional porch.

Dr Arnold loved the house, though always austerely impressing on his children that 'mere mountain and lake hunting' was 'time lost'. The house passed into the hands of the second great Arnold, the poet and critic Matthew, on his father's death. Matthew spent many holidays here and his poem 'The New Sirens' was composed 'While walking up and down on a soft gloomy day in the field by the Rotha' below the house. (Or so the standard edition of his poems has it. His biographer tells us that it was 'a soft bloomy day': it is characteristic of this area that either could be correct, and equally pleasant.) Dr Arnold's granddaughter Mary, later Mrs Humphry Ward (1851-1920), spent part of her childhood here and describes it in A Writer's Recollections.

Separated from her parents (who lived in Ireland) she cannot have been very happy. She lived in the house only for a year (1856-57) before being boarded out (aged seven) at Anne Clough's school in Ambleside, returning to Fox How for the weekends. She recalled it with the casual grandeur of the prosperous Edwardian as a modest building, with ten bedrooms and three sitting rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart of Fairfield, the beautiful semicircular mountain which rears its hollowed front and buttressing scaur against the north, far above the green floor of the valley.

There was also the garden, with its little beck with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild strawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of silver birches rearing a stately head against the distant mountain, its velvet turf, and long silky grass in the parts left wild.

She portrayed the house as 'Ravensnest' in Milly and Oily or A Holiday Among the Mountains (1881), a work of great interest (despite its insufferable prose style) as the first children's novel to take a Lake District holiday as its theme. Continue 250yds to Fox Ghyll, home of Thomas De Quincey from 1820 to 1825, the period when he wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater and established himself as a writer with the London Magazine. Most of his writing, however, seems to have been done on trips to London. The De Quinceys were evicted by Dorothy Wordsworth's friend Letitia Luff when she bought the house in 1825. She enlarged it and landscaped its grounds. Her parrot a 'sportive bird By social glee inspired' is described in Wordsworth's 'The Contrast: The Parrot and the Wren', which compares it unfavorably with a wren that haunted the moss hut at Rydal Mount.

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