This week, the students on the London Program took a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon and the Lake District to visit Shakespeare’s birthplace and Wordsworth’s home. As we loaded into the big coach bus early on Thursday morning, we were all a little skeptical as to how the trip would go—we weren’t too sure what to expect.
Visiting Stratford-upon-Avon was an amazing experience; getting to walk through Shakespeare’s home was surreal, and the entire town was dedicated to his legacy and his plays. From the wedding boutique shop called “Shakespeare in Love” to the giant statue of the Bard himself with his famous protagonists, it was interesting to see a place so dedicated to one person’s memory. From there, we drove up to the Lake District, where we stayed in Ambleside for two days. The Lake District was unlike any other place I’ve ever been—every step of our six-hour long walk through the woods and along the lakes seemed like a scene on a postcard. With the leaves changing color and the calm, reflective surface of the water, it was clear to see how William Wordsworth wrote so much poetry about the magnificence of nature. We trekked along the beautiful winding roads and trails with our professors and tour guides, taking in the scenery and history of the District. As we walked from a town called Grasmere to the Rydal Waters and back, we were enchanted by the cute cottages and stately manors that dotted the trails.
Upon our return to Grasmere, we visited the graveyard of a local church, where Wordsworth and his family were buried. As we ambled back to Ambleside to get cleaned up for dinner, we thought our adventures in the Lake District were coming to an end, but my favorite part of the trip came the next day. We went back to Grasmere on Sunday to visit Dove Cottage, one of Wordsworth’s homes in Grasmere. After a tour of his cottage and the garden that he and his sister, Dorothy, tended to, the group got a private lecture from one of the researchers at the Wordsworth Trust. She told us about Wordsworth’s life in the Lake District, and about his colleagues and acquaintances in the area. The trust has many of Wordsworth’s first edition books, as well as his original manuscripts and books from his personal library.
My favorite part of the tour was getting to hold an anthology from Wordsworth’s own library, with notations from Samuel Taylor Coleridge about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Reading my favorite sonnet, marked with Coleridge’s critique in his own pen, in a book owned by William Wordsworth has definitely been one of the highlights of my trip.