Footsteps Towards a Week in Windermere

The spark of the idea leapt out of a conversation I had with Dorothea as we walked along the Regents Canal to Regents Park in June. But the kindling has been collected over a couple of years reading with Sue. Sue initiated a reading group that John and I have been religiously attending one Sunday each month by walking up York Hill and down Valley Road in time for brunch (delicious!). I forget exactly where we started, but something monumental happened when Sue invited us to embark on the grand voyage through Dublin with James Joyce's Ulysses. After that epic journey we went for a paddle up the Thames to visit Beckett's Murphy, who took us down to Beckenham on a bus and into the wards of the newly built Bethlem Hospital, after that we wandered up Bond Street and into Regents Park alongside Woolf's Dalloway. 

But the "backlog" of the fire – and I'm surprised to discover that "backlog" is in fact the technical term for the large log at the back of the grate that burns slowly, steadily and produces long lasting heat, sustaining the fire over time – could be Harriet Martineau (1802-1876). I first met Harriet in 2011 when I produced and participated in a rehearsed reading of Sue Blundell's play, Roofing the County of Surrey in Crystal. Harriet is currently being rediscovered now that patriarchy is on the way out (see for example Stuart Hobday and Gaby Weiner's Reintroducing Harriet Martineau, Pioneering Sociologist and Activist, London, Routledge 2024). She is credited as being one of the founding mothers of sociology, and she was able to go and live independently in the Lake District due to the success of her writing. She designed a house––The Knoll in Ambleside–– and had it built 1845, Wordsworth welcomed her to the neighbourhood by planting a tree* in her new garden which must still be growing there today. It is possible to rent the house as a holiday let and I was looking for it for our autumn adventure when the google spider presented me with the grander house in Windermere of which she had written that it was "the most enviable abode in the county."  

Making the booking inspired me to reach for a book on my shelf: Harriet Martineau at Ambleside, (edited by Barbara Todd, 2002) which contains "A Year at Ambleside," a month by month account of her first year in the house. I turned to the entry for June, written on the longest day, 21st. She describes a boat made by one of her new friends, a German woman, Frederika, who lived further down the lake at Bowness. A handmade boat: "it is a curiosity – this new boat – of mahogany, thirty-three feet long and only twenty-six inches wide in the middle. It will be a pretty sight – the shooting of this arrow-like skiff over the smooth lake – with the one graceful rower and her demure friend Carlo [a dog] seated in front of her."

Frederika is introduced in "March." Harriet is much occupied at the time with planting the new garden before moving in April:

In this we had the effectual help from my German friend, Fredrika, albeit she lives at Bowness, six miles from us. When we had once settled where our flower-beds and borders were to be – how many on the north slope, how many under the terrace wall, and of what shape to make the one within the quarry, Fredrika knew how to proceed and would not allow me to be disturbed if she came when I was busy. Her way was to row herself in one of her three boats from Bowness to the head of the lake, stopping to eat her breakfast in the centre of the lake, and also to fish for our dinner. According to the month she would bring a booty of trout, carp, or pike, and her fishing seems to be always more or less successful. She would land in the garden at Croft Lodge, and there add some fresh vegetables to her present of fish. She would then walk the mile and a half to my house, quietly put in her basket at the back door, take the heaviest tools from the tool-house, and go to work. With pick axe, spade and riddle, she cleared the rock here, trenched a bed there, and prepared a choice order for our best plants. It was she who made and stocked my first dahlia-beds, driving in the poles with her own hands. It was she who sent me half the roses I have, and made the terrace suddenly gay the next summer, with a grand show of geraniums. When, at two o'clock my morning's work in the study was done, I went out and worked with her till dinner-time; and then, if I accompanied her to her boat, or to walk home, how sweet were those spring evenings in the meadows and on the water! How, as we cut through the lights and shadows on the surface of the lake, did Fredrika tell of her feats with her gun among the wild swans and other fowl that visited us in their passage, or answer the cuckoo that hailed us from the woods on the shore! (p. 64, March)

This passage appears just after the extraordinary description of Wordsworth's planting the Pine tree in her garden (pp. 62-3, March). He was 76 at the time, and in the entry for July, there is a description of him that I found quite enchanting: "They had seen an old man in a Scotch cap and green spectacles and plaid cloak, cutting ash sticks out of a copse by the roadside, for half-a-dozen cottage children who were about his heels; and as he walked on, whittling his poles, the little creatures were pulling his cloak and asking him questions, and he was talking to them all the way he went" (p. 104, July).