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The illustrations in the Beatrix Potter books are not imagined. They are drawn from specific places, in specific seasons, at specific times of day. This is what makes them extraordinary as pictures and what makes the Lake District visit so satisfying for anyone who knows the books: you are not visiting the inspiration for a fictional world. You are visiting the actual places that are in the paintings.
Understanding which illustrations are based on which locations transforms both the visit and the books.
The front garden gate — the gate through which Mrs Tabitha Twitchit sends her kittens in The Tale of Tom Kitten is the front garden gate at Hill Top. It is still there. The composition of the illustration — the path, the gate, the hill rising behind — is unchanged from the painting Potter made for the 1907 book.
The farmyard — the farmyard at Hill Top appears in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, most clearly in the illustration where Jemima walks down the path carrying her umbrella and her reticule. The cobbles, the barn wall and the yard entrance are identifiable.
The kitchen and staircase — the interior illustrations in The Tale of Tom Kitten — the staircase, the landing, the bedroom where the kittens are being dressed — are the Hill Top interior as it stood in 1906–1907 when Potter was making the illustrations. The furniture in those rooms today is the furniture in the illustrations.
The garden in general — the vegetable garden, the flower beds and the garden walls appear in multiple Tom Kitten illustrations and, more subtly, in the backgrounds of several other books. The planting is maintained in the same tradition, in the same beds, using the same varieties where possible.
The village green and pump — the village scenes in The Pie and the Patty-Pan are the Near Sawrey village as it stood in 1905: the lane, the pump in the yard, the cottage gardens. Several of the buildings are recognisable.
The lane above the farm — the lane running uphill above Hill Top, towards the fell, appears in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck and in The Fairy Caravan (1929). It is still a lane.
Esthwaite Water is the lake visible from the Hill Top field gate and from the lane above the farm. Potter painted it repeatedly — not as a background but as a subject — and it appears in The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher (1906) as the lake where Jeremy Fisher goes fishing.
The specific illustration showing Jeremy Fisher's lily pad from below the water surface — looking up through the water with the lily pad above and the sky beyond — was drawn from the Esthwaite shoreline, based on direct observation of the Esthwaite marginal vegetation. The specific lily pad shape, the water colour and the shoreline vegetation are identifiable in the paintings as Esthwaite.
The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle (1905) is set above the Newlands Valley, which lies west of Derwentwater. The farm of Little-Town, where Lucie lives, is a real farm at the foot of the fell. The fell above is the fell in the book. The church at Buttermere road end appears in the final illustration.
Potter was drawing the Newlands landscape before she had Hill Top — she knew the valley from the Derwentwater summers and used it as the setting for Mrs Tiggy-Winkle precisely because it was the type of steep, enclosed fell valley that her hedgehog character required.
Before the books, Potter produced a substantial body of mycological illustration — detailed, scientifically accurate paintings of fungi, lichen and mosses, many of them made in the Lake District. Her mycological notebook, held in the Armitt Museum in Ambleside, contains some of the finest natural history illustrations ever made in this country. These illustrations established the visual discipline that underlies the book illustrations — the ability to draw what she actually saw with absolute fidelity.
The Armitt Museum in Ambleside holds a significant collection of her mycological and other pre-book illustrations. It is a short detour from the Hill Top circuit and well worth the hour.
On both our Beatrix Potter tours, Tim brings the relevant pages and illustrations to the specific locations. The comparison of the illustration with the real place — held at the same angle, at the same distance — is consistently one of the most vivid moments of the day. You are standing where Beatrix Potter stood when she painted, looking at what she was looking at.
Beatrix Potter Hidden Country morning tour and Beatrix Potter Hill Top & Windermere Cruise afternoon tour. Maximum seven guests.
Part of our complete guide to Beatrix Potter in the Lake District.