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The Wordsworth Museum Grasmere the Lake District

Just N of the cottage, in a former barn, is the Wordsworth Museum, housing a permanent exhibition on the early discovery of the Lake District by landscape artists, followed by displays on the life, work and times of Wordsworth. There is much visual material, and manuscripts displayed include The Vale of Esthwaite (1787), the 1798 Prelude and Vaudracour and Julia, as well as volumes of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and part of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Most of the best portraits of Wordsworth are here as well as important portraits of most of his associates, including Coleridge, Scott, Davy, John Wilson, Burns and Leigh Hunt.

Take the steps between Dove Cottage and the Museum to find the Rock of Names at R of the path at the back of the Museum. Carved with the initials of William, Dorothy and John Wordsworth, Mary and Sara Hutchinson and Coleridge, it is now a patchwork of fragments. It was part of a rock face at the s end of Thirlmere, at the point where Coleridge and the Wordsworths often met midway between their homes at Grasmere and Keswick. Coleridge notes (April 20 1802) 'Cut out my name & Dorothy's over the S.H. at Sara's Rock ', but it is not clear whether he carved all the initials and if so when. 

The Rock is mentioned several times in Dorothy's Journal and is addressed by Wordsworth in an original draft for 'The Waggoner': We worked until the initials took Shapes that defied a scornful look. _ Long as for us a genial feeling Survives, or one in need of healing, The power, dear Rock, around the cast, Thy monumental power, shall last ... And fail not thou, loved Rock! to keep Thy charge when we are laid asleep.

Dove Cottage and the neighboring buildings make up the hamlet of Town End. On the corner s of Dove Cottage, between the road and a narrow lane, is Sykeside Farm. This was John and Agnes Fisher's house. John helped in the Dove Cottage garden and his sister Molly, a much loved and valued servant, helped Dorothy about the house. Molly was a highly individual character, remembered not least for refusing to let Coleridge go beyond the kitchen when he turned up at Dove Cottage one wet day in August 1802 with muddy boots. Agnes Fisher, another strong personality, is described in Excursion VI. A quick learner in youth, when nothing could subdue Her keen desire of knowledge, nor efface Those brighter images by books imprest Upon her memory, faithfully as stars That occupy their places, she came to be dominated by 'avaricious thrift'. Nursed through her final illness by Molly, she resented her sister in law and on her deathbed was heard to say In bitterness, 'and must she rule and reign, Sole Mistress of this house, when I am gone? Tend what I tended, calling it her own!'

The former barn at the back of Syke side is now The Wordsworth Library and is open to scholars for research by prior arrangement. The Library holds ninety percent of Wordsworth's verse manuscripts, all of Dorothy's Journals and many Wordsworth letters as well as manuscripts by Coleridge, De Quincey and others.

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