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People who book the Beatrix Potter tours come with very different relationships to the material. Some are deeply read — they know the biography, they have read Linda Lear's definitive life, they could tell you which illustrations are based on which specific locations. Some are returning to a childhood love that they haven't thought about in years and are slightly uncertain what they are going to feel. Some are bringing children or grandchildren who are at exactly the right age. And some are from abroad — America, Japan, Australia — and are combining the Lake District with a broader literary England trip, and Beatrix Potter is one of the reasons they have come to this country specifically.
What surprises me, every time, is how consistent the response is regardless of which of these descriptions fits.
We arrive at Hill Top after the approach through Near Sawrey — past the Tower Bank Arms, which is the pub in the Jemima Puddle-Duck illustration, past the farm wall where the kittens lose their clothes, through the lane that Potter walked every morning and evening for thirty years.
I stop the group at the garden gate before we go in. I open the book — The Tale of Tom Kitten — to the illustration of the three kittens being sent into the garden to walk, and I hold it up at the same angle as the gate in front of us.
The response to this moment is almost always silence. Not because nothing is being said, but because something has happened that doesn't require speech immediately. The illustration and the real gate are the same thing. The painting and the place are the same place. The story you read as a child, or that you read to your children, was set here, in this specific garden, at this specific gate, which is still here.
Most people take a photograph at this point. Some of them are crying slightly, which they did not expect.
Tim's specialism — the natural history, the mycological work, the Herdwick sheep, the farming system — means that the Beatrix Potter tours go considerably deeper than the books. The Herdwick sheep in the field below the farm are the descendants of the animals Potter bred and showed at the Lakeland shows in the 1920s and 30s. The fungi in the garden wall — the species she painted in the mycological notebook that established her visual discipline before the books — he identifies by name and explains why she was interested in them.
The children on the tours are often the ones who are most engaged by this level of detail. The adult assumption that children want the simplified version is generally wrong. Children who love Beatrix Potter want to know everything.
The afternoon tour ends at Tabitha Twitchit's Bookshop in Hawkshead — in the actual office of William Heelis, in the building where the legal work that protected the Lake District landscape was done for forty years.
Standing in that room, with the original illustrations on the walls, in the building where the man she loved worked, in the village where they married — the story comes together in a specific way. The publisher, the books, the money, the farms, the National Trust, the landscape you have been driving through all day — it is all one story, and this is where the practical side of it was managed.
Most guests leave wanting to read the biography.
Beatrix Potter Hidden Country morning, Beatrix Potter Hill Top & Windermere Cruise afternoon. £79 and £99 per person. Maximum seven guests.
Part of our complete guide to Beatrix Potter in the Lake District.