Wordsworth House, Cockermouth

“We’re going to the Wordsworth House this afternoon.” “Oh good. You’ll enjoy that. Which one?”

It’s easy to imagine that kind of conversation between Lake District visitors over a lunch table. Currently there are three houses with strong Wordsworth connections open to the public, and before long the three will be four.

Wordsworth House, Cockermouth

Starting with his earliest life there is Wordsworth’s birthplace, now known as Wordsworth House in Cockermouth. Their father was agent to Sir James Lowther who owned the rather splendid, then almost new, property on Cockermouth’s Main Street. The Wordsworths moved in around 1766. William was born in 1770, the second son in what would become a family of four boys and a girl, and lived there during his early childhood, but his mother died in 1778 when he was only eight years old, and his father five years later.

His early schooling was in Penrith, his mother’s home town, then at Hawkshead. Subsequently, after not very distinguished studies at Cambridge, Wordsworth for some years in his twenties moved around from place to place, including time in France and also Somerset. By 1799, though, he was back in the Lake District and made his home here for the the next fifty years.

Dove Cottage, Grasmere

Dove Cottage, Grasmere

Dove Cottage had previously been an inn known as the Dove and Olive Branch. Wordsworth joked at that as he referred to himself as a “water-drinking bard”. It is today owned by The Wordsworth Trust which has developed the area around not only as a visitor attraction but also as a major international centre for literary research associated with Wordsworth and the Lake Poets.

Rydal Mount

Eventually the demands of a growing family, not to mention the visitors such as Coleridge, Scott, Southey and deQuincey whom they so often entertained, made a move into more spacious accommodation inevitable. After a brief spell in another Grasmere house the family in 1810 moved down the road in the direction of Ambleside to a house by the next lake, Rydal Water.

Rydal Mount was home to Wordsworth for longer than any of the others. He lived there until his death in 1850. Rydal Mount, with its gardens, is now once again owned by members of the Wordsworth family who open it to the public.

Allan Bank, Grasmere

The above three houses are open to the public. But I mentioned a short stay in Grasmere after Dove Cottage. This was at Allan Bank, a house which Wordsworth had earlier condemned as ugly but which he later occupied for two years from 1808. This has been owned by the National Trust for many years but rented out to private tenants. Following a fire in March this year, however, the Trust now plans to renovate the property and open Allan Bank to the public with some kind of Wordsworth-related content (precisely what being as yet undecided), so making it the fourth Wordsworth house in Cumbria open to visitors.

This morning I decided to take a look at the visitor statistics for the Around-England blog, and got some surprises.

The most visited places on the blog

Previously, if anyone had asked me which had been the most popular items I might have guessed at some of my posts about the Lake District.  For example, recently there were:

Holehird Gardens, Windermere and  Wordsworth and the Lake District Rivers

Going further back in time there were:

The Ruskin Monument – Coniston and  Visiting Coniston in Winter

However, it was none of the above that headed the list. Rather, apart from people arriving at whatever was at the time on the site’s front page, the most frequent entry point was a story I wrote some time ago on my childhood and teenage memories of Towneley Hall, Burnley:

Burnley, Lancashire – Towneley Hall and Woodland Park

Close second (actually joint-second) was another Lancashire location. Many people searched the site for Bowland, and its incredibly beautiful River Hodder took that second place:

The Hodder – Lancashire’s Most Beautiful River

Partnering the Hodder in second place was the first Lake District item:

Dove Cottage, Grasmere on Old Postcards

Maybe at some time I should write more about my collection of old Lake District postcards.  It’s not large, but I enjoy it.

“Cromwell’s Bridge” – from Lower Hodder Bridge on a rainy day

What does all this mean?

I’m not sure what lessons to draw from this quick look at the statistics, but I’ll keep watching in an attempt to understand what people find most interesting. Maybe it’s just that there are many other souces of information about the Lake District whereas fewer people write about Lancashire.

However, as someone born in the part of present-day Cumbria that used to be Lancashire, and remembering that Windermere and Coniston Water used to be known as the “Lancashire Lakes”, I guess I’ll keep on writing about both counties – and not forgetting my wife’s family background east of the Pennines in Yorkshire, the birth-county of three of my four grandchildren.

Yes I can admire, indeed love, many other areas of England and will continue to post articles now and again even about the deep south, but I’m unashamedly a Northerner and will continue to make “The Case for the North”.

Incidentally, the most common search term that led people to the blog from Google was especially surprising: Wastwater Gnomes.

Many years ago I started to collect postcards, both old and new. Lake District postcards were a part of that. From time to time I go back to it.  Recently I was looking at an album containing several cards of Dove Cottage, Grasmere which 200 years ago was the home of the poet William Wordsworth.  Here are two of the cards.

On this first one the postmark is not totally clear, but it is a Milton “ARTLETTE” card, a tinted photograph, posted in either 1900 or 1906.

Interestingly, the message on the back commences with, “We passed this cottage yesterday but could not afford to pay the 6d each to go in.”  It sounds very much like what you might hear from someone nowadays after a week of paying admission charges for one place after another – although I have to say that today’s charges at Dove Cottage are not unreasonable.

The second card is by Abraham’s of Keswick (no.229 in their series) and was posted in 1909.  Again it is a tinted photograph and views the house from a different angle.

It was in 1799 that William Wordsworth brought his family to live at Dove Cottage, and it was in this house not far from the lake at Grasmere that much of his greatest poetry was written.  It was here also that his sister Dorothy wrote her famous journals.

Other eminent poets and writers of the early/mid-19th century had a connection with Dove Cottage. Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were among the Wordsworths’ many visitors.  After the Wordsworths left in 1808 Thomas de Quincey lived there for many years.

The cottage and surrounding buildings now constitute an internationally important centre for literary research. The great majority of the original William Wordsworth manuscripts, in fact over 90% of those known to have survived, are now in the possession of the Wordsworth Trust which owns the Dove Cottage properties.

Major exhibitions are staged which are  open to the public in addition to the house itself, while the main document collection is accessible to accredited researchers by arrangement.  As with most Lake District venues, Dove Cottage is open around the year but check the web site for details, especially in winter when opening times may change.