Dove Cottage/Rock of Names - The Wordsworth Way Mystery Cache
THE SMILEYS: No longer viable.
Dove Cottage/Rock of Names - The Wordsworth Way
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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The Final cache is a decent drive away - a short steepish climb up through the trees
Dove Cottage takes is name from the Inn it was previously, The Dove & Olive Branch, and is now a Museum run by the Wordsworth Trust. It was to Dove Cottage that William and Dorothy Wordsworth came when they returned to the Lake District to live in 1799, and where Wordsworth wrote some of his greatest poetry. They transformed the rocky fellside behind the cottage into a magnificent garden and apart from the many and varied plantings, created terraces, rock pools, stone constructions and stepping stone pathways, rock being integral to the garden, comprising one third of the 7,000 sq ft in total. The Wordsworth Trust have completely restored Dove cottage so that browsing the garden is like ‘visiting the Wordsworths’ and along with their writings gives an insight into the people they were.
The Rock of Names stood on the old road that ran from Grasmere towards Keswick along the side of Thirlmere. The Wordsworths, Southey, Coleridge and Professor Wilson, carved their names or initials on the flat surface of part of the rock. It got in the way of the water engineers creating the new reservoir in the 1890s and they blew it up. Canon Rawnsley is said to have reassembled some of the fragments in a cairn above the new road being constructed by the Manchester Corporation, and there they remained until they were removed in the 1980s for safekeeping to the Wordsworth Museum at Dove cottage.
Rock was symbolic to Wordsworth - from the time he and his friends carved their initials into stone at the ‘Rock of Names’ he associated rock with immortality. Epitaphs encapsulating a life and carved in stone, express Wordsworth’s awareness that life on earth is short compared to eternity. Stone, in his view, was a metaphor for eternity because it is the most enduring natural thing on the planet, and an epitaph preserves a person’s reputation for good or ill, long after death. He also had verses etched in stone to ensure that his poetry would endure beyond himself.
The co-ordinates on this listing will take you to the Rock of Names at Dove Cottage, the actual cache is placed in the area where it was originally in Wordsworth’s day.
From the top 4 sets of intials carved on the rock:
The number of Ds minus the number of Cs = X
The number of Ws = Y
The Cache is hidden at - N54 30.8XY - W 003 02.4YX
This series charts some of the milestones in the life of the poet William Wordsworth, the main Biography appearing on ‘The Daffodils’ cache listing only.
Caches in this series:
The Daffodils - The Wordsworth Way
W.W. Memorial/Mire House - The Wordsworth Way
The Old School/Blelham Tarn - The Wordsworth Way
Dove Cottage/Rock of Names - The Wordsworth Way
The Old Rectory/Allan Bank - The Wordsworth Way
The Coffin Trail/Rydal Mount - The Wordsworth Way
Dora’s Field - The Wordsworth Way
Grisedale Tarn - The Wordsworth Way
Diana's Looking Glass - The Wordsworth Way
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Va n cvyr bs ybtf ng gur raq bs n jbbqra srapr.