River Duddon

• The River Duddon and the Duddon Estuary have figured prominently in the work of the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson, who said of the river valley that “Without hesitation this is my favourite place of all. There is such variety, such texture”.[1]

• Arthur Ransome figured the valley under the name ‘Dundale’ in his Lake novels.[2]

• The poet William Wordsworth wrote extensively of the Duddon, a river he knew and loved from his early years. He wrote his lyric sequence "The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets" between 1804 and 1820. This sequence first appeared in The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: And Other Poems. To which is annexed a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England in April 1820, and later in Wordsworth's Miscellaneous Poems in July 1820. (Although it was first published as a series of 33 sonnets, the Duddon series was expanded to 34 sonnets in the Poetical Works of 1827.)

The Duddon at Troutal Gorge above Seathwaite

Rawfold Bridge on the Duddon

Sonnet I.

NOT envying shades which haply yet may throw

A grateful coolness round that rocky spring,

Bandusia, once responsive to the string

Of the Horatian lyre with babbling flow;

Careless of flowers that in perennial blow

Round the moist marge of Persian fountains cling;

Heedless of Alpine torrents thundering

Through icy portals radiant as heaven’s bow;

I seek the birth-place of a native Stream.—

All hail, ye mountains! hail, thou morning light!

Better to breathe at large on this aëry height

Than toil in needless sleep from dream to dream;

Pure flow the verse, pure, vigorous, free, and bright,

For Duddon, long-loved Duddon, is my theme!

Subsequent sonnets followed the river downstream, past Birks Bridge (Sonnet XI), to Ulpha (Sonnet XXII),[3] before reaching “the Deep...over smooth flat sands” with Sonnet XXXII.[4]

The River Duddon is a salmon fishery. The section of the river downstream from Seathwaite is popular with canoeists and is graded as 3 with some easy 4. From Birks Bridge, through Troutal Gorge to Seathwaite there are some difficult canoeing sections graded at 5 requiring higher water levels to navigate.

Many parts of the Duddon Valley are visited by tourists, but the location is outside the main tourist area of the Lake District. Consequently, most of the visitors are day trippers who live locally, or who travel from elsewhere in northern England: Hunter Davies considered its unfrequented nature one of its great attractions.[5]

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