Qualla: Keswick

Keswick: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. Six months after William and Dorothy Wordsworth moved into Dove Cottage at Grasmere in late 1799, Samuel Taylor Coleridge could not stand being twelve miles away. He leased a house called Greta Hall in Keswick and moved his family in. Three years later his brother-in-law Robert Southey joined him there. The Wordsworths walked over the fells to visit. So did Charles and Mary Lamb. So did Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. For about a decade Greta Hall held an extraordinary share of the literary energy of Romantic England, and Keswick became, almost by accident, a town that the rest of the country wanted to visit.

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Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Keswick: Greta Hall and the Lake Poets

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coleridge moved in around the middle of 1800. Southey arrived in 1803 - the marriage of his sister to Coleridge had made them brothers-in-law - and stayed for forty years. After Coleridge left in 1804 (his life had become difficult; his opium use had become much worse), Greta Hal...

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Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Keswick: The Pencil Town

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Craven, CC BY-SA 2.0. Long before the poets arrived, Keswick had quietly become the pencil capital of the world. The graphite mined from Borrowdale - a unique deposit of pure solid carbon, found nowhere else on Earth - was brought down to Keswick to be sawn into sticks and inserted into wooden cases. ...

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Image: Stephen Craven | CC BY-SA 2.0

Keswick: Sir John Bankes and the Vegan

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mick Knapton at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The town's local history before and after the Lake Poets is full of figures who do not quite fit any one frame. Sir John Bankes was born at Castlerigg near Keswick in 1589 and rose to become Charles I's Attorney General and Chief Justice. He was a leading Royalist in the English ...

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Image: Mick Knapton at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Keswick: Walpole and the Herries

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Stewart, CC BY-SA 2.0. Of the literary figures who came after the Lake Poets, the novelist Hugh Walpole was the one most fully claimed by Keswick. He moved into a house called Brackenburn in 1924, set on the wooded slope above Derwentwater, between Keswick and Grange. He lived there until his death in ...

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Image: Alan Stewart | CC BY-SA 2.0

Keswick: A Working Market Town

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim riley, CC BY-SA 3.0. Keswick is a market town, not a museum. It has been since the Middle Ages, and the Moot Hall - the oddly-shaped market building at the centre of the square - has been the focus of town life since at least the 17th century. The Keswick Music Society has presented classical concert...

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Image: Tim riley | CC BY-SA 3.0