LITERARY COCKERMOUTH

Wednesday 04/11/2009. I'ts been raining non-stop in Keswick since the weekend so it seems like a good day to bus up to Cockermouth and spend a couple of hours looking round William Wordsworth's birthplace, now a National Trust Property. This is something I have wanted to do for quite a while as it should give me an opportunity to get some good photographs to post to my "Literary Britain" group on Flickr. Alas it was not to be as the property closes for the winter and I have missed the deadline by four days! Never mind the town of Cockermouth has quite a lot to offer by way of literary connections and I can keep myself occupied. On the Wordsworth front I photographed the drinking fountain on the junction of Main Street and Sullart Street which is dedicated to the memory of William and Dorothy Wordsworth's childhood years in Cockermouth, as this is immediately adjacent to a bust on a plinth of William Wordsworth donated to the town by it's local Round Table in 1986, it would have been churlish not to have photographed that too!

Next I pictured the two Main Street pubs with literary connections, The Wordsworth and the Fletcher Christian Tavern (see picture). Fletcher Christian led the infamous "Mutiny on the Bounty" was a Cockermouth lad who went to the same infant school with William Wordsworth. Many books have been written on this act of trechery on the high seas so I'll not repeat the story here suffice to say they all came to a sticky end. Another less well known literary connection with the town is the Scottish novelist, poet, travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - born in the year of Wordsworth's death- to 1894). Stevenson stayed at least one night in the town and wrote about his time here in one of his tavel essays. He made reference to Wilson's Hat Factory and I will be coming back to find and photograph it's remaining ruin on the outskirts of the town. A suitable diversion for another wet day in Cockermouth perhaps!