The Windermere island Wordsworth calls “Chapel-Holm” is more commonly known as Lady
Holme (i.e., “the island of Our Lady”) or St. Mary Holme, taking its name from the
chantry established there in medieval times. St. Herbert’s Island on Derwentwater
is named for the seventh-century anchorite who had his hermitage there. The island
became a place of pilgrimage by 1374, when the Bishop of Carlisle ordered the vicar
of Crosthwaite to celebrate mass there on the saint’s feast day and offered forty-day
indulgences to participants. See Wordsworth’s inscription poem “For the Spot Where
the Hermitage Stood on St. Herbert’s Island, Derwent-Water” (1800).

From Wordsworth’s “Water Fowl,” composed March 1800 but first published in Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (1823).

The Eurasian widgeon is a common dabbling duck. It is unclear what bird Wordsworth
here calls the golding.

These lines, drafted in late 1798, eventually became part of The Prelude (1850, V.384-88), but Wordsworth first published them under the title “There Was
a Boy” in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads.

Coleridge is the friend here, and the passage—which Wordsworth has slightly revised—comes
from a notebook entry dated 5 January 1804.

Moorman notes that this apt simile reveals the hand of Dorothy Wordsworth in finishing
the 1810 letterpress for Wilkinson. Dorothy had employed the same image to describe
screes in her Recollections of a Tour in Scotland (Later Years 160).

This archaic appellation for the lake that is today almost universally called Windermere
was already fading by Wordsworth’s time. The name is believed to have derived from
the Old Norse name Vindandr. Hence Winandermere translates as “Vinandr’s Lake.”