Today we walked to the ferry and crossed into the Furness District of Lancashire in order to walk to Hill Top in Far Sawrey. Our purpose was to visit the home of Beatrix Potter from 1905. There's a small garden which is not as I remember it on my first visit in 1973/4. The exterior of the house too is run-down looking. Despite an indifferent day for weather there were still plenty of visitors.
It's a small house with no modern amenities at all. Just as Beatrix Potter left on her death in 1943.
There are so many memories here for people who appreciate the several aspects and phases of her work. Not least as a pioneering merchandising business woman whose trustees, the NT, still fiercely defend her copyright. Personally, I am always impressed on seeing examples of her botanical drawing and painting and reading of her struggles with the Establishment and her idiotic parents.
Of course the southern lakes would not look as it now does if she and the NT she helped to found had not been so splendidly endowed by the profits from those most excellent creatures in the little books.
Although she loved Hill Top and left it just as she wanted we visitors to see it, will her husband William Heelis they lived in the rather better appointed house above, opposite Hill Top. We all know how she ran her farms very hands on and is responsible for the continuance of the great Cumbrian tradition of Herdwick sheep.
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