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Dove Cottage was the first Lakeland home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth to which they came in 1799. Yet despite the concentrated attention it receives from over 80,000 visitors every year, the cottage is still charming, its little garden faithfully set out as it was when William paced its short terrace intent upon his composition.
Our first visit to Dove Cottage was on our honeymoon and we had it to ourselves until we were joined in the kitchen by an earnest American lady who enquired eagerly if the soap in the sink was the poet's own soap. On our last visit a log fire burned brightly in the grate and while a thunderstorm raged outside we again had a solitary tour in the helpful and informative company of one of the guides, a philosophy graduate.
The cottage, which stands on the old turnpike road and was built in the seventeenth century, was originally the Dove and Olive Branch public house. In Wordsworth's day the outlook would have been much more open as the present main road by the lake was not built until 1823 and Grasmere could be seen. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott and de Quincy all visited here and when the Wordsworths moved to Allan Bank, Dove Cottage was taken by de Quincy where he wrote "Confessions of an English Opium Eater".
If at times the village overflows with the thousands on the Wordsworth Trail and the many more thousands who've come just because everyone else has, then perhaps one wishes that Wordsworth had lived somewhere else like Wigan or Wolverhampton. Nevertheless if it wasn't for his determined and elitist defence of the Lake District we might well have a railway to Ambleside, widespread major development and have lost for ever a priceless treasure.
That we know so much about life at Dove Cottage is due to Dorothy's Journal which she kept from 1800 to 1803 in which she details their everyday life, their walks together over the mountains, to Rydal for the post, or to Keswick to visit Coleridge. When William married, his sister stayed on with them at Dove Cottage, helping with the family and continuing the support for her brother with reading and copying out the final version of his poems. As Norman Nicholson says of Dove Cottage at its height "You can imagine a female relative in every room industriously copying out poems".
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JOHN
and ANNE NUTTALL
