Grey Skies and Grasmere

Continuing North From Ambleside we Drove through Rydal, passing the house where Wordsworth grew up and making our way to the cottage where he lived during the golden decade of his poetry career. Dove Cottage is located on the outskirts of Grasmere and is a quaint cottage covered in clematis and other climbing flowers. The House was originally a tavern which accounts for the slate floor and wood panelling of two of the ground floor rooms. There was an excellent tour through the cottage with interesting facts and anecdotes about the Wordsworth's lives at Dove Cottage and the Friends who came to visit them like de Quincy (who owned the cottage after the Wordsworths), Coleridge, and Scott. After visiting Dove Cottage we Made our way through the Wordsworth Museum and onto the town of Grasmere itself. One of the first stops in Grasmere was at the Sara Nelson Gingerbread Shop, for some of its famous gingerbread. The lakeland Gingerbread is very dissimilar to the thick fluffy variety we eat in the states. This is a very dense, crumbly, almost sandy bread with a much stranger ginger taste, however it was delicious. We walked through the Grasmere graveyard and saw the Wordsworth headstones. We visited a few shops as the town was starting to close up for the evening and then made our way even further North, past Keswick and into Thorthwaite to our second B&B.