In 1785 two brothers skating on Broadwater fell through the ice and drowned. Since
that time, as Wordsworth notes, the lake has been known as Brothers Water.

The battle occurred on October 21, 1805.

During the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the claimant to the British throne, Charles
Edward Stuart, amassed an army in Scotland and marched as far south as Derby before
being driven back north by troops loyal to George II.

See, for instance, William Green’s A Description of a Series of Sixty Small Prints (1814), which opines that the “splendid display of wood” in this particular site
“is no where equalled in the north of England” (30). Green was an Ambleside-based
artist and friend of the Wordsworths.

The Pleiades cluster.

This poem was composed on 27 June 1817 and first published in the River Duddon volume of 1820.