Visiting Dove Cottage taught me more about the poet’s life, how he lived here with his sister, Dorothy, for nearly three years before marrying Mary Hutchinson. The setting is stunning, the perfect place for a life of walking and writing.
It’s texture was not quite a biscuit (in the British sense of the word) and not quite cake; it was somewhere in the middle and just right.
Beatrix Potter learned to love the Lake District after spending a summer at Wray Castle as a child and bought Hill Top as an adult in 1905. It’s a beautiful 17th-century farmhouse kept in the exact condition she left it.
This week I read a collection of 22 Beatrix Potter stories, and while the Lake District is easily recognizable in Miss Potter’s charming illustrations, I was completely surprised to be able to find among my own pictures of Derwentwater the very Owl Island that the squirrels in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin sail out to on their rafts to gather nuts for winter.
If you drive about three miles outside of Keswick up the Borrowdale Road, you’ll cross the famous Ashness Bridge and arrive at Surprise View. From the top of this cliff you can look over almost all the Derwentwater and beyond to Bassenthwaite Lake.