Wordsworth Grasmere

In November 1799, while on a walking tour with his brother John and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth (then aged 29) noticed a cottage for let. Built in about 1700, in the late eighteenth century the cottage had been licensed as an alehouse called The Dove. It stood directly on what was then the main road through the central Lake District, passed by regular traffic of waggons, carriages and people on foot or horseback. In 1805 Dorothy commented ‘the cottage was on the highway of the tourists’.

The Wordsworths did not know their home as Dove Cottage – this name was first recorded in a
census in 1851. To them, the address was Town End, Grasmere. They moved in on 20 December 1799, initially for an annual rent of £5. Funded by a private income, the Wordsworths lived here for eight years. Their neighbours, the Ashburners and the Fishers, helped them make their ‘little domestic slip of mountain’ into a Garden-Orchard.

The Wordsworths received frequent visitors to Dove Cottage including fellow friend and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Thomas de Quincey to name but a few.

As the family grew, the Wordsworths moved across the valley to the larger, newly built house of Allan Bank in May 1808.

Today, Wordsworth Grasmere is home to one of the finest literary house museums in the world. A visit here is a unique experience; nowhere else does so much of a major writer’s original work remain where it was written and inspired. Through the words of William and Dorothy – in luminous poetry and prose – we bring to life a revolutionary moment in English literary history. We tell the story of the extraordinary people who lived here, and we celebrate the stunning Lake District landscape that inspired them – now a World Heritage Site.

William told a friend that through his poetry, he aimed ‘to console the afflicted, to add sunshine
to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel’. He calls for us to reconnect with nature, asks that we show empathy for others, and encourages us to nurture our creative imagination. A visit to Wordsworth Grasmere, in the footsteps of William and Dorothy, is both a step back in time and a recognition that the greatest poetry is timeless in its meaning and relevance.