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Beatrix Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey in 1905 for £2,805 — the proceeds of the first three Peter Rabbit books. She was thirty-nine. She had never owned property before. She had grown up in London, spent summers in the Lake District and Scotland, and spent the years between her childhood holidays writing and illustrating books in the house in Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, that she shared with her parents.
Hill Top was, from the beginning, not just a farm. It was an escape from London, a project, a different life held in reserve while she continued living the one her parents expected of her.
The garden she made there was part of that project from the start.
The Hill Top garden is small — a narrow strip running alongside and behind the farmhouse, enclosed by old stone walls — and densely planted. Beatrix Potter designed it in the cottage garden tradition: the tradition of English country garden planting that the arts and crafts movement had recently made fashionable, but which in its actual form at Hill Top is something more personal and more rooted in the specific place than any fashionable exercise.
The planting is densely layered — roses on the walls, herbaceous borders below them, vegetables in the kitchen garden section, fruit trees espaliered against the stone. The paths between the beds are narrow; the effect is of a garden that is slightly overcrowded in the best possible way, where every inch is used and the edges between different planting types are blurred.
This is the garden that appears in the illustrations. The stone walls, the gate, the hollyhocks, the path to the front door — in the Beatrix Potter illustrations these are not generic cottage garden elements. They are specific places in a specific garden that Potter drew from observation over and over again. Walking through the Hill Top garden with the books in mind is one of those experiences where the illustration and the real place collapse into each other.
Hill Top appears most directly in The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907), where the farmhouse, the garden path, the front door and the surrounding landscape are all recognisable. The ducks in the puddles are Puddle-Duck's ducks. The garden gate is the gate. The countryside visible over the walls is the Near Sawrey countryside.
Potter used Hill Top as a working studio in the summers after she bought it — she would spend days drawing specific corners of the garden, specific views from the windows, specific features of the farmhouse interior — and the illustrations from 1906 onwards have an accuracy and a specificity that earlier books, illustrated in London from memory and imagination, do not quite match.
Beatrix Potter died in December 1943, leaving Hill Top and the surrounding farms to the National Trust with specific instructions: that the farms be maintained as working farms with Herdwick sheep, that the tenants be from farming families, and that Hill Top itself be preserved as closely as possible to her arrangement of it.
The National Trust has kept these conditions. The house is preserved with extraordinary fidelity to its appearance during her occupancy. The garden is maintained in the cottage garden tradition she established. The surrounding farms still graze Herdwick sheep.
Visiting Hill Top is an experience of a house that was genuinely loved by the person who made it, preserved by an organisation that understood what it was preserving, and maintained with a care that goes beyond heritage management into something closer to respect.
Hill Top and the garden are the centrepiece of the Beatrix Potter Hidden Country morning tour. Entry included in the tour price.
Part of our complete guide to Beatrix Potter in the Lake District.