• Alston
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• The Duddon Valley
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• Vale Of Lorton
• Wasdale
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• Spa Hotels In Windermere The Lake District
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• Hot Tub Hotels In Windermere And The Lake District
• Romantic Breaks In Windermere And The Lake District
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• 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
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• Holiday Accommodation Wanted In The Lake District

Tourism in the Lake District

Ambleside´s great coaching inn was the Salutation. Despite much enlargement it still has character and its former identity as a coaching inn with yard and outbuildings is clearly visible. It was probably here that Gray nearly stayed in 1769: I now reached Ambleside, eighteen miles from Keswick, meaning to lie there; but on looking into the best bedchamber, dark and damp as a cellar, grew delicate, gave up Wynandermere in despair, and resolved I would go on to Kendal directly, fourteen miles further. Things must have improved, for it quickly became a tourist centre.

Keats stayed here in June 1818; Joseph Budworth explored the fells with one Robin Partridge, 'who acts as guide, as boots, postillion and boatman, at the Salutation Inn', portraying him in his Fortnight's Ramble to the Lakes (1793) as a comic, skeptical rustic, a sort of Sancho Panza to his own Don Quixote.

Wordsworth, in a draft for his Guide to the Lakes, assumes that visitors will start from here and is fairly cynical about how travelers were hustled along: From Ambleside to Keswick (explains the bustling leader of a party of Tourists, glancing his eye carelessly on the map in his hand or casting a look towards the clouds for information concerning the state of the weather) is how far? 16 miles. Is there anything worthy of notice on the road? Nothing but what all Travelers see as they pass along will probably be the answer of mine host of the Salutation if the question be asked at the height of the season & he is anxious to have his horses back again for a fresh job.

John Stuart Mill stayed here in July 1831, as did Tennyson and Edward Fitzgerald in May 1835. Tennyson was working on his 'Morte d' Arthur' and trying to convert Fitzgerald to Wordsworth's poetry.50yds sw of the Salutation is the Post Office, a miserable modern building on the site formerly occupied by the house of William Green (1761-1823), Ambleside's best known landscape artist. Most visitors to the town went to see his studio, and he features extensively in Ellen Weeton's Journal of a Governess. Jessie Harden visited the house on her honeymoon in 1803, and her journal gives the upper-class view the artist as genteel pauper:

We have just been viewing some Drawings of the Lakes by Mr Greene who has been here some years and has taken a very great number of accurate views of them. He sells a good many and every visitor gives him a shilling by which means I dare say He picks up a tolerable sum in the course of the season and very deservedly I think.

Her husband, of course, was an amateur painter, a very different thing. Next door (a far older and pleasanter building) is the office of that venerable Ambleside institution, Brown's Luxury Coaches. This is the Old Post Office. Here in 1835 Owen Lloyd, curate of Ambleside, minor poet and friend of Wordsworth, wrote the Ambleside Rush bearing Hymn, which explains why the Rush bearing procession which makes its .way to the church annually on a Saturday in July always stops outside the building to sing the hymn.

For Ambleside's most surprising cultural association, return uphill towards the Salutation and go behind the Market Hall, then take steep lane curving up R by St John's Ambulance hall; continue up steps and On to a group of three tall stone terrace houses. The middle one is 2 Gale Crescent, home from 1945 to 1948 of the German Dadaist poet, sculptor and painter Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948).

Schwitters, one of the great pioneers of collage and abstract painting (best kown for his 'Merz' series of constructions using bus tickets, packaging and other printed matter) was driven from his home in Hanover by the Nazis in 1937 as a 'Degenerate Artist'. He took refuge in Norway and reached Ambleside in 1945 with his English friend and nurse, Edith Thomas. He was seriously ill but continued to work, painting realistic portraits and landscapes, as well as continuing with his abstract works. He and Edith lived at Gale Crescent 'very romantically,' as Schwitters wrote, 'with a splendid view and share the housekeeping: cooking, cleaning, piano playing, and painting.' He used to play chess in the Ambleside cafes with Dr Harry Pierce of Langdale, who gave him the barn where his last major sculptural work was carried out He died of asthma at Kendal in January 1948, and is buried in Ambleside cemetery.

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