Walking Wordsworth's Paths: The Coffin Route, Loughrigg Terrace and the Poet's Daily Rounds

Wordsworth composed on his feet. Neighbours recalled the strange booming sound of the poet pacing the lanes, humming and muttering lines aloud; a household friend estimated – the figure has become legend – that his lifetime walking must have totalled some hundreds of thousands of English miles; and De Quincey quipped that Wordsworth's legs had done service that entitled them to gratitude from all of literature. The point for visitors is glorious: the poems were literally made on paths you can still walk, and the best of those paths – short, gentle and staggeringly pretty – link his two home valleys of Grasmere and Rydal. Here is our local guide to walking Wordsworth, from twenty-minute strolls to the perfect half-day pilgrimage.

The coffin route: the essential Wordsworth walk

If you take one walk, take this one. The old corpse road between Rydal and Grasmere – the terraced path along which coffins were once carried from chapel-less Rydal for burial at St Oswald's – runs above the main road on the flank of Nab Scar, about two and a half gentle miles each way, and it was the Wordsworths' own highway between their worlds: William and Dorothy used it constantly, and after 1813 it connected the Rydal Mount household to their Grasmere dead. The walking is easy and the rewards absurd: Rydal Water and then Grasmere lake below, framed exactly as the household saw them daily. Start from Rydal (by St Mary's church and Dora's Field) or from Grasmere; allow ninety minutes one way with lingering, and consider our favourite format – out along the coffin route, back along the lakeshores – for a circuit of about five miles that many guests call the best half-day of their entire trip. Along the way sits the flat-topped "coffin stone" where bearers once rested their burden – and where footsore pilgrims now rest theirs.

Loughrigg Terrace: the balcony over the vale

Across the water from the coffin route rises little Loughrigg, whose famous Terrace – a level green path traversing the fell's northern breast – delivers what may be the finest effort-to-view ratio in the National Park: twenty minutes of modest climbing from White Moss earns the full classic prospect of Grasmere – lake, island, village and Dunmail Raise beyond – the vale Wordsworth judged the fairest place on earth, laid out precisely for inspection. Continue a few minutes west and Rydal Water replaces it in the frame; energetic walkers can traverse to Rydal Cave, the cathedral-sized former quarry above the lake (a later, industrial-era feature, but a thrilling one, and a favourite with children). Loughrigg's paths interlink endlessly with the lakeshore and coffin-route network, so circuits of almost any length assemble themselves.

White Moss and the lakeshores: the gentle options

Between the two lakes lies White Moss – car parks, woods and riverside meadows that make the perfect base camp for the least strenuous Wordsworth walking: level paths to the Rydal Water shore in ten minutes, to Grasmere's shore in fifteen, through terrain the family knew intimately (William owned land at White Moss, and Dorothy's journal is full of its birds and beggars and weathers). For visitors with limited mobility or limited time, this is the honest recommendation: an easy half-hour here delivers genuine immersion in the poems' home scenery – water, fell, birdsong, weather – without a contour line worth mentioning. The daffodil pilgrimage sites connect neatly too: Dora's Field lies at the walk's Rydal end, beside the church.

Further afield: Easedale and the schoolboy's lake

Two extensions for enthusiasts. Easedale, the hidden side-valley opening north-west from Grasmere village, was the household's beloved "black quarter" (their name for its brooding weather); the path up alongside the waterfalls of Sourmilk Gill to Easedale Tarn – a fine mountain pool in a crag-ringed bowl – was among Dorothy and William's favourite excursions, and remains a superb two-to-three-hour round from the village. And south near Hawkshead, the shore path by quiet Esthwaite Water lets you walk the margins of the schoolboy's skating lake from The Prelude – blissfully uncrowded, and doubly literary in Beatrix Potter country. Practical notes for all routes: paths are good but genuinely fell-country – proper footwear, waterproofs and (for the longer rounds) a map or app are the standard kit; conditions and route guidance are well covered by the National Park at lakedistrict.gov.uk.

Longer pilgrimages for the ambitious

Strong walkers can scale the idea up handsomely. Nab Scar, directly above Rydal Mount, gives a stiff but short pull to a magnificent double-lake viewpoint on the Fairfield horseshoe's first shoulder – the family's backyard mountain; Helm Crag above Grasmere (the "Lion and the Lamb") is the classic village summit at a couple of hours round; and the truly devoted can walk the poets' own thirteen-mile commute over Dunmail Raise toward Keswick, the route Wordsworth and Coleridge wore smooth between their households – best done one-way with transport arranged at the far end. All are proper fell walks: boots, layers, map and a weather check are the entry fee, and the National Park's advice pages cover current conditions.

Walking with the poems switched on

Any fit visitor can walk these paths; the transformation comes from knowing them – that this terrace carried the family's coffins and the poet's grief; that Dorothy noted that birch by that shore; that the booming sound on the evening air hereabouts, two centuries ago, was the Immortality Ode being assembled at three miles an hour. Our small-group Wordsworth tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum seven guests – pair the storytelling with time in exactly this landscape, and our guides gladly set walkers up with the perfect route for the following morning: many guests tour with us one day and walk the coffin route themselves the next, poems in pocket. Wordsworth insisted that walking and thinking were one act. His paths are still open for the experiment – and they have never once failed a properly briefed pilgrim.

This article is part of our Wordsworth guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.