By the time the Wordsworths reached Rydal Mount in 1813, they had already tried three other houses in eight years. Dove Cottage in Grasmere, from 1799 to 1808, had been beloved but too small for a family that kept expanding. Allan Bank, also in Grasmere - which William had publicly condemned as an eyesore when it was first built - sheltered them for two years. The Old Rectory in the centre of Grasmere came next, briefly. Rydal Mount was a different kind of house: larger, better appointed, sitting on a hillside in the small village of Rydal, just outside Ambleside, with views down two valleys. William signed the lease in 1813. The Wordsworths would rent it for the next forty-six years.

William designed the layout of the gardens himself, and often said the grounds were his real office. The house had a proper writing room indoors; he preferred to be outside. The Writing Hut on the high side of the grounds - little more than a bench under a small roof - was where he composed for hours at a time, watching the light shift over the two lakes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he was still close to the Wordsworths, would walk over from his home in Keswick to visit. The two poets had been collaborators when both were poor and brilliant in their twenties; by the Rydal Mount years they were old friends with strained edges and a long shared history. The garden Wordsworth made was practical as well as picturesque. He landscaped paths so that you could walk for an hour without retracing your steps. The terraces still survive.

The Wordsworths had three daughters and three sons. Dora, born at Dove Cottage in 1804, married Edward Quillinan after a long campaign by her father against the match. She died of tuberculosis in 1847, aged forty-two, three years before her father. When she died, William and Mary bought the small field just below the house and planted it with daffodils as a memorial. Dora's Field belongs to the National Trust now, and every spring the daffodils still come up. William died at Rydal Mount on 23 April 1850, aged eighty. Mary lived on in the house, increasingly blind, until her death in 1859. Dorothy, who had been with them at Dove Cottage and through every subsequent move, had died at Rydal Mount in 1855 after a long decline. Three siblings, one husband, one wife, all under the same roof.

After Mary's death the family let the house go, and Rydal Mount drifted through other owners for over a century. Then in 1969, William's great-great-granddaughter Mary Henderson - née Wordsworth - bought it back. It has stayed in the Wordsworth family ever since. The house opened to the public in 1970 and is run as a writer's home museum, complete with the gardens William designed, the Writing Hut on the high side of the grounds, and rooms left close to how they were in his later years. Rydal Mount is a Grade I listed building. Compared with Dove Cottage's pilgrimage scale - 70,000 visitors a year - Rydal Mount feels quieter and more domestic. That is roughly what Wordsworth wanted it to be. A house that belonged to his family, looking out on lakes he had walked all his life.