Be guided by a poet – and let your spirits soar
It’s 250 years since William Wordsworth’s birth and his former home of Dove Cottage has just reopened to the public. Michael Kerr got in early to wander lonely as a cloud
As I walked to his grave behind St Oswald’s church in Grasmere, rain dripping on my head from yew trees he had planted, I heard the words of William Wordsworth in my head. No, nothing about daffodils; nothing from “The Prelude”.
The lines weren’t those of the young radical who had cheered on the French Revolution, but of a more conservative man in his 60s, writing in 1844 to The Morning Post (a paper absorbed later into The Daily Telegraph). In a sonnet (“Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?…”) and, subsequently, in two letters, he let loose at plans to push a railway line into the Lake District.
In the first letter, he declared that this landscape could be profitably enjoyed only by those with “a mind disposed to peace”, who should be spared “the molestation of cheap trains pouring out their hundreds at a time along the margin of Windermere…”
One of Wordsworth’s devotees, the lawyer Barron Field, was among those who thought he had gone too far: “Has he not even published, beside his poems which have made the District classic-ground, an actual Guide?”
He had, indeed, and it went into five editions (prompting his sister, Dorothy, no mean writer herself, to suggest that prose might be more profitable than verse). I’d been reading a copy on my rail journey from London to… Windermere.
No, he didn’t stop the trains – but he did give me a few jolts as I sat on mine. He was born 250 years ago, on April 7 1770, and died on April 23 1850. He’s a writer, though, who is essential in 2020, when we earthlings – as scientists remind us almost daily – are making the weather on Planet Earth. After all, he was telling us, in the 1800s, that human intervention in the landscape must be “incorporated with and subservient to the powers and processes of Nature”.
I went to Grasmere well in advance of the anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, and long before we had heard of Covid-19, which has put a dampener on commemorations. I was there in October. Wordsworth insisted on it: “the scenery is then,” he wrote, “beyond comparison, more diversified, more splendid, and beautiful”. He was right, though the path between his homes at Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, along which men once carried coffins, was less puddled than tarned.
His A Guide Through the District of the Lakes (written for tourists and residents), is firm on many things, from the ideal extent of a lake (“small or middle-sized”) to house-painting (“I have seen a single white house materially impair the majesty of a mountain”) and tree-planting (the larch, “as a tree, is less than any other pleasing”).
As I turned out of St Oswald’s, having paid my respects, I passed Church Cottage, where queues would form later for a celebrated gingerbread. It was once a school, where Wordsworth taught for a few months, before Dorothy, his wife Mary, and her sister, Sara, took over. Around the corner, I passed houses clad in Boston ivy and the Grasmere Garden Village, fiery with Japanese maple. What, I wondered, would Wordsworth make of these incomers?
DOVE COTTAGE
At Dove Cottage, which was the background for what’s regarded as Wordsworth’s “great decade” – and which reopened yesterday – the builders were in. More prominent than the considerate-contractor notices were banners with lines from “Home at Grasmere”: “Dear Valley, having in thy face a smile…” A board explained that, under the Reimagining Wordsworth project, the museum was being expanded and modernised, the café and terrace redesigned, and Dove Cottage made “more authentic”.
Wordsworth felt wedded to this whitewashed, slate-floored cottage and its garden, which was home from 1799 until 1808 and where three of his five children were born. Shuffling around its eight tiny rooms with eight other visitors (there will be no more than six at a time now), I recalled what we’d heard earlier: that family and friends here totalled 10 on average – and we were seeing it empty.
The cottage, a former inn dating from 1700, had long exhibited possessions and furniture drawn from all stages of Wordsworth’s life. It had been stripped so that it could be restored, so far as possible, to the way it would have looked while he and his family were there. Upstairs, the only decoration was newspaper pages pasted on the walls of one room (initially by Dorothy, for insulation) and, on the back of a window shutter in another, graffiti from 1891: “Our heads will be happen cold when this is found.”
When the cottage reopened, we heard, it would be different. Marian Veevers, our guide, told us: “We’ll have all the clutter – pots, pans, letters, books, children’s toys – to create the idea of the Wordsworths’ still living here but having popped out, perhaps for a walk.”
Before continuing my own walk, to Rydal Mount on the Coffin Route, I talked to Michael McGregor, director of the Wordsworth Trust, and Emily Burnham, marketing manager. Wordsworth, I discovered, wasn’t the draw he had been. He’s certainly less of a fixture on the school curriculum, and at Grasmere’s excellent bookshop, Sam Read, his poetry these days sells mainly to Americans. But I was surprised to hear that visitor numbers to Dove Cottage and the museum had fallen from 75,000 in 2000 to 46,500 in 2017. Reasons included a drop in tourists from Japan, who were finding travel more expensive.
The anniversary, McGregor was hoping then, would bring a turnaround. If lockdown has put paid to that, 2020 still offers an opportunity, as he puts it, “to celebrate Wordsworth not just as a poet of the past but of the present and the future as well; a poet who can speak to us across the centuries and enrich people’s lives”.
RYDAL MOUNT
“I wandered lonely as a cloud” was published in 1815 from Rydal Mount, where Wordsworth lived from 1813 until 1850. As I approached the house, stamping the mud of the Coffin Route from my boots, the poem was being read aloud by a tourist.
Rydal Mount, airy and spacious after Dove Cottage, isn’t a museum; it’s still often used by the poet’s descendants, whose family snaps share space with exhibits. Among the latter is Wordsworth’s first reply to Queen Victoria, declining her invitation to be Poet Laureate. He was persuaded to change his mind – on the condition that he needn’t write verse while in the post.
I wandered in the garden, its five acres still close to Wordsworth’s design. Then I went downhill, through the yard of St Mary’s church and into a wooded plot once known as the Rashfield because its damp ground was spiked with rushes.
Today it’s Dora’s Field, after the Wordsworths’ first child, and, in spring, one of the best places to see “A host of dancing Daffodils”. Wordsworth bought the plot in 1826 and later passed it to Dora; when she died of tuberculosis at 43, in 1847, he and Dorothy planted it with hundreds of bulbs.
LOUGHRIGG FELL
I crossed the A591 and the footbridge over the River Rothay. For a while I was among other walkers, en route to echo their “Hellooo”s at the lofty ceiling of Rydal Cave. Higher up, as happens even in this “classic-ground”, the company fell away. Fighting a stiff wind, I reached the summit of Loughrigg Fell and had it to myself.
Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth and went to school in Hawkshead, from where he came exploring here with friends. It was probably from Loughrigg that he had his earliest glimpse of what would become his first real “abiding place”: Grasmere.
ALLAN BANK
Coming down, rewarded for the climb by two rainbows, I headed along the shore of Grasmere, into the village and up to Allan Bank. This Georgian villa, looking over Grasmere and the fells beyond, is unusual for a National Trust property: it has no art collection, no forbidding notices on chairs. Indeed, when it reopened in 2012 after a fire the year before, visitors were invited to write on its scorched walls and suggest what should be done with it.
The result is a place where, depending on age and taste, you can dress up, knit or play the piano; bring a dog or a picnic or both. Or curl up with Wordsworth’s poems in what was his study. Well, you could before Covid forced closure.
The fire of 2011 wasn’t the first occasion when this house was full of smoke. While the Wordsworths were there (1808-1811), it came down chimneys rather than going up. Their eyes smarted, their throats hurt; they blundered into furniture. So it never really became a home.
Wordsworth, none the less, continued working, notably on “The Excursion”, one of the poems that inspired a later occupant of Allan Bank, the Anglican priest Hardwicke Rawnsley. He wrote his guide to the Lakes and became a founder of the Lake District Defence Society and, later, the National Trust (which is this year marking its 125th anniversary and the centenary of Rawnsley’s death).
Today, the trust owns both Grasmere and the island in its centre, to which Wordsworth and Dorothy would row for picnics. I’d been reminded of that by a sign after dropping down from Loughrigg. I’d chatted to a couple in their 30s, nurses from a London hospital who were enjoying the view across the water.
They were first-timers and knew little of Wordsworth. I was on my fifth visit to the Lakes, but still struggling to identify features on the skyline. All of us, though, were “disposed to peace”. If we couldn’t respond to the play of light and shadow on the fells as Wordsworth had done, we could answer – to steal a line from one of the poet’s great admirers, Van Morrison – with the “inarticulate speech of the heart”.