Grasmere, June 1983

June 1983. We took a trip up to Grasmere in the Lake District. At the time I was supplying photographs to numerous magazines and one of them that regularly featured my work was a small local magazine called Lakescene, based on Cumbria and particularly the Lake District National Park.

The Lake District is said to be England's wettest area and certainly, no matter what the weather was like around 40 miles south (64 kilometres) as the crow flies (and almost double that for a car journey), there was no guarantee of good weather by the time you reached the Lakes.

And so it proved as we reached the car park at Grasmere under cloudy skies and chilly temperatures on this particular day. But dull weather doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to take decent photographs and indeed as most magazines were still only just starting to use colour for photographs other than on their front cover (and Lakescene used black and white exclusively) the added drama of even wet days could look quite attractive and were certainly not unrepresentative!

Dove Cottage was the home of poet William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, from 1799 until May 1808 when the former inn became too small following William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson. As William lived with his sister, so Mary moved her own sister into Dove Cottage and then with three children being born within four years, they moved out in search of larger accomodation.

Grasmere Church. It is dedicated to Saint Oswald, the 7th century King of Northumbria who was said to have preached on the site. The present church dates from the 1300s however. It still holds an annual Rushbearing Festival. In fact the floor of the church remained earthen until 1841. Burials under this floor were only stopped in 1823 so regular replacement of some sort of floor covering preferably a pungent sweet-smelling one would have been very necessary.

It is in the churchyard, however, that we find the graves of William Wordsworth and his wife, plus those of his sister, Dorothy and others of his family.

William Wordsworth alongside some of his friends, Coleridge and Richard Southey became known as The Lake Poets and with them he brought the Romantic Age to English literature. He was Poet Laureate 1843 to 1850 having at first refused the position due to his age until Prime Minister Robert Peel told him that he need write no new work and he remains the only Poet Laureate without an official work published during his tenure.

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