‘Come forth into the light of things,” implored William Wordsworth in his 1798 poem The Tables Turned, extolling the virtues of a good old-fashioned walk in nature. Treading through his homeland of the Lake District more than two centuries later, on a radiant early spring day, sunbeams casting through the bare branches to anoint the daffodils, it’s a compelling edict.
As a founding father of England’s Romantic poetry movement, Wordsworth’s legacy is synonymous with the rolling, rugged landscapes of the Lakes. He and his contemporaries Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were collectively known as the “Lake Poets”, and to gaze on the region’s deep, still waters and scrabble across its fells is to understand the source of his artistic inspiration, centuries on.
