Wordsworth House and Garden

Wordsworth House and Garden is the elegant Georgian townhouse on Cockermouth's Main Street where the Romantic poet William Wordsworth was born in 1770 and spent his early childhood with his sister Dorothy. Now cared for by the National Trust, the property has been carefully presented to evoke the 1770s, with rooms dressed as the young family would have known them and costumed interpreters helping visitors imagine daily life in a comfortable middle-class home of the period.

Inside, visitors can explore the parlour, kitchen, bedrooms and the counting room used by Wordsworth's father John, agent to Sir James Lowther. Hands-on activities are encouraged: trying on costumes, writing with quill pens, helping in the working Georgian kitchen, and playing with period toys. The atmosphere is deliberately lived-in rather than roped-off, making it a welcoming visit for families.

Behind the house, a walled garden runs down to the River Derwent, the same river the young Wordsworth later remembered in The Prelude as a constant companion of his childhood. The garden grows heritage vegetables, herbs and flowers in the eighteenth-century style. Cockermouth itself is an attractive Lakeland market town on the northern edge of the Lake District National Park, making the house an easy and enriching stop on any visit to the area.