Dove Cottage, Grasmere
William Wordswoth’s first family home is the only place in the world to see his personal belongings.
Here Wordsworth wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language and Dorothy his sister kept her famous ‘Grasmere Journal’, now on display in the Museum.
William came across his first Grasmere home by chance as he and his brother John walked along this lane with his fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in late 1799. He and Dorothy moved in just a few weeks later.
The cottage had once been an inn, the ‘Dove and Olive Bough’. It was now to be the Wordsworths’ home for the next eight years. In 1802 William married Mary Hutchinson and three of their five children were born here.
Step into Dove Cottage to get a sense of that time: stone floors, dark panelled rooms, glowing coal fires and the family’s own belongings. Little has changed in the house since the Wordsworths lived here.
Stroll in the Dove Cottage garden, a place of refuge, meditation and inspiration. It was, wrote Wordsworth, ‘the work of our own hands’. Here they planted flowers and vegetables, watched birds and butterflies and, most importantly, read, talked and wrote poetry.