Lake District Part the Second

This post will not be very long. I'm in the Manchester Airport, awaiting a flight above the oceans of the world. I have been very busy in London, and didn't have the chance to post about the rest of my time in the Lakes, and certainly did not have time to post about London and its many, many things. So here, I shall summarise here the last few days in the Lakes.

Windemere

Dove Cottage today

The Lake District wasn't all walking for me. I did visit the Keswick Pencil Museum, which houses the largest pencil known to the human race, and also has a model of a chap mining graphite from the Cumbrian land. I also, of course, visited Grasmere, and paid a visit to the grave of William Wordsworth and, on the other side, to Dove Cottage, the first house he lived in when he moved to Grasmere. Dove Cottage was the place where he wrote many of his famous poems, and where he lived with his wife and sister and children and essentially Coleridge, so often did he visit. It was interesting to see his house, and to think that it was here he lived and composed and made good use of his ego. I'd just like to pause here to give you one of my favourite bits of Wordsworth that I think gives a nice little image of the man and one aspect of Romantic poetry:

What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

Visiting Wordsworth's grave was oddly emotional for me. I fear I must have been tired, and swear a tear did not escape mine eye. Wordsworth is buried with his family in a churchyard that smells like gingerbread and sits just above the Daffodil Garden in his name. It was already past the best of the daffodil season however, and I saw few of admirable note; neither did I see many along the shores of Ullswater, the lake that legend tells inspired that poem for which Wordsworth is most sadly known. Sure, daffodils are nice and all, but I think that one's been done to death now. It's even on the plastic souvenir bags one gets when one buys far too much Kendal Mint Cake. I've always much preferred a sadder poem, 'A slumber did my spirit seal,' which you may read of your own volition should you so wish here. Or elsewhere, such as, believe it or not, in what they call "books."

It was of course obligatory that I must stay at Windemere, and so I spent two nights there in a nice bed and breakfast and had a little look around. There is a walk one can take up a hill from which the lake in its entirety is visible, as well as much of the surrounding landscape. I had again a cloudy damp day when I did this, but nevertheless I was rather taken with the extent and form of the land and water.

I caught a 50p ferry across the lake and walked in no particular direction, ending up beside farmland, beside the lake, through farmland, and then passing Hilltop, the ill-named house of Beatrix Potter (it was not on a hill; neither was it open) and taking a stroll along Hawkshead. It was a walk, the billboards told me, she had often taken, and a source of inspiration for the little characters that decorated said billboards.

I visited Aira Force (from the Norse fors, for, I believe, water fall). It is a very powerful crashing of water down a hillside, not in one mighty drop, but in several smaller ones that send the water churning and have cut through rock and crash and boil down in small places. At the tallest fall, I stood and was covered with spray as it pounded down. The water was a murky shade from all the rain.

And oh, I must have done other things, like enjoy watching television again, and having a room to myself and most certainly banning all snores, and seeing another red squirrel in Grasmere of which I cannot locate a photograph at this moment. The Lake District was beautiful. I imagine that it still probably is, but I have a plane to catch.