Priceless donation to Park's future.

RESERVATIONS about the architecture apart, the news that a foundation grant of £500,000 could unblock obstacles to the building of a state-of-the-art collections centre at Grasmere's Dove Cottage, is to be welcomed.

It is hoped that the Jerwood Foundation's donation will trigger a further £1.8 million from the National Lottery fund.

The centre should then go-ahead and consolidate the Wordsworth Trust's position as the country's leading centre of British Romanticism.

The list of beneficiaries is boundless: the public would gain greater access to more than 50,000 precious manuscripts, paintings, books and other memorabilia; academics from around the world interested in English poetry would have better facilities for research and education; the artefacts themselves could be given greater protection against the ravages of time; and jobs for the 30 or so staff will be secured.

Director Doctor Robert Woof is keen to point out that the centre is already more than just about dead poets, a typically graphic description, but borne out by the number of modern literary figures who are keen to lecture at the former home of Wordsworth and De Quincey, and by the internationally-acclaimed exhibitions held there.

But there is potentially a much wider benefit for the besieged National Park in its endless quest to find a balance between the needs of its various inhabitants and the demands of visitors.

In the wake of the announcement of the forthcoming 10mph speed limit on Windermere, the hotel and leisure industry is having to re-appraise itself and where it should concentrate its energies.

New markets need targeting if tourism is to continue to provide employment and wealth on the scale to which it has become accustomed.

With the recent completion of the revitalised Brewery Arts Centre and the continuing success of Abbot Hall, both in Kendal; with John Ruskin's former home at Brantwood being highlighted by the centenary of his death; and with the forthcoming reopening of Blackwell at Windermere as a memorial to the spirit of the arts and crafts movement; a high-profile and newly-accessible Wordsworth Collection would complete a formidable set of cultural honeypots.

Such attractions would have a world-wide interest and with the globalisation of the holiday trade, Cumbria Tourist Board chief executive Chris Collier is surely not the only one who can see the opportunities.

As for the building itself, the Town End development and the overgrown quarry behind should be enough to soften any harsh conflicts with the countryside which inspired Wordsworth himself.

Rough and tumble.

THE Rough Guide books and television programmes have had some success based on getting away from the old deferential image of holiday advice.

Spiky by name and spiky by nature could be their epitaph.

Which is all very well if their pithy comments are based on fact.

Their Lake District book is not.

Like its predecessors in the series, its criticisms are based on inaccuracies and hearsay rather than proper research.

Exaggerated claims about the traffic and attendant parking problems, and ill-founded remarks about prices make a nonsense of any claim the book may have had of being helpful to readers, who must surely tumble to its unreliability as a meaningful guide.