and immediately hired a horse, to start the next morning at five to see it. I was most unlucky in my day, as it had been fine for the preceding week, and only set in for rain when I got among the Wicklow mountains. I had a very wild romantic uncomfortable ride through a wholly uninhabited country, till I got within the baleful influence of lionisers,[70] and was pestered out of my wits by humbugging guides who dinned into my ears miserable expansions of Tom Moore’s note about St. Kevin, till I was quite out of patience. The day was so misty that it was only once or twice that I could make out the scene distinctly, and so constantly raining, that all my paper was soaked in trying to draw what I could make out. By dint of perseverance, I crawled into poor St. Kevin’s[71] cell, which is hardly large enough to coil one’s self up in, and when I was there hardly a square foot of it was dry: so the day answered the purpose, at any rate, of showing me that there is a dark side to a hermit’s existence. He had chosen himself a most picturesque rocky point, which projects a little into the Lake, with one or two hollies and mountain ashes growing up in its crevices; and cut out a cell for himself in its perpendicular face. It would take too much space to describe the grand gloom of the Lake, the seven ruined Churches on its borders (one of which is still a burial-ground for the Roman Catholics), and that extraordinary Tower, a relic of paganism, which stands in one of the churchyards. ‘I am now on the bank of the Lake by which my mother was brought up, and of which I used to hear over and over again. It has been much altered by Macadamisers, and the house she lived in has been sold. Houses seem to have sprung up about Keswick Lake as if it was a Torquay or Sidmouth; and new dandy names have been given to all the creeks and islands, and nothing but gaiety seems to be going on or thought of. But I suppose old Skiddaw looks pretty much the same as he used to do, and will see things go to pot with their predecessors…. I hope in a day or two to find out the Parish Register, and see her birth and marriage: which is something like poring over the name of a place one likes in a map….’ The home of Margaret Spedding’s childhood, Armathwaite Hall, is within six miles of Cockermouth, the birthplace of Wordsworth. It stands at the foot of Bassenthwaite Lake, and looks out towards some of the loveliest and best-known mountains of the district, including Skiddaw, Helvellyn, and the Borrowdale Hills. It had been sold to Sir Frederick Vane, Bart., of Hutton Hall, Penrith, in 1796. Hurrell was a guest at Mirehouse, where his cousin John Spedding was always from time to time entertaining some of the noted literary men of the period.