This is a story of how life conspires with us to fulfill our dearest dreams – especially when we are willing to follow good feeling and trust our hearts.
For years, I dreamed of visiting the Lake District in the north of England – home of English-language Romantic poetry and a hotbed of artistic creativity of all kinds in the 19th century and beyond. I wanted to steep myself in two of my life’s passions: poetry and walking. “I want to walk where the poets walked,” is the phrase I wrote in my journal and spoke aloud to friends and family who asked about this dream. I said it and wrote it again and again.
When the time came to plan the trip, I looked at dozens of houses on Air BnB and so many of them were beautiful or boasted wonderful amenities that it might seem difficult to choose. But truly, it wasn’t. I booked into the homes whose pictures inspired something like yearning coupled with a wild joy. There was something inevitable about these choices, as if the homes were already expecting me.
As it turns out, my heart is a very good travel agent. The first home I stayed in, just outside the village of Staveley, is situated right on The Dales Way, a path that runs 80 miles from the Yorkshire Dales all the way to Bowness-on-Windermere.
Now, one of my main reasons for visiting the Lake District was to see the places that poet John Keats saw when he walked through the region in 1818 with his friend, Charles Armitage Brown. Keats and Brown would have walked right along the path running just outside the door of the farmhouse on their journey from Burneside to Bowness. The very first night I arrived, I walked miles along that route and went to bed exultant. Already I had walked where the poets walked – and truly, I had no idea that would happen when I booked my lodging there.
A few days later I told my host how exciting that was. “Of course, the house wouldn’t have been here in 1818,” I said, gesturing to the 1848 carved under the gable. “No,” she said, “but YOUR part of the house was definitely here then. It was built at the end of the 18th century.” My little apartment with its sloping floor and irregular beams was much older than I knew.
That means that not only did I walk where Keats walked on my very first night in the Lake District, but I stayed in a house he would almost certainly have passed on his journey. I was thrilled!
Anyone who knows anything of the habit of the Romantic poets might object that it would be hard NOT to walk where they walked because they were such busy, prodigious walkers. Truly, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their beloved friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked miles, from town to town, over the fells, along the lakes, at all hours of the day and night. All the same, it was so exciting to retrace their steps along Ullswater where they saw the daffodils “dancing in the breeze” that inspired WW’s famous poem. I also loved rowing the length of Grasmere where they used to go fishing, quite near their home at Dove Cottage.
That sense of being led and helped really knocked me sideways at the last home I lodged in. It’s located in Colthouse, just outside Hawkshead, the village where a young Wordsworth attended grammar school and where William Heelis, Beatrix Potter’s husband, had his law office.
Paul, my host, knew I was interested in poetry and art and was eager to tell me the history of his house which is protected by the National Trust.
It seems that sometime in the 1780’s when he was attending school in the village, the woman who ran William Wordsworth’s boarding house became “indisposed,” and the young poet came to lodge for three weeks at Green End – the very house I was staying in. “Now, I’m not going to say that Wordsworth slept in your bedroom,” Paul said with a smile, “but he might have.”
WOW!
And then, because life is full of surprises, he went on to tell me that Beatrix Potter used to come to Green End for tea more than a century later. After she moved permanently to the Lake District at the start of the 20th century, she noticed a lack of medical help in the area and set up a committee to take “subscriptions” to fund the salary of a full-time nurse. The treasurer of the committee lived at Green End and the two met there to plan and work.
And so, led by that yearning coupled with wild joy, I ended up booking into exactly the homes that would help make my dearest dreams come true. I did indeed “walk where the poets walked.” And without ever imagining it as a possibility, I also slept where the poet slept and drank tea where the artist-storyteller drank her tea!
There is so much more to say about this wonderful experience, but I wanted to share this one aspect of it to encourage all of us to trust life, to trust our hearts which know so much more than our heads, and to remember most of all that dreams really do come true in their own time and with great beauty and generosity.
Yes!
