Hill Top

Beatrix Potter bought Hill Top in 1905 with the earnings from her first books and used it as a retreat and then a working farm; she wrote several of the tales here and drew the house, garden and village into them, so the rooms, the staircase, the garden gate and the village street appear as backgrounds in The Tale of Tom Kitten, Samuel Whiskers and others. She left it to the National Trust with the condition that it be kept exactly as she left it, furnished with her things, which is why the house is shown as a home rather than a museum. Potter went on to buy around sixteen farms and over one thousand seven hundred hectares of the Lake District, largely to keep it from development, and left almost all of it to the Trust, which shaped the district that exists today.

What you actually see

• The unchanged rooms - kept as her will required, with her own furniture.
• The illustrated settings - staircase, garden and village drawn into the tales.
• The cottage garden - planted in the informal style she painted.
• The Trust legacy - the first of the farms and land she left to preserve the district.

When to go

April to October; the house closes for winter apart from limited periods. Timed tickets are released on the day and in advance and sell out early in summer. Mornings are the calmest.

Honest expectations

The house is very small, entry is strictly limited and queues form even with timed tickets. Photography inside is not allowed. Near Sawrey has minimal parking and the lanes in are narrow. It is aimed squarely at readers of the books.

Nearby

Hawkshead and the Beatrix Potter Gallery are close; the Windermere ferry crosses east.