Located within the Lake District National Park, Keswick owes much of its superb reputation to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his fellow Lake Poets, authors of the Lyrical Ballads collection. Long before welcoming the Tour de France’s riders, the town captivated artists and tourists alike, who were attracted both by its market, which dates back to the 13th century, and the surrounding natural wonders.
- First-time stage town
- Town in the county of Cumbria (England)
- Population: 4,300
- cumberland.gov.uk
Keswick and cycling
Situated in the Lake District National Park, Keswick owes much of its fine reputation to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his Lake Poets, authors of a collection of Lyrical Ballads. Before welcoming cyclists from the Tour de France, the town had long attracted artists and tourists, drawn as much by its market – whose history dates back to the 13th century – as by the natural wonders of the surrounding area.
Mark Donovan, who joined Team Visma I Lease a Bike in 2027, hails from the Lake District and Penrith, some 25 km from Keswick. There is no doubt that he knows the winding country lanes amongst the fields and lakes of Ullswater, Thirlmere and Derwentwater like the back of his hand.
Sights
The Lake District
The Lake District is an English national park situated in Cumbria. Covering 2,280 km² of lakes and mountains, it is England’s largest national park. It is home to England’s highest mountains, including Scafell Pike (978 m), its highest peak. The region, a haven for walkers, is known for having inspired the so-called Lake Poets, notably William Wordsworth.
The Lake District is a popular tourist destination offering a wide range of activities, particularly outdoor pursuits such as hiking, mountain biking and sailing (on Lake Windermere). A narrow-gauge railway, the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, is particularly popular with tourists, and there are pleasure boats, notably on Lake Ullswater. The area became a national park in 1951 and is therefore well protected from industrial development.
The Poets’ Trail is a route through the central part of the Lake District that pays tribute to the poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) who were inspired in one way or another by the landscapes of the Lake District.
Lake Derwentwater
Derwentwater is one of the main lakes in the Lake District. It is situated in the Borrowdale valley just south of the town of Keswick. It is fed by the River Derwent. It measures approximately 4.8 x 1.6 km and has a maximum depth of 22 m. It is home to numerous islands, one of which, Derwent Island, features a house owned by the National Trust. The lake’s shores and the surrounding valleys are home to ancient, protected oak forests which support a rich variety of flora and fauna, such as red squirrels.
Trivia: images of Derwentwater were used as the backdrop for Maz Kanata’s castle on the planet Takodana in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Images of Derwentwater, sometimes slightly altered to make it appear shrouded in mist, are used in the video game Silent Hill 2 to depict Toluca Lake, the fictional lake on the shores of which the fictional town of Silent Hill – where the action takes place – is situated.
Moot Hall
Built: 1813.
History: the site originally housed an early 16th-century courthouse and market hall. The present-day Moot Hall was rebuilt in 1813. Over the centuries, it has served as a medieval court, a market hall, a local prison, a museum and, more recently, a tourist information centre for visitors to the national park. In early 2026, the historic visitor centre closed its doors due to budgetary constraints. The site is now being repurposed to house a local café concept whilst retaining a reception area for visitors.
Features: it is a Grade II listed building. It is built of local stone covered with white lime render and topped with a slate roof typical of the region. The building’s most famous feature is its square tower. It houses an unusual single-hand clock, installed in 1814.
A bit of history: Moot Hall is the starting point for famous extreme sporting challenges in the Lake District, notably the legendary Bob Graham Round (a circuit of 42 peaks to be completed in under 24 hours).
Listing: Grade II listed.
Pencil Museum
Opened: 1981.
History: the first pencil factory, owned by the Cumberland Pencil Company, opened in Keswick in 1832. A second factory, which still exists, was founded in 1920 and operated in Keswick until 2007, when it moved to Workington. The Pencil Museum opened in 1981 and is home to one of the world’s largest coloured pencils, a yellow pencil 7.91 metres long and weighing 446 kilos. The museum also houses a replica of the Seathwaite graphite mine. It welcomes over 80,000 visitors a year. Damaged by Storm Desmond in 2015, it reopened in 2017.
Greta Hall
Construction:
History: Greta Hall is known as the home of poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, famous poets of the Lake District. Coleridge lived there with his family from 1800 to 1803 and frequently visited his friend William Wordsworth in Grasmere. Robert Southey arrived at Greta Hall in 1803 and took Coleridge’s place there. He lived at Greta Hall until his death in 1843.
The house was visited by a great many poets and literary figures, including William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Sir George Beaumont, Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, Thomas De Quincey and John Ruskin.
Converted into a girls’ school and then a boarding school until 1994, it subsequently operated as a guesthouse before being sold in 2021 to a private owner. It is therefore no longer open to visitors.
Trivia: in July 1877, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil and his wife, Empress Teresa, visited Keswick and Greta Hall to pay tribute to Robert Southey, author of A History of Brazil.
Listing: Grade I listed.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote some of his greatest poems in Keswick, is, alongside William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, one of the leading figures of the Lake Poets movement – poets inspired by the Lake District.
Orphaned by his father at a very young age, he was placed in a boarding school and had a difficult childhood. In 1791, aged 18, he secured a free place at Jesus College, Cambridge. He became involved in radical movements and began to abuse alcohol and laudanum to alleviate his mental distress. In 1794, he met poet Robert Southey. In 1795, Coleridge and Southey married sisters Emma and Sarah Fricker. The couple did not get on well but went on to have four children. In 1796, Coleridge published his first collection, Poems on Various Subjects, and entered politics, albeit unsuccessfully. That same year, he met William Wordsworth, with whom he formed such a close friendship that he would henceforth follow him wherever he went, first to Somerset, then to the Lake District. In 1798, they published a joint collection, Lyrical Ballads, a manifesto of Romantic poetry, which contained the first version of the famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Around the same time, he began using opium, again to alleviate his mental distress. It was during these years that he began his great medieval poem, Christabel, and wrote Frost at Midnight and The Nightingale. After a stay in Germany, he settled at Greta Hall, in Keswick, to be closer to Grasmere, where Wordsworth lived. Together with Southey, they came to be known as the Lake Poets or the Lakists. It was also at this time that he met Sara Hutchinson, sister of William Wordsworth’s future wife, who would become the great love of his life.
Having become a royalist, he accepted the editorship of the Morning Post, a newspaper that supported the government. He was rewarded with the title of Poet to the Court and a generous pension. In 1816, as his opium addiction had worsened, he became a patient of Doctor James Gillman in Highgate, in the northern suburbs of London. It was there that he completed his great work of prose, the Biographia Literaria. He died there in 1834. In 2018, his coffin was discovered in a former wine cellar incorporated into a crypt at St Michael’s Church.
Keswick Museum
Opened: 1873
History: Keswick’s first museum opened in 1873 at Moot Hall. One of its highlights is a relief map of the Lake District designed by Joseph Flintoft in 1837. The collections were moved to more suitable premises in Fitz Park in 1897. Following financial difficulties, in 2007 the local authorities handed over management of the museum to a specially created trust, partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which enabled the premises to be refurbished.
Collections: the museum holds nearly 20,000 objects, of which only 10 per cent are on display. They are mainly related to local history. As well as the relief map of Flintoft, the museum displays a collection of musical stones and a cat found mummified over 700 years ago near Penrith. The museum holds numerous documents relating to the Lake Poets, particularly Robert Southey, who lived in Keswick from 1803 to 1843.
