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Lowwood and Waterhead

Lowwood Hotel was built in 1850 to replace an older inn. Somewhere hereabouts, before the shoreline was tidied in Victorian times for picnics and boating, Dorothy Wordsworth saw her brothers William and John off 'at the turning of the Lowwood bay under the trees' on their tour into Yorkshire on May 14 1800. She shed 'a flood of tears', and walked as long as I could on the stones of the shore. The wood rich in flowers ... Crowfoot, the grassy leaved rabbit toothed white flower, strawberries, geranium, scentless violets, anemones two kinds, orchises, primroses Met a blind man, driving a very large beautiful Bull, and a cow he walked with two sticks.

No other inn in [this] route has so fine a view of a lake ... A small cannon is kept here to gratify the curious with those remarkable reverberations of sound, which follow the report of a gun &c. in these singular vales. The Hotel, and the inn it replaced, have entertained a distinguished list of visitors. Wordsworth dined here with Lord and Lady Holland in 1807, and in October 1813 Shelley and Harriet Westbrook stayed briefly on their way to Edinburgh. John Stuart Mill on his 1831 tour of the Lakes 'stopt to dine at Lowwood Inn' and made notes on the colors of the lake ('alternately of a deep lead color; a beautiful orangery; a lightish blue; a glittering white sparkling with the rays of the sun ... ') before travelling on to Ambleside and the Salutation for the night. Nathaniel Hawthorne stayed in July 1855 and admired the view across the lake. And in July 1907 E M Forster was here: '12/ a day', he told a friend, 'but I must admit they do you prettily there as well as well no beastliness: I can strongly recommend it though of course only to fools' .

Look N from the lakeside and you will see, half way up the fellside, a gabled house with frilly decorative bargeboards. This is Dove Nest, now a management training centre, whose drive slants up from the road on the corner V4m N of Lowwood. It was built in the late eighteenth century by John Benson (who also owned Dove Cottage) as a simple cottage with 'Gothic' turreted side wings; the present large gabled wings are Victorian.

A lively account of daily life here between 1809 and 1811 is given in the Journal of Ellen Weeton, who was governess. Miss Weeton's years here were not easy: her employer, Edward Pedder, was an odious coward, bully and miser; her pupil, Gertrude, accidentally set her apron on fire and burned to death. But Miss Wee ton records everything with unperturbed Jane Austenish sharpness, varied with touches of surprisingly Rabelaisian humor. Her record was published as Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess in 1936.

The poet Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) lived here during the summers from 1829 to 1831 and came to know the Wordsworths. She was a considerable literary celebrity, and though Sara Hutchinson thought her affectation 'perfectly unendurable', she earned herself a mention amongst other dead friends in Wordsworth's 'Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg'. Her work clings minimally but tenaciously to public memory by the opening of her poem 'Casabianca' (1829): 'The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled'. From 1853 Dove Nest was the home of the Rev. Robert Perceval Graves (great uncle of the modern poet Robert Graves), also a friend of Wordsworth's, who wrote a life of the astronomer and mathematician William Rowan Hamilton.

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