Dove Cottage. Dove Cottage is a house on the edge of Grasmere in the Lake District of England. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of plain living, but high thinking. During this period, William wrote much of the poetry for which he is remembered today, including his Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Ode to Duty, My Heart Leaps Up and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, together with parts of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude. William Wordsworth married his wife Mary in 1802, and she and her sister joined the Wordsworths at Dove Cottage. The family quickly expanded, with the arrival of three children in four years, and the Wordsworths left Dove Cottage in 1808 to seek larger lodgings. The cottage was then occupied by Thomas De Quincey for a number of years, before being let to a succession of tenants. The cottage was acquired by the Wordsworth Trust in 1890 and opened to the public as a writer's home museum in 1891. The house is a Grade 1 listed building, and remains largely unchanged from Wordsworth's day. It receives approximately 70,000 visitors a year. Dove Cottage was built in the early 17th century, beside the main road from Ambleside in the south to Keswick in the north. It was probably purpose-built as a public house, and it is first recorded as the Dove and Olive, an inn included in a list of public houses in Westmoreland in 1617. It remained a public house, sometimes called the Dove and Olive Branch, until it closed in 1793. The history of the cottage is referred to in William's 1806 poem, The Waggoner, in which the protagonist passes by Where once the Dove and Olive-bough offered a greeting of good ale to all who entered Grasmere Vale. The building is constructed from local stone, with limewashed walls and a slate roof. There are four rooms downstairs, and another four upstairs. The ground floor rooms retain the oak panels and slate floors often found in well-built Lakeland houses of the period, and appropriate to their original function as drinking rooms in a public house. The fireplaces were altered in the 1790s to burn coal rather than the traditional Lakeland peat. William Wordsworth had been born in Cockermouth in Cumberland in 1770, and knew the Lake District well from his childhood. He moved away to study at the University of Cambridge in 1787, and then travelled in Britain and Europe for 12 years. William first encountered Dove Cottage when on a walking tour of the Lake District with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1799. William had been close to his sister Dorothy in their childhood, but they had spent many years apart. Although they had lived together in Somerset in 1797 and in Germany in 1798, William wanted to find a permanent home for them together. Dove Cottage was empty and available for rent, and they took up residence on 20 December that year, paying E 5 a year to John Benson of Grasmere. On the ground floor, the main reception room was the houseplace or kitchen-parlour, by the main door, which contains a cooking range and window seat, used for the main daily meal. A smaller room next to the houseplace was used by the Wordsworths as Dorothy's bedroom. A separate kitchen was used for the more arduous task of the domestic routine, with the fourth room being a small buttery, used as a larder. The Wordsworths employed a neighbour, Molly Fisher, as a maid to do their washing and cooking. Upstairs, the room over the houseplace was William's study, with views over meadows to the lake, used by William for his composition and as a second parlour for light meals and entertaining. The three other rooms were used as bedrooms, with the small room over the buttery being used later as a nursery for William and Mary's children. The walls of the small bedroom were covered with newspapers in 1800 as an attempt at insulation. There was no running water inside the house, and the toilet was also outside in the garden. William and Dorothy took particular pleasure in the garden and orchard behind the house, their little nook of mountain-ground, which was deliberately arranged in an informal wild state. William became a key member of a group of Romantic poets in the Lake District, later known as the Lake Poets. Robert Southey lived in Greta Hall in nearby Keswick. Southey and Coleridge were married to sisters, Sarah and Edith Fricker, and Coleridge himself moved his family to Keswick in 1800. Both Coleridge and Southey became a frequent visitors to Dove Cottage, but Coleridge's marriage was unhappy, and he departed Keswick in 1804. Nevertheless, he returned to visit the Wordsworths in Grasmere from time to time.