“… Knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” (William Wordsworth)
The bus drove away with a rumble. Where it had been, there now stretched the countryside of pasturelands and rolling hills, framed with gray-slate walls of stone and a crooked little wooden gate. A cluster of white houses, with shingled gray rooftops and a few flowerpots hanging along the walls for a splash of cheerfulness. Perched on the top of the hill, overgrown in ivy and wisteria, is the very place itself: the home of Beatrix Potter.
Hilltop Farm is nestled in the rolling countryscape of Sawrey. Except for a few cars that mill down the narrow roads, it looks exactly the same as it did when Beatrix Potter bought the farm with the proceeds of her first children’s book, The Story of Peter Rabbit.
Distant bleating of sheep in the pastures. A little red postbox, tucked in the stone beside a bed and breakfast.We push past the little green gate with a squeak. A gravel pathway winds up the hill, between planters overgrown with wild ivy and bluebells and borage and countless other wildflowers.
Across from the house, a secret little garden gate swings open to Beatrix Potter’s own garden. When I visited two months ago, these four garden beds were thriving and so overgrown that there was hardly a path to walk through. Now, after harvest, they have been trimmed back.
This is where things get fun, though — throughout the garden, there are clues hidden from all of her stories: a wooden trowel, a pair of spectacles, a wheelbarrow, an array of pots. There is the little white picket gate and the red geranium.
All of this looks like she had just left it out on accident and might pop around the corner to return at any moment. The caretakers of this place put great effort to leave things as she would have left them — paying attention to let little details breathe life into the space.
As a child, Beatrix Potter found sanctity in art and nature. For twenty-one years, she visited every summer to the Lake District in England, allowing her plenty of time to sketch the landscape and the animals that surrounded her. The earliest copy of Peter Rabbit came from a letter she sent to her childhood governess’s children.
When a family friend encouraged her to publish, Beatrix decided to self-publish 250 copies of Peter Rabbit to give to her friends. In 1902, a publishing company, Frederick Warne, offered to publish her “bunny book.” she worked carefully with them to make sure that her books were affordable—so much so, that she almost chose to publish in black-and-white rather than color.
Peter Rabbit was such a success (it sold over 50,000 copies!) that Beatrix Potter bought Hilltop Farm. Seven of her subsequent books have connections to Hilltop, including The Tale of Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers. With every new book she sold, she bought another working farm. She loved this landscape—and that’s why, in preserving it, the view looks the same today as it did a hundred years ago. In the end, she owned and ran fifteen working farms and four thousand acres of land in the Lake District! She openly expressed intentions of passing it on to the National Trust.
Our tour begins at half past two o’clock. As I am admitted into the living room, the warmth is not just in temperature. A warm smell of woodsmoke rises from a crackling fire in the hearth. The gentle ticking of the grandfather clock. China plates, with patterns of woodland animals, arranged on display.
The house is decorated for harvest: pumpkins, seeds, a recipe book open on the kitchen table, candlesticks flickering with light. In a time of industrialization, it is fascinating that she chose furniture and things that were all handcrafted by artisans. Hilltop Farm is a cultivation of loveliness.
Upstairs is much the same, filled with Potter’s own books, teacups, bouquets of flowers, patchwork quilts, and large watercolor landscape paintings done by her brother, Walter Bertram Potter. Here is a piano set with little family photographs—although Potter didn’t play herself, she loved to hear music.
Next door is a sitting room with a view of the garden; the desk is set with a watercolor set and an open sketchbook. Everything is arranged with care, a collection of charming things arranged by a woman who loved beauty. “It’s like living in a dollhouse,” says one of my friends as she passes through the rooms.
It’s easy to see how the Lake District shaped her stories. There are woodlands and lakewaters, hills and dales, and perhaps even hobbits and mischievous rabbits and silly old bears roaming about. Her watercolors are painted in gentle neutral colors, with a lot of emphasis on trees and plants and woodland animals, which she infused with personality as she came to know them.
There are some places on earth that God created as homes for the world-weary. That is what the Lakes are. You’ll be walking down a footpath and suddenly catch sight of a moss-covered signpost, or a bridge that leads across a babbling brook, or catch a glimpse of a pastureland beyond a hedgerow, perhaps a shimmering silver lake and distant mountains settled with fog.
In that moment, all the children’s fantasies you ever read begin to stir in your imagination again. You think of a girl crossing a wardrobe and meeting a fawn in a snowy wood; a pooh bear awaiting his friends for adventures beyond the tree hollow; an immortal isle called Avalon; four halflings departing their home for a faraway quest; a mole and a rat and a toad adventuring beside the wild wood. There are new stories here too—stories so old they have not yet been written.
On this semester abroad, we’ve been talking a lot about how landscape influences stories. The Lake District shaped Beatrix Potter’s sense of self, her determination, her watercolors. A love of simple things has shown through her children’s stories—a true glimpse into the soul of the English countryside. Beatrix loved Nature, and Nature inspired her stories.
This is the land of imagination, the realm of poetry, where the prayers of grateful hearts are as natural as breathing in these fells. For centuries as ancient kingdoms rose and fell and faded, the Muses have wandered and settled here in the woodland realm. You needn’t go far to find them. Just wander in the woods of your mind for a while.
Sending you love from the Lake District,
<3 Olivia Grace
