Sheep and Storm, Dove Cottage (AW13)

Originally built as an inn and known as the Dove and Olive Bough, this seventeenth century building in Grasmere continued as a public house until 1793. Six years later Romantic poet William Wordsworth came upon it whilst on a walking tour of the Lake District with his brother and friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He fell in love with the place and, after agreeing upon an annual rent of £5, moved in shortly after with his sister Dorothy. There followed eight years of “plain living, but high thinking”, during which Wordsworth wrote some of the finest poetry in the English language, and Dorothy her inspirational journals.