grasmere

The annual parade for the Rushbearing festival at Grasmere, an ancient tradition where the villagers gather the rushes from around the lake or river, make ornaments out of them, and carry them in a procession to St. Oswald’s chapel.Last summer, while living in the green and beautiful valley of Grasmere, I felt like I had stepped into the past. I first arrived to this small village in northern England for a summer internship and saw more nature untouched by man or time than I thought possible. In addition to its vibrant color and overabundance of life, everything about Grasmere and the entire Lake District exuded a sense of timelessness that the Romantic poet William Wordsworth tried to capture in his poems. Dove Cottage, the little house he lived in for a time, was still standing, allowing visitors to come and explore life in early eighteenth-century England. Even the church he’s buried at, St. Oswald’s, still holds regular Sunday services. All the while, the forests, streams, trees, ferns, and fells surrounding the little village have an ancient feel to them that seemed entirely undisturbed. The past and the present seemed intertwined: I could have just as easily been visiting that spot more than two hundred years ago and would have seen Wordsworth walking by, muttering his poetry under his breath.