Gillian looks at Hill Top and sees a document. I look at it and see a workplace — and workplaces are where I always want to start, because they tell you who actually did the work, not just whose name ended up on the book cover.
So this isn't really a piece about Beatrix Potter the author. It's about the farm underneath her, and the people who kept it standing.
When Beatrix bought Hill Top in 1905, she didn't move in and start farming it herself. She kept on the existing tenant farmer, John Cannon, and his family stayed living and working there for several years while she learned from them.
Beatrix earned her way into that world by doing the unglamorous, physical, repetitive work of actually farming. She was elected president-designate of the Association in March 1943 — not simply "made president" as it's often told — and she died that December, before she could take up the role the following spring.
Farms of that size and period ran on domestic labour too — cooks, housekeepers, dairy work — almost always done by women whose names didn't survive the way Beatrix's did. I can't give you her name. Nobody kept it. But I think naming the gap is its own kind of honesty.
She left the farm to the National Trust specifically so it would keep being worked. Today Amy Dixon farms it under a tenancy that's now run over thirty-five years in that family. On our private tours, Amy takes small groups round the working farm herself.
Castle Cottage, where Beatrix and William Heelis actually lived as a married couple from 1913, is a five-minute walk away — she kept her working life at Hill Top and her domestic life at Castle Cottage quite deliberately separate.
Hill Top is closed on Fridays. If that's your day, I'll happily take you further into the working landscape around it instead.
Meet Amy Dixon's flock in person on our private tours. See private tour options.