Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Wordsworth, Taffy Thomas, and sheepdogs

Written 8 October 2025

The Swan is staffed largely by teeny-boppers. Well, not really; they're mostly in their late teens, but Stefano explained that through some scheme that lets husinesses hire young people in a certain age range at less than minimum wage, so long as they are given job training, the hotel can keep its staffing costs low. So there were a few glitches with maintenance and service (cobwebs on the ceiling, annoyingly made beds, soap pumps that didn't work), but on the whole they did a good job.

We were at first puzzled until we realized that the local way to say "May I help you?" is "You okay there?" Not just the young people; everybody used it.

We had a more leisurely start this morning. I mostly stuck with the pastries from the buffet, but they had blood sausage on the menu, so I ordered a side of that. Disappointing. It had no more flavor that the pretty tasteless version I can get at Publix in Tallahassee—nothing like the yummy stuff my Scottish grandmother used to order through her butcher or that I got in Madrid during the 2005 ASLO meetings.

Also having breakfast while we were there was a party of half a dozen very large people who turned out to be from Panama City, FL. They were making a shopping list and sending one of their group out for Advil and a watch battery. Meanwhile fighter jets screamed overhead, presumably from a nearby airbase (I wonder if that's what the Panama City people were there a propos of).

At the left here is the view from my window of the hotel's green roof, mostly Sedum, the flowers most gone by.

And at the right, a framed collection of Hairy Fairy brand fishing flies that hung on the wall near the dining room. It's labeled in English and German, or maybe Dutch ("Fish with confidence"/"Hengel met vertroue"), and organized into many categories—for example, the "Taddy" is a "Special Nymph," but the "Black and peacock spider" is a "Wet Fuzzy-Wuzzy."

At the appointed hour, it was into the buses and off along the shore of Lake Windermere to the town of Grasmere (on the shores of Lake Grasmere) to visit Dove Cottage, the home of William Wordsworth (you know—I wandered lonely as a cloud, was accosted by a horde of dancing daffodils . . .) and his sister Dorothy from 1799 to 1808.

Written 9 October 2025

At the left here is the view through the bus windshield (we had the front-row seats this time) before we even moved—the hotel is right on the water.

At the right is a view of the famous Lake Windermere, the largest in the lake district, which we got to cruise on later in the day.

Along the way, I spotted the first sheep with obvious ownership markings—patterns of red blotches. I remember reading in some famous work of literature, which I was little interested in at the time, about the "reddleman," an itinerant marker of sheep.

The lake shore was lined with large and beautiful houses, downhill from the road, between it and the lakeshore. Many also had gorgeous gardens. A for-sale sign revealed that you could have one of them, a four-bedroom model, for 2.5 million pounds. Near the far end of the lake we saw fewer houses and more rental condos and rental cottages. We passed a huge parking lot just for empty boat trailers, as well as a marina dense with small pleasurecraft, next to a motor home park.

I saw a few waterfowl, maybe ducks, maybe coots, and a few white ducks in the fields among the sheep. I even saw black sheep with white heads! These may be the Herdwicks, of which more below.

The Wordsworth complex includes a museum, a little film about life in the cottage, and the cottage itself, which still has some of the original furnishings. It also has a lovely, if treacherously steep, garden. For once, we entered through the gift shop, and the first thing that caught my eye was this basket of "dibbers," which I've always seen called "dibbles" (any linguist will tell you that l's and r's are pretty much interchangeable), hand planting tools. The contents of the museum were pretty word-intensive—I took lots of photos of the info panels, for later more careful reading, but they don't really lend themselves to display here.

It did include this intriguing hand printing press, though.

We passed from the museum to the cottage itself (the white building in the left-hand photo) down this switchbacked path lined with stone walls that were topped with this unusual diagonal pattern of stones. I don't thing these walls were there in Wordsworth's day.

The shoulder you can see at the left edge of the photo is that of our docent, who stopped us here to talk about the history of the cottage. While she stood there, a small bird flew in to perch on a twig right over her head—I was able to whip out my binoculars and see that it was a European robin! (Later, as we walked to lunch, I opened the Merlin app on my phone, which confirmed that all the bird song we were hearing was that of the European robin. I loaded Merlin's "British Isles module" before we left home.)

The house was 100 years old before the Wordsworths arrived. It was originally an ale house, and apparently ale houses were always painted white. As an ale house, it was called the Dove and Olive (or maybe Olive Bough), which is why it was known as Dove Cottage. The gray buildings were built after the Wordsworth moved away, to house the workers building a nearby dam.

Written 10 October 2025

The left-hand photo shows part of the interior. I think this is the table where Dorothy wrote her very detailed diary. William read it regularly, and even years later, would sometimes write poems about incidents recorded there. She was also a prolific writer, and the two of them were in many ways literary collaborators. Both of them were energetic walkers, together and separately. Many of Williams poems are about the natural world around him on his long hikes. Dorothy defied the conventions of her time by going out and walking for miles in the countryside, gasp, unaccompanied!

Here's another view of the interior. The docent kept referring to the room where we entered as the "kitchen," but from the descriptions, it seemed more like the family room; it was where William did his writing. This space at the back of the house was clearly where food preparation took place.

The garden out back was frightenly steep, and the switchbacks from each level to the next were rocky, mossy, and (on this damp day) very slippery. It was mostly ornamental but a few fruit trees lined the back boundary. The plants, both in the back garden and on the path between the museum and the cottage, seemed to have been chosen to favor red berries. I got photos of European cranberry (not related to ours and not edible), rockspray cotoneaster, red currants, and others.

William and Dorothy had an income of about 70 pounds/year, the average being about 10. The house cost them 5 pounds/year. They hired a couple called the Fishers helped with the house and garden. They had a pony, but they swapped it out for a cow, for the dairy products. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a good friend and frequent visitor.

During their time at Dove Cottage, William took a wife, Mary Hutchinson (his father made him a financial gift on that occasion), and they had three children. So six people were living in the very small cottage. William wrote at a wooden table while Dorothy and Mary cooked and did laundry around him and small children played at his feet. With the birth of the third child, they decided they really needed a bigger place, so the whole household left Dove Cottage and moved to a different house less than a mile away. Still the years at Dove Cottage are those in which he produced the majority of his more famous works.

Unfortunately, behind the museum, just where we left the gardens to go on to our lunch venue, we came upon a large cluster of garish, oversize, artificial daffodils. Now who in the world thought that was a good idea?!

We had some free time to look at more of the museum or to explore Grasmere before lunch, but Stefano warned us not to join the queue at Sarah Nelson Grasmere Gingerbread shop, because that what we were having for dessert after lunch.

It seems Sarah Nelson was a school teacher, and to get the kids to learn the alphabet, she baked gingerbread in the shape of letters. Any kid who could spell his name and name the letters got to eat them (I'm sure Ann resented Genevieve and Catherine for their larger servings). Stefano says the gingerbread is even better with Cumbrian rum butter on top. That's a mixture of butter, brown sugar, rum, and nutmeg.

David and I went straight to the lunch restaurant, where he could sit and rest his foot while I explored the large garden center across the street. It was run by a co-op of farms, and each farm had a large information panel in the garden. The two especially caught my eye.

Cannerheugh Farm emphasizes growing particularly good forage—tall grasses, high diversity, and native plants like cocksfoot, which "mine minerals from deep below; the cows bloody love it!" Susan's Farm hosts thousands of school children "for a taste of farm life," and more recently "has become a refuge and lifeline for some of the county's most vulnerable young people."

We had lunch at Tweedie's bar and lodge, the only locally owned restaurant remaining in Grasmere (the others have all been bought by chains)—curried cauliflower soup, shepherd's pie, ratatouille, and pesto pasta salad.

For dessert, we had the famous local gingerbread (did I write "shortbread" on the postcard version?). It was moist and crumbly, quite gingery, sort of a cross between cake and a cookie.

After lunch, we were entertained by, are you ready?, the Story-teller Laureate of Great Britain, Taffy Thomas, MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). He's Welsh, and his first name is Dafydd (pronounced Dah-vidth, Welsh for David). Taffy is short for that. He was originally a fire-eater and played other roles in circuses and carnivals, but at age 36, just a year after he was married, he suffered a major stroke and reinvented himself as a story teller. Telling stories was his self-imposed speech therapy as he learned to speak again. He credits his wife with much of his success.

He also told us about Old Tweedie, for whom the resturant is named. His real name was Mickey Moscrop, and he was a Scotsman who traveled annually from 1922 to 1976 to Grasmere to sell high-quality tweed cloth. He then bought up local wool to take back to Scotland from which more tweed was made.

The local sheep is the Herdwick, brought originally by the Vikings. They are born black, fading in adulthood to brown or salt-and-pepper, with white faces. Beatrix Potter brought them to this region; she had 14 farms and she left them to the National Trust with the proviso they keep only Herdwicks.

He told us, a number of other stories, including the one that won him 3rd place in the International Liar's Competition held by the Adirondack Liar's Club (the story of how he acquired a particularly nice flat cap). Finally he modeled his famous coat. When he received his MBE, he was told he'd need a tailcoat, but somebody (I didn't catch who) felt that a tale coat would be more appropriate and commissioned the magnificant garment shown at the right. It's elaborately appliquéed and embroidered with images from his hundreds of tales, then intricately quilted. I didn't realize until his wife had to help him put it on how little use he still has of his left arm.

He ended by telling us that the listeners were the most important part of story telling, reminding us that "if talking were more important than listening, we'd have two mouths and one ear," and by presenting each couple with a copy of his book of tales. Charming guy.

From Tweedie's, our bus took us back to a landing on Lake Windermere, where we would catch a tour boat (mostly empty because it was raining by then) back down to the lower end of the lake. We had free time before the boat sailed, so most of our group went shopping in a cluster of shops near the landing, but David and I just ducked into the snack bar for a hot chocolate, sharing our table with a vacationing British couple and their dog, with whom David instantly made friends.

From the boat, we were able to see the fronts of some of the huge houses we'd seen from the other side in the bus. The tour narration told us that the lake is 67 m deep at the lowest point and is split into two halves by a row of islands. Only one island, just opposite where we got the boat, is inhabited. It was renamed Bella island for the inhabitant's wife, but has become Bell island. A car ferry called the Mallard crosses the lake and saves a 14-mile trip around the end. Ferries have been operated here for hundreds of years; it's ony the most recent. Lake Windermere is pretty big, about 16 square miles, but it's not as large as Maggiore, Zurich, or Annecy. We saw groups of swans along the shore of the lake. From the top of the highest mountain on the lake (I didn't catch its name), you get an amazing view, all the way to Blackpool to the south and all the way past the top of the lake north.

At the end of the cruise, we caught an antique steam train that took us back to within a five-minute walk to our hotel. The connection with the train was so tight that I didn't get a photo of the outside of it, but once we were in our car (reserved just for our group by Tauck), I got this shot of the interior—that's not David but another member of our group.

Back at the Swan, we scattered to our rooms for about an hour before reconvening outdoors for a "tour director's surprise," which turned out to be a demonstration of working sheep dogs! In this case, the classic black and white border collies. Note the blue kiddie wading pool behind the shepherd, which I assumed was there for the dogs or the sheep to drink from.

The neatly fenced off square area where the demonstration took place is the hotels helipad. Apparently only once has a helicopter appeared, expecting to land, during the demonstration. The shepherd and his wife had brought seven sheep and four dogs with them. The sheep were of the Evans breed, called "badger-faced" because of the markings on their heads. They were white but with black throats and underbellies!

The first dog to work was a well-trained 7-year-old; I didn't catch her name. That's her in the right-hand photo. The shepherd directed her with voice commands or equivalent whistle notes to group them sheep, scatter them, take them here or there, cut one out from the herd, herded them into a pen, etc. Amazing to watch.

Next up was her youngest daughter, Maddie, who's just over two years old. Not as accomplished as her mother but still very good. Her training is a little behind, because she was held back for a year after a snake bite. Her brother Jagger is farther along and is very promising; he recently made the "reserve group" in some sort of competition. The shepherd emphasized that the dogs must do all their herding gently, without unduly alarming the sheep. If the sheep get freaked out, then the person who then has to shear them, check them for ticks, or whatever gets kicked or bitten. He also explained some of the whistles. For example, a sharp blast means stop, lie down, or stand. An upward note means "go around to the right."

As soon as the three had finished their demonstration, the shepherd gave some subtle "at ease" command, and the senior dog made a bee-line for the kiddie wading pool, leaped in, and commenced wallowing in delight. Only when she yielded the place did the other dogs get their turns. This seems to be their reward for a task well demonstrated.

The last dog to work was a six-week-old puppy who had received no training whatever. But on instinct alone, bred in over generations, he clearly was of the very strong opinion that those sheep should be kept in a tight group and moved somewhere. Without any direction, he ran over, rounded them up, pushed them into a corner of the enclosure and stood there ensuring they didn't try to get away. When the time comes to begin his training, the shepherd will watch him closely as he interacts with the sheep. When the dog goes around to the right, he will do the upward note (and the equivalent voice command); when he stops, the sharp blast. Very soon, the dog will learn the association and start following the whistles and commands. Amazing.

The grand finale was when the shepherd picked up the puppy and handed him over the fence to David, who got comprehensively licked in the face while the rest of the group clustered around to pet him and feel how soft his fur was. I was really, really sorry my camera battery had just given out.

After I dashed back to the room to change my camera battery, we all assembled for a special pub dinner at the hotel's restaurant. Stefano conducted a Tauck trivia quiz (our team won, of course, mostly thanks to a lady in our group who really knew her popular culture).

The first course was served on a board—a bowl of salad, strips of focaccia, wedges of pita, hummus, fried cheese sticks, and fried chicken tenders with Asian sweet chile sauce. At the right is my selection.

After the starters, we were entertained with traditional music by a trio playing two fiddles and a guitar. Partway through, one of them laid aside her fiddle and took up a bagpipe of the style used locally. It differed from the highland bagpipe in being smaller, having the three drones bound together, and being generally less ornate. David and I thought it was all great and were surprised later to hear some of our group grumbling that it was boring music and went on too long!

After the music came our main courses. From the four choices offered, David opted for fish and chips with mushy peas.

I chose beef and ale pie made with both local beef and local ale.

A tablemate got the roasted chicken. I don't think anyone went for the vegetarian asparagus risotto.

A very frequent vegetable offering was what we call broccolini, but which was usually called "tender-stem broccoli" on British menus. Ironically, the stems were invariably very tough.

The dessert choices were sticky toffee pudding with soft custard (shown here at the left), strawberry Pavlova sundae with vanilla whipped cream (my choice), and lemon posset, which I don't think anyone chose.

The strawberry dessert was outstanding.