William Wordsworth, Ullswater

THE CUMBRIAN SCENERY stirs rapturous reactions in many onlookers, but most famous were the Lake Poets of the early 19th century. The group’s key members were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Poet Laureate Robert Southey, and they were part of a wider Romantic movement that invited society to thrill to the beauty and awe of mountain landscapes, instead of recoiling from them as ‘monstrous excrescences’.

Walking was core to their work: Coleridge took to the fells for days, once perilously throwing himself from ledge to ledge down the crags of Broad Stand after getting lost on Scafell, and it’s thought Wordsworth totted up 180,000 miles in his lifetime, many of them around his home in Grasmere. A stroll along the west shore of Ullswater inspired one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems though, as he stumbled across a host of golden daffodils at Glencoyne: ‘Ten thousand saw

I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance’. He didn’t ‘wander lonely as a cloud’ as its first line suggests though – his sister Dorothy was with him, and it was after reading notes in her journal that he wrote the poem we all know from school.

Dorothy was no slouch at walking either; she made one of the earliest ascents of Scafell Pike. In 1818 she and a friend called Mary Barker ascended England’s highest peak and spent so long admiring the view – ‘the majesty of the mountains below, and close to us, is not to be conceived’ – that the stars were coming out as they finished their descent to Seathwaite.

WALK HERE: Download Ullswater and Scafell Pike route guides at lfto.com/ bonusroutes

DANCING DAFFS The Ullswater daffodils ‘Beside the lake, beneath the trees’ were immortalised in Wordsworth’s verse. ▲ SIBLING RAMBLES William and Dorothy Wordsworth would often walk the Lakeland fells together. HIGH POINT