A campaign has been launched to preserve William Wordsworth’s family home at Rydal Mount in the Lake District, as a site of literary heritage. The poet lived there from 1813 to his death in 1850. It is now up for sale, for offers at over £2.5m.

Rydal Mount is described by the property website Rightmove as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of England's heritage, surrounded by some of the country's most stunning landscapes”.

Wordsworth had rented the house, and in the late 1960s it was bought by his descendants, and has since been open to the public for most of the year. However, after the Covid pandemic, visitor numbers dropped sharply and the house was put on the market.

The Guardian reports that Wordsworth’s great great great great granddaughter, Charlotte Wontner, is leading a campaign in the hope that financial backers will step in and help preserve the house and gardens so that they can be kept open for the public.

Actors Brian Cox, Miriam Margolyes and Tom Conti as well as the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce are among those calling for the home of William Wordsworth to be saved as a site of literary heritage.

Charlotte Wontner, whose grandmother bought Rydal Mount in 1969, described it as a “living museum”. The gardens “are where Wordsworth wrote many of his poems and when people get there, there is this wonderful sense of being closer to the poetry”.

Her cousin, Christopher, who is selling the house, is supportive of the campaign, she said. “We all have the same goal which is to find a way of keeping the house open to people. There may be other relatives who feel the same way and I hope they will get in touch.”

Hunter Davies records in his biography of Wordsworth that the family moved into Rydal Mount, which was two miles from their previous home, at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, “without ever having been inside before. The previous owners … had left the house empty for several weeks, but refused to let the Wordsworths go inside until they had removed their wine from the cellar”.

Because of Wordsworth’s fame, the house quickly became a tourist attraction, even during his lifetime. His previous home, Dove Cottage, is now a museum and poetry events are regularly staged there.