Wray Castle Wray Castle. The house was built in 1840 for a retired [Liverpolitan] surgeon, James Dawson, who built it along with the neighbouring Wray Church using his wife's fortune. After Dawson's death in 1875 the estate was inherited by his fifteen year old nephew, Edward Preston Rawnsley. In 1877 Edward's cousin, Hardwicke Rawnsley, took up the appointment of vicar of Wray Church. To protect the countryside from damaging development, Hardwicke Rawnsley, building on an idea propounded by John Ruskin, conceived of a National Trust that could buy and preserve places of natural beauty and historic interest for the nation. The house
Hardwicke Rawnsley theme, and, as the "Dictionary of National Biography" put it, "as a minor lake poet, a vast output of verse." His memoir of Ruskin, described by "The New York Times" as "in many ways the best volume [of] his series of books upon some of the literary aspects of the Lake Country", was published in 1901. After 34 years at Crosthwaite he retired to Grasmere, where, in 1915, he had bought Allan Bank, the house in which William Wordsworth had lived between 1808 and 1811. Edith Rawnsley died in 1916, and two years later, Rawnsley married Eleanor "Nellie" Foster Simpson,