William Wordsworth

📍Dove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere, Ambleside LA22 9SH, UK

“I was born in Cockermouth and grew up roaming the Cumbrian fells, rivers and lakes; both my parents were gone by the time I was thirteen, and my sister Dorothy and I were separated for years. Just before Christmas 1799 we walked into Grasmere together and took a little whitewashed cottage at Town End that had once been an inn called the Dove and Olive Bough. Dorothy started her journal so she could tell me what I had missed when I was away, and she kept it for nearly three years: the weather, the neighbours, the beggars on the road, the moon over the lake. In April 1802 she wrote about daffodils by Ullswater that tossed and reeled and seemed to laugh with the wind, and I later turned her words into my most famous poem. We wrote, read and talked in the steep garden-orchard behind the house, and friends crowded in — Coleridge, Walter Scott, De Quincey. I married Mary here, and our first children were born in these small rooms until we simply ran out of space. Dove Cottage has belonged to the Wordsworth Trust since 1890.”

Sources: wordsworth.org.uk euromanticism.org englishlakestours.com