Dove Cottage
Alex Saint
There aren’t many that don’t associate the Lake District with Britain’s best known poet William Wordsworth. Each year thousands pay homage to Dove Cottage, a little cottage tucked away near Grasmere which inspired some of the greatest poetry in the English language, but don’t let the crowds deter you as the Wordsworth Trust has sensitively maintained an evocative experience.
Alongside the cottage, museum and a pretty garden is The Jerwood Centre – an award winning new building holding an impressive archive of Wordsworth’s verse drafts, including The Prelude, along with letters, journals and work by other writers like Coleridge and de Quincey and painters Turner, Constable and Girtin.
If Wordsworth and the Lakes were an inspiration to his contemporaries, it remains so today and poetry is a living thing here, with readings, workshops and events filling up the local cultural calendar.
