Derwent Island House

Derwent Island House is an 18th-century villa on a small wooded island in Derwent Water near Keswick, which the Trust calls the only inhabited island in the Lake District. Once owned by the monks of Fountains Abbey, the island was acquired in 1569 by the Company of Mines Royal as a safe home for its German miners. Joseph Pocklington, who took it on in 1778, built the Palladian villa to his own design along with a Gothic chapel-boathouse, and staged mock naval attacks on the island at his Derwent Water regattas; Wordsworth ridiculed the house as 'like an astronomer's observatory'. Henry Marshall bought the island in 1844 and added the east and west wings and the tower, and Denis Marshall gave it to the National Trust in 1951. The house is let to tenants, who help care for the island. Derwent Island and House are currently closed to visitors: the Trust says staff shortages mean it cannot run open days at present, though it hopes to welcome visitors again, and the villa can still be glimpsed from a boat on the lake.