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There is a field beside the road in Rydal, between Grasmere and Ambleside, that fills with daffodils every spring. Not the wild daffodils of the famous Wordsworth poem — those grow further north, on the banks of Ullswater — but thousands of cultivated daffodils planted by Wordsworth himself in 1830, in a field he bought specifically for the purpose.
He planted them for his daughter Dorothy, known as Dora, who was ill and whom he feared he might lose. He did not lose her yet — she survived until 1847, outliving her mother Mary (who died in 1859) to Wordsworth's relief. Dora died in 1847 of tuberculosis, at the age of 43. She had outlived two of her own children. Wordsworth was 77. He never recovered.
The field — Dora's Field — is now a National Trust property. Every spring, for one or two weeks when the daffodils are at their peak, it is one of the most visited places in the Lake District. The visit, for anyone who knows the story, is genuinely affecting.
Wordsworth's 1804 poem I wandered lonely as a cloud — the one everyone knows — was written two years after the walk along the shore of Ullswater with Dorothy that inspired it. The poem is about memory and imagination: the speaker, away from the daffodils, finds them returning to him in moments of solitude, bringing the pleasure they gave him in the original experience.
Dora's Field is a different thing. It was not inspired by the Ullswater daffodils — Wordsworth planted it forty years after that walk, in a different place, for a different purpose. The field was an act of love, a physical expression of his feeling for his daughter, which is why it moves people in a way that the Ullswater site (beautiful as it is) does not quite match.
Dora's Field is beside the A591 road between Grasmere and Ambleside, at Rydal. The National Trust car park at Rydal is immediately beside it. There is no entrance charge.
The field is small — perhaps two acres — on a slight slope above the road, with a gate at the lower end. In the daffodil season (typically late March to mid-April), you can enter and walk among the flowers. The proximity of Rydal Mount (Wordsworth's home from 1813 to his death in 1850) above the field means that the whole area — the house, the field, the church, the view down the valley — has a quality of concentrated meaning that few other places in the Lake District possess.
Wordsworth lived at Rydal Mount from 1813 until his death in 1850 — the longest of his several Lake District addresses, and the one he was living in when he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1843. The house is now owned by his descendants and had been open to the public seasonally, though it has been temporarily closed since March 2026 for conservation work, with no reopening date yet announced. It contains original family furniture and memorabilia, and the garden — which Wordsworth designed himself — is largely intact.
The walk from Rydal village to Rydal Mount and then up to Rydal Hall (the larger house above, with its own grounds and the famous Rydal Hall Grot) and back via Dora's Field takes approximately an hour and gives a comprehensive tour of the Wordsworth landscape around Rydal.
Dora's Field, Rydal Mount and the surrounding landscape are part of both our Wordsworth tours. Your expert storyteller will tell the full story of the field — the planting, the illness, the death, the poem — in the context of Wordsworth's late life and the relationships that defined it.
Dora's Field and Rydal are stops on our Wordsworth Morning Tour and Wordsworth Afternoon Tour.