Wordsworth House stands on Main Street in Cockermouth, sixteen kilometres north-west of Keswick, and it is the house where William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770, and where his sister Dorothy was born the following year.
It is a substantial Georgian townhouse of about 1745, the finest in the town, and the family lived there because their father John was law agent to Sir James Lowther, the immensely rich and widely detested political fixer who effectively owned this part of Cumberland.
The National Trust runs it, and it runs it in a specific and unusual way.
Rather than presenting rooms behind ropes, the Trust presents the house as it would have been in the 1770s, with costumed staff in role as the household — a cook in the kitchen, servants at work — and visitors free to handle things, sit down, join in.
The kitchen is a working one: bread and dishes are cooked on the range to eighteenth-century recipes on most open days, and you can taste them. Children can help.
It works extremely well, and it is a considerably better way of conveying how a household of this class actually functioned than a set of furnished rooms would be.
The point of coming, though, is what is at the back.
The walled garden runs down to a terrace above the River Derwent, and this is the ground Wordsworth wrote about directly in The Prelude: the river that “loved to blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song”, the terrace where he played, the sound of the water through his childhood bedroom window.
It is one of the few places where a specific patch of ground can be matched to specific lines by a major poet, and it is unfenced, ordinary and quiet.
The garden is planted with period-appropriate flowers, herbs and vegetables and is worked accordingly.
Wordsworth’s mother died when he was seven, his father when he was thirteen, and the children were dispersed to relatives. Lowther refused to pay the money owed to the estate, leaving the orphaned children effectively destitute, and the debt was not settled until Lowther’s death twenty years later.
That experience — the loss of the house, the injustice, the separation from Dorothy — is not incidental to the poetry. This house is where the childhood he spent the rest of his life writing about happened, and where it ended.
Admission charged; free to National Trust members.
Time: ninety minutes to two hours including the garden.
Opening: seasonal, typically spring to autumn and not every day of the week — check before travelling, because Cockermouth is a half-hour drive from Keswick.
Facilities: café, shop, toilets.
Access: it is a Georgian townhouse with stairs; the ground floor and garden are more manageable. There is a virtual tour of the upper floors.
Parking: town car parks in Cockermouth; there is none at the house.
Worth an hour in its own right — a handsome Georgian market town at the meeting of the Derwent and the Cocker, with a broad main street, independent shops, the ruins of Cockermouth Castle, and the Jennings brewery.
It flooded severely in 2009 and again in 2015, and the town’s recovery is visible in how much of the main street has been rebuilt.
Yes — William was born here on 7 April 1770 and Dorothy in 1771.
The house is run as a living 1770s household with costumed staff in role, a working kitchen and things you can handle.
The terrace above the River Derwent appears directly in The Prelude — the river’s sound is one of Wordsworth’s earliest recorded memories.
No — it is seasonal and not open every day. Check before making the half-hour drive from Keswick.
Sixteen kilometres north-west, about thirty minutes by road, with buses on the Keswick–Cockermouth route.