Robert Walker

Robert Walker (1709–1802), called Wonderful Walker, was a Church of England priest in Dunnerdale, now in Cumbria. In around 1804, William and Dorothy Wordsworth became interested in the local stories about him; William mentioned Walker in The Excursion, and later in one of his sonnets.

Life

Walker was born at Undercrag in Seathwaite, Dunnerdale, Furness, then in Lancashire, in 1709. He was the son of Nicholas Walker, a yeoman farmer, and his wife Elizabeth, and was the youngest of 12 children; his eldest brother was born about 1684. He was taught at an elementary level in Seathwaite Chapel. Regarded as frail by his parents, he sought more education and ordination, in Eskdale and the Vale of Lorton, with support from clerical patrons.

Walker was schoolmaster in Loweswater in 1735, when he became curate of Seathwaite. In 1755–6, he proposed to the bishop of Chester that the curacy of Ulpha should be joined to that of Seathwaite, but was turned down.

Edwin Waugh included an account of Walker in his Rambles in the Lake Country and its Borders from 1861. In 1892, Samuel Barber wrote that "The wonderful Walker type of parson may be considered about as extinct as the Dodo."

Family Walker and his wife Ann (née Tyson, died 1800, at age around 93) had ten children, of whom eight—three sons and five daughters—survived to adulthood. With an income as priest calculated as £20 per annum in 1755, Walker supported his family's finances in other ways, including by spinning wool, which became a family business.

The eldest son, Zaccheus Walker (1736–1808), joined the engineering firm Boulton and Watt and married Mary Boulton, sister of Matthew Boulton. Their only daughter married Joseph Vincent Barber. Another son, who predeceased his father, was William Tyson Walker. He was a curate and schoolteacher at Ulverston, where one of his pupils was the future Sir John Barrow, 1st Baronet. Barrow remembered him, around 1777, as a good classical scholar, educated at Trinity College Dublin.