REIMAGINING WORDSWORTH

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With great sadness, Moorcroft cannot visit to the Lake District to celebrate Wordsworth's 250th Anniversary as planned. Nevertheless, it is our pleasure to bring the Lake District to you through imagery and the Applied Arts.

Wordsworth’s deep love for the “beauteous forms” of the natural world was established early. The Wordsworth children seem to have lived in a sort of rural paradise along the Derwent River, which ran past the terraced garden. Derwentwater, a limited edition of only 40 pieces, is an abstract expression of this beauty and created to cheer and calm the mind.

Bordered by woods and towering crags, Derwentwater is hailed as 'Queen of the Lakes', and is surrounded by some of the most magnificent scenery in the Lake District. The lake is the third largest of the Cumbrian lakes with four islands - Derwent, Lord's, Rampsholme and St. Herbert's.
Derwent Island and its house, were considered by Wordsworth to be a blot on the landscape as he was not an admirer of buildings which seemed alien to their environment. During one walk when he encountered a heap of rough stones near a deserted quarry which had been intended to build “a little dowe or pleasure house”, he wrote an inscription with a slate pencil on one of the stones, urging those with similar ambitions to:

“think again; and taught
By old Sir William and his quarry, leave
Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose;
There let the vernal glow-worm sun himself,
And let the red-breast hop from stone to stone.”

Emma Bossons has heeded Wordsworth’s words and no man-made buildings can be seen in her design of Derwentwater. Emma’s vase creates the sense of the lake far below you,, as seen from the viewpoint of Cats Bells, one of the surrounding fells that shield the lake from the elements. The linework has a stained glass feel to it, making it a most unusual piece, and one Wordsworth would have approved of as mother nature has been left untouched.