UK: William Wordsworth's 'daffodils' cottage set for £5m improvement grant

A grant of almost £5m will be announced this week by the Heritage Lottery Fund to improve facilities at Dove Cottage, the home of the poet William Wordsworth and the place where he wrote his daffodils poem, in time for 2020, the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

The cottage is still full of the poet’s possessions, and among the treasures of the museum are his sister Dorothy’s journals, including the entry for Thursday 15 April 1802, when they saw the flowers. She described:

A long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake

Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud set a new world record for mass recitation in 2004, when 250,000 school children across the UK read his poem inspired by the daffodils.
The cottage in Grasmere – which the poet called “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found” – was once a pub called the Dove and Olive Branch. The two-storey whitewashed building was rented by the Wordsworths from 1799 until they all moved to a larger house after he married and had children. It has been a museum since the Wordsworth Trust was formed in 1890 to preserve it.
It currently gets around 50,000 visitors from all over the world every year – a number that is expected to rise steeply as facilities are improved – and part of the grant will be used to improve interpretation in Mandarin and Japanese. Better lighting and displays will be installed in the adjoining museum, opened in 1936 by John Masefield, a successor of Wordsworth as poet laureate, which has the greatest collection of Wordsworth journals, letters and manuscripts in the world.

Treasures that may come out of storage for the first time include letters from Wordsworth’s French mistress, Annette Vallon, who had a daughter with him and wrote in the hope that he would return to France and marry her. Their story was kept out of the first official biography at the insistence of the poet’s widow, Mary.

Plans for the site include turning staff out of their space in another old building and restoring its early 19th-century appearance to create a living history display.
The work is also intended to give better access to the woods and the garden they both loved, which has been restored to the wild appearance they favoured . A few days after they moved in, William wrote: “In imagination she has already built a seat with a summer shed on the highest platform in this our little domestic slip of mountain.”

The Wordsworths were not living in romantic isolation; the house was often full of visitors. Dorothy complained of tourists, and traffic on the main road passing the house, but staff and visitors have been enjoying unusual peace and quiet since the recent storms and floods spared the museum but cut the road to Keswick, leaving them at the end of a cul-de-sac and keeping the usual heavy lorry traffic off the road.

“We hope the road will be open again in May – but in the mean time it’s lovely to lose the lorries,” said Paul Kleian, head of marketing said.