Dorothy Wordsworth Walks

An app to guide you around Dorothy’s favourite places in Grasmere and Rydal

Use this free, location-based app as a companion for your walks around Grasmere and Rydal. The app will notify you when you reach a place linked with Dorothy’s writing. Each extract is available as both text and audio.

When Dorothy Wordsworth moved to Dove Cottage in 1799 walking, for a respectable middle-class woman, was an activity considered unseemly at best and dangerous at worst. Dorothy’s aunt had tried to dissuade her from ‘rambling about the country on foot’, to which Dorothy firmly replied: ‘I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me’.

This app offers Dorothy as a companion for your walks and brings her words back to life in the places she was writing. These extracts from the journals and poetry Dorothy wrote here will introduce you to a version of Grasmere and Rydal that is new to you. Her brother William wrote that Dorothy helped him see the everyday things around him in a new way, and we hope that she does the same for you.

Although Dorothy valued her walks alone, walking was, above all, a social activity for her. We think she’d have been delighted to have your company as she shows you around her best-loved places.

Suggested walking routes

This location-based app will notify you when you reach somewhere with an entry. With this in mind we have designed three suggested walking routes for you to explore at your leisure. If you walk all three routes you will be able to stop and enjoy each entry in the app, but you can access all the content from wherever in the world you are!

Time: 2.5 hours
Distance: 9km
Start and end at Wordsworth Grasmere

View on Google Maps

Time: 1 hour
Distance: 4km
Start and end: Emma’s Dell, Grasmere

View on Google Maps

Time: 1 hour
Distance: 4km
Start: Sam Read’s Bookshop, Grasmere
End: Wordsworth Grasmere

View on Google Maps

App instructions

1

Using Google Play or the App Store, search for ‘Dorothy Wordsworth Walks’, and download the app.
2

When the app opens, you may need to navigate to 'Dorothy Wordsworth Walks' in the list of featured experiences first. It will ask you what permissions you’ll grant for location data. Select ‘Allow while using’ and/or ‘Always Allow’ to use the app around Grasmere and Rydal; this option will mean your phone automatically notifies you when you pass a point of interest. (You can turn this option off later, in your settings). If you’re using the app from elsewhere, you do not need to grant it access to your location.
3

If you have location services enabled, your phone will notify you when you pass somewhere with media – text and audio – attached to it. You can access these again – either on location in the Lake District or wherever you are – by selecting the markers on the map.
4

To access a list of all the content, select the map icon in the bottom right of the screen, and select ‘all places’.
5

The app contains three suggested routes, indicated by coloured lines on the map. Tap on a line for information about where it will take you.

FAQs

Q: What location services settings should I use?
A: Always allow, which you can change after you’ve finished using it – your phone will notify you periodically about apps using your location data.

Q: How do I get back to the map?
A: Use the arrow at the top.

Q: Do you need to be connected to the internet?
A: Not if you download the data, otherwise leaving 3G enabled is good.

Q: Do I need to have notifications enabled?
A: Yes, if you want the content to pop up automatically. You can manually select points on the map if you’d rather not.

Q: Do you have to start from a particular point?
A: No, not at all.

About Grasmere WI

Since its foundation in 1919, Grasmere WI has been at the heart of village life. With a membership of around 70, it is a lively, thriving group. GWI has strong links with Wordsworth Grasmere. Having helped stage the exhibition celebrating Dorothy Wordsworth’s 250th birthday, GWI were very happy to voice Dorothy’s words on this App. Find out more at https://grasmerewi.wordpress.com/

Credits

Co-produced by Dr Joanna E. Taylor, with research assistance from Esme Moszynska, at the University of Manchester, and Wordsworth Grasmere. Audio recorded with Grasmere WI.

Images: Drawing of Dorothy Wordsworth by Alex Jakob-Whitworth; Photograph of book and lakeshore by Joanna E. Taylor; A page from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal, showing her entry for 18 March 1802; Lines from ‘Grasmere – A Fragment’ by Dorothy Wordsworth, written in her hand