On this day 199 years ago, Dorothy Wordsworth walked to Portinscale, west of Keswick, and "lay upon the turf and saw into the Vale of Newlands". She tells in her journals how she looked up to Borrowdale and down to Keswick and described what she saw as a "soft venetian view". Last weekend we saw what she saw but were still puzzling over how she could compare a lonely Lake District valley with Venice when, having walked south from the hamlet of Braithwaite, we met the black plastic bucket.
We had sniffed disinfectant in the crisp morning air and then came across a soggy, cleansing mat on the road; next to it sat the bucket. Two shivering volunteer national park wardens asked us to dip our boots. As we did, we glanced across to the adjacent field where a contented ewe was nuzzling her new-born triplets. We tried not to think how much longer she and her lambs would have in this world and strode off on a tarmac walk, which is just about the only walk you can do in the Lake District at present. (But don't try walking over the Hardknott and Wrynose passes: they are closed.)
If you have to walk on roads, the lane that ambles down to Stoneycroft and Rigg Beck and back through Little Town and Swinside makes a satisfying six-mile circuit if you can hide your eyes from the keep out signs on every stile and from the tracks that lead invitingly up to Causey Pike and the wild hinterland of the fells.
On the way out there was Catbells to the east and just a glimpse of Derwent Water; ahead lay High Crags and beyond that, Great Gable. A cautious sun in a big sky made the prospect more Turner than Venice. We turned east by a purple house that looked like a reject from Psycho and eventually headed north, gazing towards Skiddaw and Blencathra while wondering what to do about the errant Herdwick sheep that trotted resolutely along the road in front of us.
So the Lake District is open and anyone involved in the tourism business should be able to offer the kind of warm welcome we received at the Lairbeck Hotel in Keswick, which we had plucked more or less at random from a website: a large, comfortable double room for £31.50, as many mint imperials as you can swallow and the chance of a game of Scrabble with the owners in a bar warmed by a roaring fire.
We had made our way to Keswick from Windermere, dropping off first at the Steamboat Museum, a superb collection of varnished teak launches from the age of elegance, a century ago, when owners of grand lakeside homes vied with each other to show off the quality of their craft to ladies with parasols. We were torn between Branksome (the apotheosis of Victorian style) and Otto (built for speed), but neither was plying the lake (trips should start at Easter), so we took to the water on a cruise boat from Waterhead near Ambleside.
Miss Cumbria II, did not, like the boat the young Wordsworth rowed, go "heaving through the water like a swan", but it returned us to Ambleside in time for a visit to Dove Cottage, up the road in Grasmere, the poet's home with Dorothy (and sundry other friends and relations, including Coleridge and De Quincey, both high as kites on laudanum) from 1799 to 1808.
Foot and mouth has closed the garden that William and Dorothy made (and into which Walter Scott once did a bunk through an open window), but the cottage still exercises its strange, intense charm, especially when a fire blazes in the kitchen hearth and a vase of daffodils rests on a table by the window. There were just half a dozen people on our tour of the nine rooms, but that left both scope for romantic daydreams about the nature of genius and time to admire some of the cottage's magnificent floorboards. The ceiling in Dorothy's bedroom leaked, by the way.
The nearby museum, with bare walls of local stone, was pretty empty, too, but that meant there were no queues for the headphones to hear readings of Upon Westminster Bridge and Tintern Abbey. It was enough to turn the sensitive visitor into what Wordsworth would have called a living soul. And there was a cheap, groupy kind of thrill in seeing the skates on which the poet could have glided across Esthwaite Lake in a famous passage in The Prelude.
We met Wordsworth again at Rheged, near Penrith, one of Cumbria's newest tourist attractions where the county's "history, mystery and magic" are celebrated in Europe's largest earth-covered building. There are shops (everything Cumbrian), crafts, cafés and play areas for children. But at Rheged's heart is a cinema with a huge screen on which is shown a film (narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, no less) that dabbles in Celtic and Arthurian whimsy while telling the tale of an American lad who heads east to find his Cumbrian roots.
Wordsworth and Dorothy make a slightly embarrassed arm-in-arm appearance because the lad turns out to be a descendant of the errant son of Michael, the hero of Wordsworth's long poem about a peasant shepherd and his incomplete pen for sheep (which may have had foot and mouth but it didn't seem to matter much in those days).
Our diversion was a pint of Jennings bitter, excellent sausage and mash and a pile of fresh veg at the George in Keswick followed by Twelfth Night at the Theatre By The Lake, the town's loveable and successful theatre on the shores of Derwent Water. The production was more Ibiza than Ilyria, with much of the action taking place in Olivia's bar. There were no references to sheep (thank God they were not doing A Winter's Tale) and not a lot of depth-plumbing. But a full house enjoyed every minute, glad for a moment to forget a crisis that had prompted an angry farmer to erect on the outskirts of the town a sign reading, in blood-red paint, "Drop dead Blair."
The volunteer warden who had watched us dip our boots in the bucket near Braithwaite had commented gloomily: "It [foot and mouth] is in the Duddon Valley now." Wordsworth loved the Duddon Valley and celebrated it in 34 sonnets:
Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish.
By the time you read this, a Duddon flock of Herdwicks, the sheep Beatrix Potter loved, will have been slaughtered amid fears for the future ecology of the Lake District. And in one of Rheged's shops you can buy Backpacks and Blisters "the Lakeland walking game for the armchair rambler", which could prove a useful diversion until current restrictions are lifted.
* Lairbeck Hotel, Vicarage Hill, Keswick (017687 73373), B&B £31.50 (£38.50 high season). Special deals for three-, four- and seven-night packages.
* Windermere Steamboat Museum, Windermere, 10am to 5pm daily, tel: 015394 45565.
* Windermere Lake Cruises, departures from Lakeside, Bowness and Ambleside, tel: 015394 43360.
* Dove Cottage, 9.30am to 5.30pm daily, tel: 015394 35544.
* Theatre By The Lake, Lakeside, Keswick, tel: 017687 74411.
* Rheged, Redhills, Penrith, 10am to 6pm daily, tel: 01768 868000.
Check points
* The Lake District National Park has an information pack listing local attractions, lane-based walks and activities that can still be enjoyed in the area. It can be obtained by sending an SAE to the Lake District Visitor Centre, Brockhole, Windermere, Cumbria LA23 1LJ.
* Devon: 0870 6085531; www. devon4allseasons.co.uk; rest of the West Country, www.westcountrynow.com
* English Tourism Council: 0870 2415659.
* Wales Tourist Board: 08080 1000000, www.visitwales.com
* Scottish Tourist Board: 0131-332 2433, www.visitscotland.com
* Northern Ireland: 02890 524279/ 524590, www.discovernorthernireland.com
* Republic of Ireland: www.irelandtravel.co.uk
