BRANTWOOD
Brantwood was the home of John Ruskin during the latter years of his life. Mr W. G. Collingwood in his life of Ruskin has described the journey to Brantwood, as it was in Ruskin's time, as follows:—
After changing and changing trains, and stopping at many a roadside station, at last you see suddenly, over the wild undulating country, the Coniston Old Man—maen, stone: a survival of Celtic Cumbria—and its crags, abrupt on the left, and the lake, long and narrow, on the right. Across the water, tiny in the distance and quite alone amongst forests and moors, there is Brantwood; and beyond it everything seems uncultivated, uninhabited, except for one grey farmhouse high on the fell, where gaps in the ragged larches show how bleak and storm-swept a spot it is.... You drive up and down a narrow, hilly lane, catching peeps of mountains and sunset through thick, overhanging trees; you turn sharp up through a gate under dark firs and larches; and the carriage stops in what seems in the twilight a sort of court—a gravelled space, one side formed by a rough stone wall crowned with laurels and almost precipitous coppice, the brant (or steep) wood above, and the rest is Brantwood with a capital B.
Chapter vi. Vol. ii.
The Life and Work of John Ruskin.
W. G. Collingwood.
