I was late to Wordsworth’s birthday party — through no fault of my own. I started preparing for the celebrations more than six months beforehand. A piece I wrote to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, on April 7, 2020, and which should have appeared in advance of that date, didn’t make it into print until August 16. A world health emergency saw off my “nap”.
When I was working as a travel editor, young freelance writers would often ask me what sort of stories I was looking for. “Good ones,” I’d answer. Then I’d try to be more helpful: “Think like a bookie; think of ‘the nap’.”
The nap, I’ve long known, is a tipster’s best horse of the day. But it wasn’t until recently that I looked into the origins of the term. It’s derived from the card game Napoleon, possibly named after Napoleon III, who ruled France from 1848 to 1870, first as president and then as emperor, and died in exile in England. In that game — which reached England in the 1880s, having been played for some time under various names or guises in northern Europe — the best hand you can have is a Napoleon: in short, a nap. It’s a useful hand, too, if you’re trying to persuade an editor to commission a travel story.
N is for news. “Content” may be the buzzword online, but newspapers and media organisations can’t live without news. Or novelty. If there’s something going on in travel or tourism that hasn’t already been covered, an editor is likely to be interested.
Travel pieces that are essentially timeless do appear occasionally, but when pages are being planned at editorial meetings such pieces are much harder to fight for as part of the mixture, however well written they might be. “Why does that have to run this week?” someone will ask. And if it’s not newsy, you need another argument in its favour. Which bring us to A and P.
A is for anniversary. During my time as an editor, Stephen McClarence explored India in the footsteps of Edward Lear; he timed his article so that it could be published on the 200th anniversary of Lear’s birth. Sophie Campbell reflected on how Queen Elizabeth had seen (or at least been shown) the world over 60 years in a piece in 2012 linked to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
P is for peg: something other than news or an anniversary that you can hang your piece on. The peg might be the nomination in the Academy Awards of a film — one used by Max Davidson to make topical what would otherwise have been a timeless piece on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. It might be the start of a new television travel series, as it was for Nigel Richardson in an interview with the author and presenter Simon Reeve. It might be the creation of a new coastal path in Wales; the poet and playwright Owen Sheers had walked a stretch and his piece appeared the weekend the path officially opened.
I made good use of nap myself after I ran away from a desk job in 2014 and went back to working as a freelance writer. It served me well. At least it did until 2020, when pegs, however firmly they had been hammered in, had a tendency to fall out.
In the summer of 2019, while Teri and I were on holiday in the Lake District, we called at two of William Wordsworth’s former homes, Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount. While we were there, I learnt that the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth was coming up the following April. A big renovation programme, “Reimagining Wordsworth”, was in progress at Dove Cottage. The museum (closed throughout 2019) was being expanded and modernised, the cottage itself (closed while we were there in early August) made “more authentic and atmospheric”, a “sensory garden” laid out and the café redesigned. All helped by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of nearly £5 million. In September 2019, I contacted Telegraph Travel and secured a commission for a piece tied to the bicentenary.
The marketing manager at the Wordsworth Museum had told me most of the work should be finished some time in March, with the press allowed in then. But she also said that if I wanted to do some research and chat to the curators I could come earlier. Autumn seemed a good time: I could have an early look at the revamped Dove Cottage before it closed until the following spring; I could also make the rounds of other key Wordsworth sites, including Rydal Mount and Wordsworth House, while they were quiet, and see what their custodians had planned for the anniversary. Then, I thought, I might go back briefly to Dove Cottage in the spring to update myself before filing my piece.
It was around that time, fretting over the cumulative depth of my carbon footprint, that I had started to read books on climate science written for a general readership, among them There Is No Planet B by Mike Berners-Lee and The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (who told me, in one passage, that “Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London… costs the Arctic three more square metres of ice.”). Wordsworth sat easily among that company. Dipping into “The Excursion”, an extensive blank-verse work that Coleridge had described as “the first genuine philosophic poem”, I was reminded of how Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a writer ahead of his time in his concern for the environment…
Meanwhile, at social Industry’s command,
How quick, how vast an increase! From the germ
Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced
Here a huge town, continuous and compact
Hiding the face of earth for leagues — and there,
Where not a habitation stood before,
Abodes of men irregularly massed
Like trees in forests — spread through spacious tracts,
O’er which the smoke of unremitting fires
Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths
Of vapour glittering in the morning sun.
And, wheresoe’er the traveller turns his steps
He sees the barren wilderness erased,
…and one who, in places, seemed to be writing about our century as much as his own…
. . . I grieve, when on the darker side
Of this great change I look; and there behold
Such outrage done to nature as compels
The indignant power to justify herself;
Yea, to avenge her violated rights…
My plan, though, on a walk around some of his favourite places, was to take my lead not so much from the poems as from Wordsworth’s prose. In A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, first published in 1810, he was firm on the best time to visit — and it wasn’t summer. The colouring of mountains and woods then was “too unvaried a green”. The rain, “setting in sometimes at this period with a vigour, and continuing with a perseverance… may remind the disappointed and dejected traveller of those deluges… which fall among the Abyssinian mountains, for the annual supply of the Nile.”
Autumn was much better: “The months of September and October (particularly October) are generally attended with much finer weather; and the scenery is then, beyond comparison, more diversified, more splendid, and beautiful…”
So, the timing of my trip wouldn’t just be administratively convenient; it would be in line with Wordsworth’s advice. I went. I wandered. I filed my piece. Knowing that there was a chance it might appear as early as March, with a standfirst looking forward to the bicentenary on April 7, I emailed it early — on February 4. The following day, I sent an updated note on opening times for an accompanying panel. At that time, Allan Bank (another of the houses where Wordsworth had lived) was due to reopen on February 15, Dove Cottage on April 7 and the renovated museum — where work was behind schedule — some time in the summer. Then, on March 16, came advice from the prime minister, Boris Johnson, that everyone should avoid gatherings and crowded places and “non-essential” travel. A week later, the advice became mandatory; the United Kingdom went into lockdown. “From this evening,” Johnson said, “I must give the British people a very simple instruction — you must stay at home.”
So I didn’t go back to the Lake District in March, and, in the Telegraph travel pages at least, the Wordsworth anniversary went unmarked in April. I’ve heard many reasons for the shelving of an article (and made some of them as an editor myself), but the one used by the young commissioning editor handling my piece was novel: “…we felt that, given the current government advice, it would be irresponsible to promote places for people to walk in the UK at the moment…”
Most Coronavirus restrictions in England were finally lifted on July 19. Dove Cottage reopened on Saturday, August 15, and my piece appeared the following day. Even then, visitors to Dove Cottage couldn’t just turn up; they had to book online. At Rydal Mount only the gardens were open, and at Allan Bank both house and grounds were still shut. The Lake District was a different place from the one I’d seen the previous October…
* * *
As I walked to his grave behind St Oswald’s church in Grasmere, rain dripping on my head from yew trees he himself had planted, I heard lines from William Wordsworth in my head. No, nothing about daffodils; nothing from “The Prelude”.
The lines weren’t those of the young radical who had cheered on the French Revolution, but of a more conservative man in his seventies, writing in 1844 to The Morning Post (a paper absorbed later into The Daily Telegraph). In a sonnet (“Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?…”) and, subsequently, in two letters, he let loose at plans to push a railway line into the Lake District.
In the first letter he declared that this landscape could be profitably enjoyed only by those with “a mind disposed to peace”, who should be spared “the molestation of cheap trains pouring out their hundreds at a time along the margin of Windermere…”
One of Wordsworth’s devotees, the lawyer Barron Field, was among those who thought he had gone too far: “Has he not even published, beside his poems which have made the District classic-ground, an actual Guide?” He had, indeed, and it went into five editions (prompting his sister, Dorothy, to suggest that prose might be more profitable than verse). I’d been reading a copy on my rail journey from London to… Windermere.
No, he didn’t win his battle against the trains — but he did give me a few jolts as I sat on mine. In our century, we earthlings — as scientists remind us almost daily — are making the weather on Planet Earth, and feeling the consequences in rising temperatures and seas, drought and flooding. And Wordsworth was warning us, as long ago as the 1800s, that human intervention in the landscape must be “incorporated with and subservient to the powers and processes of Nature”.
He was right, too, about autumn being a better time than summer to explore the Lake District — though the path between two of the places where he had lived, Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, along which men once carried coffins, was in October not so much puddled as tarned.
His Guide Through the District of The Lakes (written for tourists and residents) is firm on many things, from the ideal extent of a lake (“small or middle-sized”) to house-painting (“I have seen a single white house materially impair the majesty of a mountain”) and tree-planting (the larch, “as a tree, is less than any other pleasing”).
As I turned out of St Oswald’s, having paid my respects, I passed Church Cottage, where queues would form later for a celebrated gingerbread. It was once a school, where Wordsworth taught for a few months, before Dorothy, his wife, Mary, and her sister, Sara, took over. Round the corner, I passed houses clad in Boston ivy and the Grasmere Garden Village, fiery with Japanese maple. What, I wondered, would William make of these incomers?
At Dove Cottage, which was the background for what’s regarded as Wordsworth’s “great decade”, the builders were in, busy on renovations for the “Reimagining Wordsworth” project. More prominent than the considerate-contractor notices were banners with lines from “Home at Grasmere”: “Dear Valley, having in thy face a smile…”
Wordsworth felt “wedded” to this whitewashed, slate-floored cottage and its garden, which was home from 1799 until 1808 and where three of his five children were born. Shuffling round its eight tiny rooms with eight other visitors, I recalled what we’d heard earlier: that family and friends here totalled 10 on average — and we were seeing it empty.
The cottage, a former inn dating from 1700, had long exhibited possessions and furniture drawn from all stages of Wordsworth’s life. It had been stripped so that it could be restored, so far as possible, to the way it would have looked while he and his family were there. Upstairs, the only decoration was newspaper pages pasted on the walls of one room (initially by Dorothy, for insulation) and, on the back of a window shutter in another, a message from one W. Martin, Paperhanger, from 1891: “Our heads will be happen cold when this is found.”
When the cottage reopened, we heard, it would be happen different. Marian Veevers, our guide, told us: “We’ll have all the clutter — pots, pans, letters, books, children’s toys — to create the idea of the Wordsworths’ still living here but having popped out, perhaps for a walk.”
Before continuing my own walk, to Rydal Mount on the Coffin Route, I talked to Michael McGregor, director of the Wordsworth Trust, and Emily Burnham, marketing manager. Wordsworth, I discovered, wasn’t the draw he had been. He’s certainly less of a fixture on the school curriculum, and at Grasmere’s excellent bookshop, Sam Read, his poetry these days sells mainly to Americans. But I was surprised to hear that visitor numbers to Dove Cottage and the museum had fallen from 75,000 in 2000 to 46,500 in 2017. Reasons included a drop in tourists from Japan, who were finding travel more expensive.
The anniversary, McGregor was hoping then, would bring a turnaround. It was an opportunity, too, “to celebrate Wordsworth not just as a poet of the past but of the present and the future as well; a poet who can speak to us across the centuries and enrich people’s lives”.
“I wandered lonely as a Cloud” was published in 1815 from Rydal Mount, where Wordsworth lived from 1813 until 1850. As I approached the house, stamping the mud of the Coffin Route from my boots, the poem was being read aloud by a tourist with a German accent.
Rydal Mount, airy and spacious after Dove Cottage, isn’t a museum; it’s still often used by the poet’s descendants,* whose family snaps share space with exhibits. Among the latter is Wordsworth’s first reply to Queen Victoria, declining her invitation to be Poet Laureate. He was persuaded to change his mind — on condition that he needn’t write verse while in the post.
Between showers, I wandered in the garden, its five acres still close to Wordsworth’s design, its dark corners in accordance with his belief that nature shouldn’t be manicured. Then I went downhill, through the yard of St Mary’s church and into a wooded plot once known as the Rashfield because its damp ground was spiked with rushes.
Today it’s Dora’s Field, after the Wordsworths’ first child, and, in spring, one of the best places to see “A host of dancing Daffodils”. Wordsworth bought the plot in 1826 and later passed it to Dora; when she died of tuberculosis at 43, in 1847, he and Dorothy planted it with hundreds of bulbs.
I crossed the A591 and the footbridge over the River Rothay. For a while I was among other walkers, en route to echo their Hellooos at the lofty ceiling of Rydal Cave. Higher up, as happens even in this “classic-ground”, the company fell away. Fighting a stiff wind, I reached the summit of Loughrigg Fell and had it to myself.
Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth and went to school in Hawkshead, from where he went exploring on the fell with friends. It was probably from here that he had his earliest glimpse of what would become his first real “abiding place”: Grasmere.
Coming down, rewarded for the climb by two rainbows, I headed along the shore of Grasmere, into the village and up to Allan Bank. This Georgian villa, looking over Grasmere and the fells beyond, is unusual for a National Trust property: it has no art collection, no forbidding notices on chairs. Indeed, when it reopened in 2012 after a fire the year before, visitors were invited to write on its scorched walls and suggest what should be done with it. The result was a place where, depending on age and taste, you could dress up, knit or play the piano; bring a dog or a picnic or both. Or you could curl up with Wordsworth’s poems in what was his study.
The fire of 2011 wasn’t the first occasion when this house was full of smoke. While the Wordsworths were there (1808-1811), it came down chimneys rather than going up. Their eyes smarted, their throats hurt; they blundered into furniture. So while Allan Bank provided more elbow room, it never really became a home.
Wordsworth nonetheless continued working, notably on “The Excursion”, one of the poems that inspired a later occupant of Allan Bank, the Anglican priest Hardwicke Rawnsley. He shared Wordsworth’s concern over the damage a rapidly industrialising and urbanising society was doing to landscape and heritage. He became a founder of the Lake District Defence Society and, later, the National Trust (which in 2020 marked its 125th anniversary and the centenary of Rawnsley’s death).
Today the trust owns both Grasmere and the island in its centre, to which Wordsworth and Dorothy would row for picnics. I’d been reminded of that by a sign after dropping down from Loughrigg. I’d chatted to a couple in their thirties, nurses from a London hospital who had come up by train and pitched a tent** by the lake. They were first-timers and knew little of Wordsworth. I was on my fifth visit to the Lakes, but still struggling to identify features on the skyline. All of us, though, were “disposed to peace”. If we couldn’t respond to the play of light and shadow on the fells as Wordsworth had done, we could answer — to steal a line from one of the poet’s great admirers, Van Morrison — with the “inarticulate speech of the heart”.
* Rydal Mount was put up for sale at the end of March (2025) following a post-Covid fall in visitor numbers. One of Wordsworth’s descendants, Charlotte Wontner, is leading a campaign to encourage financial backers to step in and help preserve the house and gardens so that they can be kept open for the public.
** In the piece that appeared in the paper, I left out mention of the tent and where it had been pitched, on the advice of one of the staff at Allan Bank, who reminded me of the problems caused by the post-lockdown rush to green spaces. In an email she said: “…the police, the national park, the farming community and the National Trust have had many issues with fly-camping, fires and litter (including medical and sanitary waste) and an increase in antisocial behaviour in general.”
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