Private Wordsworth Morning Tour

This private half day tour takes you to the places most closely linked with William Wordsworth, all in one morning.

We begin at Rydal Mount, the Wordsworth family's home from 1813 until William's death in 1850 at the age of 80. The family moved here after the deaths of two of their children, unable to bear the view of the graveyard from Grasmere Rectory. The house is now closed to visitors, but from the gate your guide will tell the story of the poet's later years, when Rydal Mount became a place of pilgrimage for admirers of Romantic poetry, and of the garden he laid out himself.

Time and weather allowing, we visit the tranquil Rydal Hall Gardens. Rydal Hall was the home of the le Fleming family, Wordsworth's landlords at Rydal Mount. Its formal garden was designed in 1909 by Thomas Mawson, the leading Arts and Crafts garden designer, and below it a waterfall crashes down a wooded ravine past the Grot, a viewing house built in 1669 and admired by Wordsworth.

We move on to Dove Cottage on the edge of Grasmere, where William set up home with his sister Dorothy in 1799. William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802 and she joined them here, and the family spent more than eight years of “plain living, but high thinking” in the little cottage. In this period William wrote much of the poetry for which he is remembered today, including “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, “Ode to Duty”, “My Heart Leaps Up” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, together with parts of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude. Entry to Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum is included in the price of this tour.

Finally we arrive in the pretty village of Grasmere and stop for a while to see the places that mattered so much to the Wordsworths. With three children arriving in four years, they left Dove Cottage in 1808 for larger lodgings at Allan Bank, on a hill above the village, and later moved to Grasmere Rectory; your guide will point out both. You'll see Church Stile, the former inn where William, his brother John and Samuel Taylor Coleridge stayed on their tour of the Lakes in 1799, St Oswald's Church, where the family worshipped, and the Wordsworth family graves, one of the most visited places in the Lake District. Next to the churchyard is the Grasmere Gingerbread Shop, where Sarah Nelson created her famous gingerbread in 1854.

Just outside the village lies the lake of Grasmere, which Wordsworth called “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found”. The small island in the middle was a favorite place that he often rowed out to while living at Dove Cottage.

Our road back passes Rydal Water, where steps lead up to “Wordsworth's Seat”, said to be the poet's favorite viewpoint, and Nab Cottage, once home to Thomas De Quincey and later to Hartley Coleridge, son of Wordsworth's old friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived there from 1840 until his death in 1849.