subject: Coleridge And The Lake District [print this page] At the same time De Quincey stayed, and he and Coleridge helped Wordsworth write his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, denouncing British handling of the Peninsular War. Other prose works written here include the Reply to Mathetes (1809), the Essays upon Epitaphs and the earliest parts of the Guide to the Lakes.
Dr Thomas Arnold rented AJlan Bank for the summers of 1832 and lived here (often playing host to the Wordsworths) whilst his house at Fox How was being built. Return to the village; or take N fork in drive below house then footpath NE towards white buildings for Easedale Road.
Dockwray Cottage, at the Grasmere end of Easedale Road, faces Sam Read's bookshop across a field. It was the farm of Dorothy Wordsworth's friend Jenny Dockeray. On May 28 1800 Dorothy records that she walked up to the rocks above Jenny Dockeray's, sate a long time upon the grass, the prospect divinely beautiful. If I had three hundred pounds, and could afford to have a bad interest for my money, I would buy that estate, and we would build a cottage there to end our days in. I went into her garden and got white and yellow lilies, periwinkle, etc.which she took back to Dove Cottage and planted.
Continue w along Easedale Road and after Yzm cross Goody Bridge over Easedale Beck and lOO yds later turn L (s) through the gate to Goody Bridge Farm and over the field to the beck (crossed by stepping stones). Wordsworth reckoned in old age that he had composed 'thousands of lines' whilst walking beside Easedale Beck, and his poem 'It was an April morning: fresh and clear' gives a detailed description of a walk up the beck and identifies a 'dell' with a waterfall and the natural foliage of the rOcks the birch, The yew, the holly, and the bright green thorn, With hanging islands of resplendent furze: And, on a summit, distant a short space, By any who should look beyond the dell, A single mountain cottage might be seen.
Rest Bank Ambleside St John's in the Vale In the poem the place is named 'Emma's Dell', 'Emma' being Wordsworth's poeticism for Dorothy. Emma's Dell is on private land at the sharp bend in the beck 120yds downstream of the steppingstones; there is a tiny waterfall where a small gill joins the beck. The 'single mountain cottage' is Goody Bridge Farm, enlarged since but still picturesque.
Return to Goody Bridge Farm and the road. 50yds w of the farm, on the N side of the road, is Easedale Lodge. C DayLewis frequently stayed here in the 1920s and '30s, walking, working on his early poems, and sometimes driving up to Threlkeld to see W H Auden. lOO yds beyond Easedale Lodge the road reaches the gate to Lancrigg, now a hotel. This was the home after 1840 of Mrs Eliza Fletcher, a lady of strong intellectual interests, who had been a radical and a feminist in Edinburgh at the turn of the century, holding an informal salon which was much frequented by the founders of the Edinburgh Review. She retired here to be close to her daughter, who was married to Dr Davy and was especially friendly with the Wordsworths, Southey and Hartley Coleridge. Her Autobiography (1875) gives a good picture of Lake District society at the time.
Opposite the Lancrigg gate take the footbridge (signed Easedale Tarn) into a small wood. It is mentioned in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal (December 9 1801): At the little footbridge we stopped to look at the company of rivers, which came hurrying down the vale this way and that; it [Easedale?] was a valley of streams and islands, with that great waterfall [Sourmilk Gill] at the head, and lesser falls in different parts of the mountains, coming down to these rivers.
