Ullswater, the second-largest lake in England’s Lake District after Windermere, is widely credited as the setting that inspired William Wordsworth’s 1804 poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, written after the poet and his sister Dorothy encountered a dense stretch of wild daffodils along the lake’s shore near Glencoyne Bay in 1802, an experience Dorothy recorded in her own journal in considerable detail before her brother transformed it into one of the most widely recognised poems in the English language. The daffodils Wordsworth described still bloom along stretches of the lakeshore each spring, drawing visitors specifically to see the scene that inspired the poem more than two centuries later.
Ullswater’s distinctive shape, a long, winding, glacially carved valley with several visible bends, means the lake is often described as resembling a series of separate lakes joined together, a quality that gives it a genuinely different character from the more open expanse of Windermere.
A Lake Still Crossed by Victorian Steamers
The Ullswater Steamers, a fleet of vessels operating on the lake since 1859, remain in regular service today, one of the oldest working passenger boat services in the world, carrying walkers and visitors between villages along the lake’s shore much as they did in the Victorian era. Aira Force, a dramatic 20-metre waterfall feeding into Ullswater, was a popular subject for Romantic-era poets and painters beyond Wordsworth alone, its accessible, picturesque setting drawing visitors specifically to view the falls since the 18th century.
Ullswater sits partly within the boundary of the historic county of Cumberland, now part of Cumbria, its surrounding fells offering some of the more dramatic, less crowded walking routes in the wider Lake District National Park.
Painting Still Water Beneath Lake District Fells
Ullswater’s winding, glacially carved shoreline beneath surrounding fells gives a watercolourist soft, layered colour and genuine stillness to work with. We’ve captured that character in our own Ullswater Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of England for a wall at home.
Home to daffodils that once stopped a poet in his tracks, Ullswater remains a lake whose quiet shoreline has shaped more of English literature than its size might suggest.