Valid: *Please see website for current opening times*
More information: 20% off admission for up to 4 people. MyCumbria Card must be presented on entry.
Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School from age 8 to 17. The school is now a museum and looks much as it did in Wordsworth’s day. A curator is available to show visitors around and tours are held hourly. Visitors can see the main school room, which still contains the wooden benches the boys sat on (and carved with their pocket knives).
The school was started in 1585 to educate the sons of Protestant families after the Reformation. It taught Latin and Greek grammar, arithmetic, geometry, sciences, modern history and the classics with the aim of preparing boys for entrance to Cambridge. Lessons were in Latin and Greek and attendance at the church, next to the school, was compulsory. Boys boarded with local families in and around Hawkshead. Wordsworth and his brothers stayed in Colthouse, about half a mile away along the shore of Esthwaite Water. Wordsworth liked to walk around the lake and roam the fields before and after school, and it is easy to imagine that today as both the museum and the village of Hawkshead look much as they did in Wordsworth’s day.