Grasmere is small — barely a mile long, half a mile wide, with a single wooded island that sits near the centre of the water. It is not, by any objective measure, among the most spectacular lakes in the Lake District. Ullswater is larger and more dramatic. Derwentwater is more magnificently set. Wastwater is more austere. By the standards of surface area or the height of surrounding fells, Grasmere would not make a list of the ten most impressive lakes in the National Park.
It is, however, probably the most written-about lake in England. This changes what it is.
Wordsworth knew Grasmere from childhood but chose it deliberately as his home in 1799 — not Ullswater, which he also loved, not Derwentwater, which he had access to via Coleridge in Keswick, but this small, enclosed lake with its single island and its ring of fells. The choice reflects something about his aesthetic preferences: the intimate rather than the spectacular, the comprehensible rather than the overwhelming.
In the poem Home at Grasmere, written in 1800, he described the vale as a place of sufficient isolation to allow the kind of sustained contemplative attention his poetry required. The lake was part of this — the water, the island, the surrounding fells creating an enclosure that he found conducive. He could see it from Dove Cottage.
The island in Grasmere — heavily wooded, visible from almost every point on the lake shore — appears in several of Wordsworth's poems and in Dorothy's journals. The Windermere Lake Cruises operate an occasional service to the island from the eastern shore; in the main, it is left to the cormorants and the herons that nest there.
The island's visual function in the lake — the dark mass of trees reflected in the water, the way it divides the composition of the lake without dominating it — is part of what makes Grasmere's particular combination of elements so satisfying. A lake without an island would be a different thing.
The finest view of Grasmere lake is from the Red Bank road on the western shore — a minor road that climbs steeply above the lake and gives an elevated view south along the water with the island in the foreground and the fells closing the valley to the south. This is also the road that Wordsworth took on his regular walk from Grasmere to Rydal, and it was along this road that he composed aloud.
Grasmere lake in rain, mist or low cloud has a quality that fine weather suppresses. The combination of the enclosed valley, the still water and the absence of visibility beyond the immediate fells produces the atmospheric intensity that De Quincey described in his essays on the Lakes and that the Romantic painters came specifically to capture.
The lake is on eight of our tour routes. Your expert storyteller will explain what you are looking at and why this specific, small lake has accumulated more literary significance than any other body of water its size in England.
Grasmere lake is covered on the Wordsworth Morning Tour, Wordsworth Afternoon Tour and the 8 Lakes tours.