May 23, 2008

• Hill Top Farm
  
  After all the walking, we finally reached the village of Sawrey, and who should be there to greet us but Mr. MacGregor outside a pub! Hill Top Farm, Beatrix Potter’s home, could not be far away…

  
  

  When Beatrix was a grown woman, still unmarried, she bought this farm 
  in 1905 and wrote a number of her books while living there. Over the remaining years
  of her life, she bought around 4,000 acres of land in the Lake District which wound up in the hands of The National Trust after her death.

  
  

  
  Hill Top was where she lived until she married William Heelis (when she was 46) and moved to Castle Cottage. She continued to use Hill Top as a studio and a place to entertain her American visitors.  She didn’t often entertain English ones, assuming they were mere curiosity-seekers. But, if you were an American who wanted to meet her and came all that way, in her mind, you were more than likely truly interested in her books and in children’s literature. Then, you’d get invited to tea. 

  Before her death in 1943, she left specific instructions on how she wanted the house to be set up. She already knew it would become a tourist attraction.  As usual, you aren’t allowed to take pictures in the house, but I have taken pictures of the guidebook for your amusement! (The outside pictures are mine.)

  Hill Top Farm

  
  

  Clematis climbing high
  

  
  

  
  

  The Gardens

  
    

  

  Inside the house, there were Beatrix Potter books in every room opened to pages which showed how she used that room in a drawing in a book.

  The stair landing in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers

  

  And the same spot from another angle in the same story

  

  Beatrix Potter also enjoyed embroidery, and they had several examples in the house of her work. One thing she did was to embroider the green top-cover for this bed. The guide was puzzled as to why she would have done it since she embroidered it after she was no longer living there.  I think she did it so generations of visitors could say how pretty it is!
  

  
  

  
  

  This is a china cabinet in the first room one enters. The blue plates have designs drawn by her father, Rupert.   Her brother, Bertram, was also an artist, and a room in the house is full of his paintings. There is even a painting by her mother. Quite an artistic family!

  

  This room is to the right when you walk in. It’s the parlor, and it had a bookshelf full of intriguing, old books.

    

  Hill Top Farm was a treat, but a bigger treat was to come the next day…A trip to Pemberley!

  
  

  • 9:05 am
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