William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850
His 'Daffodils' poem beginning “I wander’d lonely as a cloud” is the quintessential Lake District poem. Born in Cockermouth, just north of the National Park, he went to school in Hawkshead. After attending Cambridge University and then living in Dorset, Wordsworth moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere in 1799 and then Rydal Mount in 1813.
Wordsworth’s ‘Guide through the District of the Lakes’ published in 1820 sparked off the first beginnings of mass tourism to the area.
Quotations
On the Lake District: "A sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy".
On the mountains: "in the combinations which they make, towering above each other, or lifting themselves in ridges like the waves of a tumultuous sea, and in the beauty and variety of their surfaces and colours, they are surpassed by none".
Arguing that extending the railway into the Lake District would bring so many people that they would destroy the beauty they had come to see: “Let then the beauty be undisfigured and the retirement unviolated”.
On the building of the Georgian roundhouse on Belle Isle, Windermere: “A pepper-pot”
Locations
Many places vie for the honour of being the daffodils of the famous poem, but the most likely place is between Patterdale and Gowbarrow by Ullswater.
You can see Wordsworth’s carved name in his school desk at Hawkshead Grammar School
More information
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