Robert Walker (priest, of Seathwaite)

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.

Regarded as frail by his parents, he sought more education and ordination, in Eskdale and the Vale of Lorton, with support from clerical patrons.

), and in the eighteenth sonnet of The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets (1820) ("Seathwaite Chapel") referred to Walker as the "Gospel Teacher Whose good works formed an endless retinue, A pastor such as Chaucer's verse portrays, Such as the heaven-taught skill of Herbert drew And tender Goldsmith crowned with deathless praise."

Both Bamford and Wordsworth omitted to mention Walker's sale of ale, which was one of the ways in which he supported himself.

Richard Parkinson, who included material about Walker in a novel, The Old Church Clock (1843), also slanted the facts.

[1] He wrote in the novel's introduction: "Nor was it merely as an exemplary parish priest, (and well does Robert Walker deserve the title of Priest of the Lakes [...]), that the character of this good man is to be regarded, but as one striking instance out of many (if the history of our Parish Priesthood could now be written) in which the true liturgical teaching of the church was strictly maintained in the lower ranks of the clergy, when it had been either totally discontinued or had withered down to a mere lifeless form, in the higher.

[4] In 1892, Samuel Barber wrote that "The wonderful Walker type of parson may be considered about as extinct as the Dodo.

"[5] 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.