Houses & gardens in CumbriaCumbria, England

Elizabethan hall with world-famous topiary garden.

Fell-side castle with gardens and owl centre.

A relaxed National Trust house above Grasmere, once a Wordsworth home and later Canon Rawnsley's, with lake views and open fires.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth's cramped Grasmere home from 1799 to 1808, where he wrote his greatest poetry, now a writer's-house museum.

Beatrix Potter's farmhouse and cottage garden.

Cavendish family estate near Cark with 25 acres of woodland and formal gardens, home to the ancient Great Holker Lime and a summer sunken garden.

A National Trust time-capsule yeoman's farmhouse in Troutbeck, kept by one family for four centuries with its carved oak and books intact.

The Georgian townhouse in Cockermouth where William Wordsworth was born, saved from the bulldozers and kept as a 1770s family home

William Wordsworth's home for his last 37 years, with the garden he laid out.

A medieval pele tower with the National Trust's largest limestone rock garden and a national fern collection.

A walled herb garden of over 250 medicinal and culinary plants, with a watermill.

John Ruskin's home above Coniston Water, its eight steep hillside gardens climbing through moorland, ferns and the zig-zaggy woodland walk.

Historic house near Penrith with walled gardens, a 17th-century terrace, topiary and a woodland lake in the old Forest of Inglewood.

A Thomas Mawson woodland garden of 1889, best in May for rhododendron and azalea.

Thomas Mawson terraces of 1909, plus a 1660s grotto framing a waterfall.

A National Trust place in Cumbria.