Dove Cottage
Grasmere, Cumbria
The cottage where William Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy and where the poet created some of his greatest works is now a museum, surrounded by ancillary buildings including a library with an important collection of manuscripts by the poet and his contemporaries. It is administered by the Wordsworth Trust. The education department was begun almost twenty years ago as an initiative by an enthusiastic member of staff, and has gradually grown in importance. Dove Cottage is remarkable for the creativity flourishing there. It concentrates on literary activity: tours for primary school children, followed by sessions in which the children, scattered around the house when it is closed to the public, work on their own. In summer, when the cottage is full of visitors (it has around 85,000 a year), school parties are taken into the countryside on the Language in the Landscape programme. For Sixth Form groups studying English workshops are organised to study Wordsworth in detail, looking for example at various versions of the Prelude. The two long-term poets in residence offer sessions with children, sometimes from special needs schools. All of this is done within a very small house where the pressure from visitors, especially in the summer, is intense. The Trust also offers a Wordsworth Summer conference, a Winter School and literary residential courses, as well as annual summer readings and a weekend book festival.
Part of the vitality of Dove Cottage comes from the volunteer scheme. Unusually, it is targeted at the young. Volunteers, who tend to be at the beginning of their careers, spend between six and twelve months here, occupied in a wide range of duties from working in the shop to giving tours of the Cottage. They are able to gain a qualification in return for their work, since their experience contributes towards an NVQ4 in the NVQ Training Scheme.
The aim of the Trust is to make heritage live ‘and to link it with the endeavours of today’s authors’. They are succeeding. GW
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