Stand on the drive with your back to the house and look up. The hillside goes almost straight into the sky behind you, dark with trees, and it has been called the forest side for centuries — long before anyone thought of putting a mansion on it.
A little over two hundred years ago a man in his thirties used to walk up here from a small cottage a mile down the road. He liked the steepness of it. And he gave this hillside to a shepherd in a poem — a man who works one patch of ground his whole life and loses it at the end, the land passing into a stranger’s hand.
Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name…
The walker was William Wordsworth and the poem is Michael, written around 1800. Fifty-three years later a stranger from Manchester bought the farm on the forest side and built the house you are looking at.
Wordsworth never saw it go up. But he had spent the last years of his life fighting the thing that made it possible.
Long before the mansion, this was a working corner of the Keswick road. In the late seventeenth century the buildings on this spot included a smithy and an ostler’s house serving the Swan Inn just along the way — a stage where the coach horses were changed. So the first trade ever carried on at Forest Side was looking after travellers and their transport. Not a great deal has changed except the horsepower.
Later it became a farm in its own right. A directory of 1829 gives the yeoman farmer as John Dixon; the tithe map of 1838 shows the holding; by 1851 Edward Walker was farming here. Then, in October 1852, the Westmorland Gazette carried a notice that the Walker property was to be sold at auction.
Wordsworth’s last great public fight was against a railway. The line from Kendal was to be pushed on into the heart of the Lakes, and he campaigned hard and publicly to stop it. He half won: the track was halted at Windermere in 1847, several miles short of Grasmere.
It made no difference at all to what followed. A guidebook published in 1853 announced with great satisfaction that the district of the lakes could now be reached conveniently by rail from every quarter — and the men who read that were exactly the men Wordsworth had in mind. Within a few years of the trains arriving, the valleys south of here filled with substantial new houses built for prosperous northerners who had discovered they could get to the mountains before dinner.
Wordsworth died in 1850. Three years later, work began on the forest side.
The stranger who bought the farm was not a lord and had no ancestors worth mentioning. Stephen Heelis was born in Bolton in 1801 and made himself into one of the best-connected solicitors in Manchester. He lived at Halton Bank in Salford with his wife Ann and their seven children, and if you want to understand why a man in that position would buy a hillside in Westmorland, the short answer is air. Salford in the 1850s was the smoky heart of the industrial north. Grasmere was not.
He was good at what he did. He helped found the Manchester Law Society and was twice its president; the society still awards a medal that carries his name, and the firm he built still trades under it. He acted for the Manchester industrialist John Owens and became one of the first trustees of the college Owens endowed — the institution that grew, in time, into the University of Manchester. He was twice elected mayor of Salford, and during his second term he was offered a knighthood and turned it down.
In November 1853 the local press reported that forty-seven workpeople employed on Mr Heelis’s estate had been given a substantial supper at a hotel in the village. That is what the completion of a house looked like in 1853: forty-seven people fed, on a hillside farm, to mark the end of the job.
And it was Heelis who walled the gardens. In September 1858 the Gazette singled out his gardener, a Mr Roberts, for his success in rearing wallfruit — peaches and apricots ripened against a warm brick wall in Westmorland, which is showing off, and both of them knew it.
He had it for five years.
In 1858 his youngest daughter died, and then Ann. By the following March the house was advertised for sale and Heelis had gone back to Salford, where he lived another twelve years. He is buried down in Grasmere churchyard with his wife, his daughter and one of his sons.
Five summers of the view, for all of it. It is worth thinking about on the terrace.
What followed is a run of owners who arrived full of intention and did not stay.
James Harrison paid £7,000 for the estate — the figure survives, pencilled on an undated plan of the house and land. He was here in August 1860, advertising two horses for sale. By August the next year he was advertising the furniture. Whatever he came for, he does not seem to have found it.
Then Charles Frederick Younge, a silversmith from Sheffield, in the house by the spring of 1863 and newly married at the age of seventy to Emily Barker, who was twenty. Their daughter Edith Mary was born the following summer and christened at Grasmere church. Younge died in 1866.
Mrs Younge kept it for years and then put it up at auction in Manchester in June 1888, and the sale catalogue is a small masterpiece: the mansion house, coach-house, two stables, two cottages, walled kitchen garden, conservatory and vinery, pleasure grounds and shrubberies, a noble avenue of trees leading up from the carriage entrance, fifty acres of meadow and pasture. Nobody bid. Five years later they tried again, this time in London.
The trouble, I think, is that the house had been built as a statement, and statements are difficult to sell to anyone who did not need to make that particular one.
It took a Liverpool businessman to break the run. Edmond Brownbill was listed as owner by 1897 and was still here in 1914, by which time Kelly’s directory was describing Forest Side as the second of the principal seats in Grasmere — a phrase somebody had to write down, and somebody had to read. He died that December, having held it for seventeen years, longer than anyone before him.
After Brownbill the descent through the directories is quick and quietly brutal. In 1921 there is a new owner; by 1925 the entry has been moved out of the principal seats altogether and filed under Commercial. The great house had stopped being great.
Then, in 1929, it was taken on by the Co-operative Holidays Association — an organisation that existed to get young working people out of the industrial cities for a week. Walking all day, everyone eating at long tables, singing and talking in the evening, and back to the mill on Monday. It stayed in that ownership, later as the Countrywide Holidays Association, for most of the twentieth century.
By the end of the century the house had become a hotel, and then it faded: damp, dilapidated, the garden gone to bramble and the avenue lost in it. It was bought in 2014 and rebuilt properly rather than tidied. Eighty-odd sash windows were made to the original pattern and lifted back into the openings. The mean little servants’ rooms in the roof were opened up and given the fell views — the people who once had the worst rooms in the house now have the best of them, which is a reversal Heelis would have found startling and I find very satisfying.
It reopened in 2016 and the kitchen took a Michelin Star within a year. In February 2026 it added a Michelin Green Star, awarded not for the cooking but for how the food is grown, sourced and handled. The hotel holds a Michelin Key. No other property in Cumbria holds all three — there is more on that in our guide to the Michelin Collection.
And the Green Star is for the garden. Heelis’s walled garden — the one Mr Roberts ripened his apricots in, against that same brick — is under cultivation again: well over a hundred varieties of vegetable and herb, grown without chemicals, with the kitchen built around whatever comes out of it and the rest found within about ten miles or foraged in the woods behind. That absence of chemicals is also why the hillside still holds red squirrels and roe deer.
Wordsworth’s poem was about ground that stopped being farmed, and a family that lost the working of it. It has taken a hundred and seventy years, but the forest side grows food again, and it travels about two hundred yards to the table.
Go down into the village in the early evening, when the coaches have gone and Grasmere belongs to whoever is still standing in it. In St Oswald’s churchyard, under the yews, are the Wordsworth graves — everybody comes for those, and quite right. The gingerbread shop in the old village school is beside the church gate, and Dove Cottage is a short stroll on.
A little way off, with no queue at all, is Stephen Heelis: the Bolton boy who made good in Manchester, turned down a knighthood, and spent a fortune on five summers of this view.
You have the same view he bought, for considerably less, and yours includes dinner.
A note on one widely repeated claim: several travel sites state that Forest Side was built as a hunting retreat for the Earl of Lonsdale. It was not. The documentary record — auction notices, directories and the tithe map — is unambiguous about Stephen Heelis and the farm he bought.
We are an independent local tour operator. This guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by Forest Side.
Staying in the valley, or planning to?
Stephen Heelis, a Manchester solicitor born in Bolton in 1801, built the house in 1853 on the site of an earlier farm. A plaque on the building carries the date. He sold it after only five years.
No. The site held a smithy and ostler's house serving the Swan Inn, then a working farm, then a private mansion from 1853. From 1929 until late in the twentieth century it was a walking-holiday centre for the Co-operative Holidays Association, and it became a hotel after that.
Wordsworth walked this hillside from Dove Cottage, a mile away, and used the setting for his poem Michael, whose opening names the forest side in Grasmere Vale. He also led the campaign against the railway whose arrival at Windermere in 1847 brought the wave of house-building that produced Forest Side itself.
They share a surname and no established connection. William Heelis came from a Westmorland family settled around Appleby; Stephen Heelis was born in Bolton and practised in Manchester. We have found nothing linking the two families, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
It was awarded in the 2026 guide for sustainable gastronomy rather than for the cooking. The Victorian walled kitchen garden supplies the restaurant directly, growing well over a hundred varieties without chemicals, with the remainder sourced within about ten miles or foraged locally.
