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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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• 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

William Wordsworth and his time in the Lake District

In 1794 William and Dorothy Wordsworth picnicked by (and drank from) the beck that flows down through the wood past the Dove Nest drive, on their walk through the Lakes. Wordsworth celebrated it in a sonnet, 'There is a little unpretending Rill': the beck is 'humbler far than aughtrrhat ever among men or Naiads sought/Notice or name'; for the poet, however, 'The immortal Spirit of one happy day/Lingers beside that Rill, in vision clear.' Continue N to Waterhead. If you bear L on A5075 (signed Langdale, Coniston) you pass near the head of the lake and Galava Roman Fort (NT). Camden (1586) tells us that At the upper point of Winandermere lies the carcase as it were of an ancient city with great ruins of walls, and of buildings without the walls still remaining scattered about ... the British brick, the mortar mixed with fragments of brick, the small urns, glass vessels, Roman coins frequently found ... and the paved roads leading to it plainly bespeak it a Roman work.

The area between the road and the lake is the 'North Pole' of Arthur Ransome's Winter Holiday. A summerhouse here (long since demolished) inspired the building to which the children race through the blizzard at the end of the novel.

Continue N to Ambleside (large car park at N end of town; follow signs to Main Car Park). A small market town, placed where a route from Kirkstone comes down to the head of Windermere, Ambleside was an early centre of tourism. It was well known to the Wordsworths; Dorothy came here almost daily for letters and supplies during their years at Dove Cottage, as her Journal records, and in 1810 the family stayed here for six weeks to escape the scarlet fever at Grasmere.

Wordsworth praised the town (and the homely pall of smoke that overhung it each day from the domestic fires) in one of his last sonnets: While beams of orient light shoot wide and high, Deep in the vale a little rural Town Breathes forth a cloudlike creature of its own That mounts not toward the radiant morning sky, But, with a less ambitious sympathy, Hangs o'er its Parent.

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