Arts & Literature

The poet William Wordsworth (of Wandering Lonely as a Cloud fame) loved the Newlands Valley and wrote his poem, To May, after walking over the fells from Grasmere with his sister Dorothy in 1826. The poetic moment came when the church at Littletown revealed itself through the budding spring leaves.

The church, or rather the daughter of the then vicar, Lucie Carr, was the inspiration for Lucie, in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, almost 80 years later.

The Lake District, specifically Windermere and Coniston Water, were the inspiration for Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books, credited with changing children’s literature for ever. As a journalist he was a foreign correspondent in Russia during the Revolution and played chess with Trotsky and Lenin, later marrying the Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepin (both are buried in the churchyard at Ruslin, between Windermere and Coniston).

Fifteen minutes down the road from Stair, over Newlands Pass, and you’re at Buttermere, where the Fish Inn is the setting for Melvyn Bragg’s 1987 novel, The Maid of Buttermere. “The maid” was Mary Robinson, who died in 1837 and also featured Wordsworth’s The Prelude, part of a proposed epic in blank verse, conceived jointly with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Other literary figures who have drawn inspiration from the Lake District include Robert Southey, whose The Cataract at Lodore paints a wonderful word-picture of the Lodore Falls, just across Derwentwater from Newlands.

Then there’s the celebrated aesthete and critic, John Ruskin, who with William Morris (of wallpaper fame) and the poet and illustrator, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, inspired the Arts and Crafts Movement. Ruskin’s secretary, W G Collingwood, was a close friend and mentor of Arthur Ransome, who learned to sail in his boat, Swallow. Collingwood himself wrote and painted extensively in Iceland.

Landscape painters have found and continue to find inspiration in the Lake District. Turner is both the most celebrated and probably most prolific. This dramatic depiction of a rainbow over Buttermere is Turner at his haunting best. [insert pic]

In more recent times, Derwentwater was used as location for the Swallows and Amazons film, while the BBC drama, The A Word, is filmed in Newlands Valley.

Wordsworth’s To May

Lo! Streams that April could not check

Are patient of thy rule;

Gurgling in foamy water-break,

Loitering in glassy pool:

By thee, thee only, could be sent

Such gentle mists as glide,

Curling with unconfirmed intent,

On that green mountain’s side.                             

How delicate the leafy veil

Through which yon house of God

Gleams, mid the peace of this deep dale

By few but shepherds trod!

And lowly huts, near beaten ways,

No sooner stand attired

In thy fresh wreaths, than they for praise

Peep forth, and are admired.