I have been wanting to visit England’s famous Lake District since I first read the Romantic Poets in college. With only words, they painted vivid travel posters in my mind. But life always seemed to get in the way. And now we’re actually going there, the proper way, on a train leaving the charming seaside village of Whitby, passing up the Esk River valley and through the Yorkshire Moors. We’ll have three train changes ahead of us, and it will be a long day through much scenic countryside, and occasionally otherwise. But we like trains, and so it will be a good day.
On our last drizzly morning we packed up early to roll our bags downhill – in a light Yorkshire rain, of course – through an alley and past a grumpy gargoyle (aren’t they all grumpy?!). He’s perched near that sweet little old Morris sedan that caught my eye early in our visit, and it’s still there, peeking through feral flowers that happily found a fertile niche in the pavement.
After rolling a few more blocks we stopped at friendly Cranberry Swamp for a hot bowl of porridge to fortify us against the drizzle, and it was all a perfect beginning to the morning. As an extra bonus, an interesting old guy sitting next to us at the window seats shared most of his life story, including adventurous tales of his RAF days. I’m not sure what he said to the young lady by the counter, but she also was amused.
And then we were off again, rolling ourselves and bags downhill, past gulls cadging treats and small boats in the inner harbor, to the Whitby train station.
Soon we’re aboard a comfortable dry coach whisking us through the Yorkshire back country, past bridges and villages. And sheep.
We’re heading north along the coast to a train change in Newcastle. From there we cross the midsection of the UK, past Haltwhistle(!?) to Carlisle and another train heading south to Oxenholme, the entryway to the Lake District.
And one final short ride puts us at the little Windermere station in the county of Cumbria, where there’s apparently something for, well, everyone.
We roll downhill a few blocks from the station to simple lodgings at The Carriage House. And the sweet breakfast area already has us looking forward to the coming morning.
It’s been a long day, but with our bags stashed it’s time for a look-about at famous Windermere. The grey stone walls and slate roofs match the grey skies overhead, with their promise of more rain to keep everything so green. And the grey stone blends well into the woodlands, like outcroppings of the local geology.
Banners around town tell us the World Cup finals will be on big screens tonight in most of the pubs, and so we look forward to settling in for the main event with pints and food and the happy local lads. But at every pub they tell us there are no more reservations. Everybody’s full up for the event. Bummer. So we snag some decent cheese and crackers, and some cookies and good Portuguese wine, and trudge back to our room to catch the game. It was a closely-fought match, but Britain lost to Spain. And so there were no raucous celebrations in town that night.
Day Trip to Keswick
There are frequent inexpensive buses (£2 ea; US$2.62) linking lakeside villages throughout the District. So after breakfast we take advantage of this excellent service to get an overview of the area, and visit the village of Keswick, by Lake Derwentwater, at the end of the route. There were only a couple of scattered seats left on the upper deck and I found one next to an annoyed-looking chap who had the great misfortune to sit next to me. And he gives off the side-eye. I hadn’t noticed him until I saw the picture later, and then I thought it was kind of humorous. At least, for me.
So a cheap bus ride, in the rain, with lots of charming scenes along the way reassures us there will always be an England. And maybe at Keswick we’ll get a taste of what attracted Percy Bysshe Shelley to spend some of the winter of 1811 there working on his tract called, “The Necessity of Atheism.”
He would soon mail copies to the heads of each college at Oxford, and would be booted out for his troubles. It was the sort of thing that in 1811 would be a serious cannon shot across the bow of the lumbering ship of social propriety. Today it would be more of a BB shot across the bow and be greeted with an eye-roll. At any rate, he was spending little of his time in class and preferred to conduct dangerous chemical experiments in his room.
Shelley spent December and January of 1811-12 in Keswick with his first wife, Harriet, until they left for Ireland, to the great relief of his neighbors, who had grown tired of his pistol shooting and radical proclamations. And by the time we got to Keswick there was little sign of him.
We managed to choose a Saturday to go bus riding, so there’s a long traffic jam on the quaint old two-lane road – complete with appropriate signage to warn us of the obvious risks we must assume on this route. We may encounter ‘Elderly People’ as well.
There are endless picturesque scenes of stone houses and shops along the way, and a sheep’s pasture being repurposed for weekend festival parking. But the sheep seem to deal with it OK.
We pass through a rocky cleft in the hills above Lake Windermere that leads to the next valley and we soon arrive in Keswick. This is the place where a happy crowd of hearty-to-party fellows in their colorful club ties wrap up the jolly public song-fest that kept their fellow passengers entertained, and depart for their next engagement.
We’ve arrived during a big street fair and the rainy streets are crowded with festing folk. There’s every kind of local handcraft, many other items, and tempting baked goods on sale under the tents.
And if your old roof is in dire need of a re-slating after several hundred years of English weather, the Lakeland Slate Company will surely be helpful to set things right once again.
The Brits are fond of their favorite pets, sheep or otherwise, and there are many opportunities here to lavish the love upon them. And you can get a charming (to the owner, anyway) new leash to help the furry ones avoid a run-in with the local pet constabulary.
There are attractive places in Keswick that beckon us to join them for a hearty tank-up. Some offer such helpful services as a ‘Husband Creche’ for harried wives needing to drop off a complaining spouse for the afternoon. And warnings against memory loss should not be taken with any less than a hearty pint.
But it’s only midday and not the best time for that, at least not for us. And so, after a good look around, it’s time we caught the bus back to Windermere, where a tall tankard of ale (or some other beverage) will go down nicely later on. With a good dinner. Of bangers and mash. And peas. (Curiously, the usual standard UK fare of ‘mushy peas’ seems to be replaced these days with whole peas.)
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The extended period of grey and dripping skies over England recalls a description of the clouds over foggy Amsterdam in The Fall (1956) by Albert Camus. He describes the gloom as flocks of grey birds hover overhead. And the snow that falls is the feathers they drop onto the city. It’s a remarkable novel that mostly takes place in a bar called Mexico City that once existed in Amsterdam. Camus compares the city’s concentric canal system to Dante’s bleak visions in the Commedia Divina. And the bar, located in the red light district, is in the “last circle of hell.”
Yet despite the grey skies, Windermere and most of the idyllic Lake District are vastly unlike the tortured Dante’s painfully abysmal work. The Lakes are nestled into picturesque western foothills of the Pennines, the north-south mountain range that forms the backbone of the UK, the high rugged peaks that Daniel Defoe called “The English Andes.”
England’s Lake District is impossibly pleasant and gorgeous (dare I say precious?), as befits one of the UK’s great romantic destinations. Peter Rabbit and his friends from the works of Beatrix Potter, a long-time local resident, are surely hiding in the woods hereabouts. One expects to encounter modern disciples of legendary English landscape painters such as Constable and Turner, still trying to capture that elusive wispy foggy magic of these hills, lakes, and villages. And then there’s the magical poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth whose words (and Wordsworth’s 1810 Guide to the Lakes) led so many of their admirers to these enchanted valleys.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cumberland, now a part of the Lake District. By 1787 he had published his first sonnet and entered St John’s College, Cambridge. In 1790 he embarked on an extensive summer walking tour of the Alps, Switzerland, France, and Italy, and then returned to graduate from Cambridge in 1791.
Wordsworth met Coleridge in 1795, and by 1798 they anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, an important piece of English Romanticism which contained two of their best-known works: “Tintern Abbey” by Wordsworth, and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge. By 1799 Wordsworth had settled by the Lakes in Dove Cottage, Grasmere with his sister Dorothy. By 1800 Coleridge was living at Greta Hall in nearby Keswick, and Southey soon joined him at Keswick.
The three would become an attraction as their fame grew, and they’d be called the Lake Poets, regardless of whether they much mentioned the Lakes. The stream of luminaries to visit Greta Hall would include: Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt, John Ruskin, and Sir Walter Scott. Southey and Wordsworth would each later be honored with the post of Poet Laureate of the UK.
The so-called ‘Second Generation’ of Lake Poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, who began as young radicals inspired by the French Revolution and looking for adventure in the Alps and exotic Italy – or even Albania and Greece, in the case of Byron. They were risk takers out to change the stodgy and classist society of England. But they were generally disappointed at actually meeting their older mentors living among the Lakes, who had become conservative with age.
Coleridge lived to the age of 61, Southey to 68, and Wordsworth died at 80, but the Second Generation perished young in their travels. Keats died in a rented home at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1821 at the age of 25, while searching out a warm weather cure for his tuberculosis; Shelley, at 29, drowned in 1822 in a boating accident in a storm off of La Spezia; and Byron died in 1824 of a fever at Missolonghi, Greece, at the age of 36, while helping the Greeks gain their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Their deaths in foreign lands gave them each a romantic credence that exceeded the fame gained during their short lives.
And as always happens with rebels, all of the Lake Poets endured the petty sniping of critics who abhorred this modern rejection of the stilted elite language of classical poetry and honored its replacement by the organic tongue of the common people. The splenetic Scottish critic Francis Jeffrey referred to them as (according to Coleridge), “the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes.”
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A Day in Grasmere
We catch a morning bus to Grasmere, where Wordsworth spent much of his time learning from nature, marveling at the lessons gained from whispers of flowers, birds, and rainbows in the Lake District, and writing in the vernacular of the local people. We join the summer crowd of gawking visitors (about 70,000 per year) at the grey stone Wordsworth Museum, and become another wave of those who the poet later regretted calling to the Lakes in his popular Guides.
Dove Cottage is the home and garden where Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy from 1799 to 1808 and they spent their time in “plain living, but high thinking.” It’s a modest place that was at times a local pub, and is now connected to the Museum. Care has been taken to preserve the essence of the poet’s simple life, and there are even notes and manuscripts left in place. It seems well suited to the contemplative life that Wordsworth and Dorothy sought in these valleys.
After an extended visit to the Cottage, we’re beckoned by a quiet patio next to the Museum’s fine little cafe. We happily settle under a shady tree on a long-awaited sunny day with a delicious bowl of hot soup, coffee, and slices of pie.
A quiet wander through the village after lunch puts us in touch with stone homes and gardens nestled into the gorgeous wooded hills overlooking the lake below and the peaks beyond. It’s a place the poet described as “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.”
In later editions of his Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth spoke of incursions and changes from the outside world and had strong words about messing with the local landscape and indigenous architecture.
“…in truth, no one can now travel through the
more frequented tracts, without being offended, at
almost every turn, by an introduction of discordant
objects, disturbing that peaceful harmony of form
and colour, which had been through a long lapse of
ages most happily preserved.”
He was well acquainted with Italy through his travels as a young man, but he grew to prefer the dramatic changeability of weather at the Lakes. And he described those blue Mediterranean skies, “the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad spectacle.”
The nearby Wordsworth Daffodil Garden in St Oswald’s churchyard by the River Rothay was created to honor Wordsworth’s poem, “The Daffodils.” It’s the wrong season to experience the Springtime joys of daffodils, but the churchyard also contains the modest graves of William, his wife Mary, his sister Dorothy. And I wish we’d had time for tea overlooking the gentle waters of the Rothay, but somehow we didn’t.
Frequent reminders of Beatrix Potter are present, as she was another long-time resident among the Lakes. And we decide to forgo the long line to enjoy one of those famous Grasmere Gingerbread cookies.
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Windermere
So far we’ve explored a bit of the countryside, yet the village of Windermere has its own delights. And one of them is a hot cuppa at Brown Sugar, followed by a brisk walk downhill about a mile to Lake Windermere itself.
We’re walking right beside a roadway, but it’s also a naturalistic walk by the gardens and the flowers and the historic architecture of the Lakes. And the local architecture is something that Wordsworth had a few words to say about in his Guides.
The quaint shop district appears as we get closer to the Lake, and there’s ample distraction for wanderers.
We’re reminded of the World of Beatrix Potter and all her fuzzy friends. Beatrix Potter was an accomplished author and illustrator with a wide range of academic and scientific interests, including mycology. And some of her illustrations of mushrooms were published in respected guidebooks. But of course, it’s her tales of a rascally rabbit that brought her fame, and she wrote and illustrated about two dozen of those popular stories.
Potter was a smart businessperson who created a Peter Rabbit soft toy in 1903 and registered it at the Patent Office. It was the first fictional character ever licensed in England. And Harrods of London has carried a line of her merchandise for over a century.
She was a conservationist who was instrumental in preserving much of the Lake District lands that are now administered by the National Trust. Her home at Hill Top Farm, in Near Sawrey, which she willed to the National Trust as a museum, is among those properties.
But on another chilly morning, it’s a warm cup of soup that calls us even more ardently than Peter Rabbit.
Regardless of the overcast, it’s time for a lake cruise to get a better view of the place and the many fine small sailing craft that surely fleck the scene with white billowing sails on a pleasant sunny day. The lake is long enough that there’s still a ferry to transport people and cars to the other side. We also catch a glimpse of the deep forest lands over there that Beatrix Potter worked to preserve and protect during the 38 years she lived at Hill Top Farm.
Ice cream is a good reward as we trudge back up the hill, and we get a fleeting glance of a gorgeous classic Morgan coupe out on a day leg-stretch. The rumble of that old Morgan reminds me (slightly) of the old faded and cutely-ugly bug-eyed Austin Healy Sprite that I owned so long ago. But we pass a little scooter with full rain enclosure that’s probably much closer to the actual value of my well-worn Sprite than a gleaming classic Morgan show car.
And upon arrival back at the top of the hill, a place called Tilly calls to us for one of the best meals we’ve had in many a day. But alas, this year our tyrannical schedule is dictating the short number of days we can spend in any one place, and this must be our final meal in the famous Lake District.
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Onward and Northward
In the morning we’ll be off again to the train station for a passage further north. We’re venturing into Edinburgh, into the land of the fierce Picts and Scots who defeated the overly ambitious Romans, and have ever since constantly badgered the English. It’s our hope not to annoy them with our presence, so please join us for the next leg of our 2024 UK-Euro trek . — PRW