It was the family home where William Wordsworth hosted Alfred, Lord Tennyson, lived as poet laureate and worked on his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude.
Now, after a long period of decline in visitor numbers, Rydal Mount and Gardens has been saved from descending into the “half-choked with willow flowers and weeds” state that Wordsworth described in his 1814 poem The Excursion – and will be preserved by a charity that will ensure it remains open to the public.
The Lake District site, near Ambleside, was the residence of the Romantic poet for 37 years until his death in 1850. Wordsworth lived there with his wife and children, as well as his sister and fellow writer, Dorothy.
The property had recently been placed on the market for £2.5m by Wordsworth’s descendants. The running of the literary museum had become unsustainable owing to rising operational costs and a fall in visitor numbers to fewer than 20,000 a year.
The house had last been bought in 1969 by Wordsworth’s great-great-granddaughter Mary Henderson and was opened to the public the next year. The museum once had 40,000 visitors a year.
Simon Armitage, the UK’s poet laureate, said he was delighted by the acquisition of “the iconic home of one of my heroes and forefathers as poet laureate, and that Rydal Mount will continue to be a place of creativity and inspiration”.
While living at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth revised The Prelude, his epic autobiographical poem, and his travel book, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes. The house contains a framed copy of Wordsworth’s letter to Queen Victoria in which he initially declined her offer to be poet laureate.
Other notable guests at the house include fellow Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, as well as the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Although Wordsworth only rented Rydal Mount, he designed the layout of the five-acre gardens and added his own “writing hut” to the grounds.
Michael McGregor, the director of the Wordsworth Trust, said: “Acquiring Rydal Mount gives us an opportunity to tell a much richer story about the lives and works of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The news of its sale came as a cautionary tale of how precarious the Wordsworths’ heritage in the Lake District has become.”
The Wordsworth Trust is also the custodian of Dove Cottage, the Wordsworths’ first Lake District home, which opened to the public in 1891. It looks after an archive of Wordsworth’s manuscripts and Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals.
After the cottage became too small for his growing family, Wordsworth lived in Allan Bank from 1808 to 1811, before moving to the much larger Rydal Mount in 1813.
Last year the actors Brian Cox and Miriam Margolyes joined a campaign to save the house as a site of literary heritage.
The previous owners of Rydal Mount, Christopher Andrew and Simon Bennie, said they had “worked hard to keep the house open” to the public, despite the drop in visitors since the Covid pandemic.
“Over the years we have had a very good relationship with the Wordsworth Trust and so it was with great relief that at the beginning of the sale process it became clear that Rydal Mount was likely to pass into their safe hands,” they said.
The house and grounds will remain closed to the public for the immediate future as maintenance work is carried out.
The Wordsworth Trust is largely funded by Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Garfield Weston Foundation, Westmorland and Furness council and Lancaster University.
