The best, most beautiful part of England is steeped in history and storybook tales. Every traveller should see England’s largest National Park,writes Marion Scher WHEN you next think of visiting the UK add on a few days and take a trip to England’s largest National Park – the Lake District, the land of cool, clear lakes, tarns and rivers.
This beautiful part of England, made famous more recently in the film Miss Potter, based on Beatrix Potter’s life and love of the area, has something for everyone. The locals love to point out that among the 12 lakes that make up the Lake District they have the biggest lake in England – Lake Windermere and the deepest lake at Wastwater, all geared for those who like messing about in boats, or those of us who prefer a sunset cruise on a converted Victorian steam powered yacht with a cocktail in our hand. And, of course, there’s fishing for your supper – or dining at one of several excellent local restaurants specialising in the local catch.
A cyclists’ and walkers’ heaven with more than 3 500 kilometres of “rights of way”, it should be teeming with people from all over the world, but according to the locals “All the foreign tourists just go to London”. Well, they’re truly missing out…
What is particularly useful is that all the walks are graded according to your level of fitness – so you won’t find yourself stuck halfway up a mountain path before realising you don’t have the energy to go further up or down. Particularly rewarding after such strenuous exercise are the magnificent picture postcard views that you get from almost any point in the area. Some of the most spectacular walks are around Tarn How, at the north end of the famous Coniston Water with its historic woodlands and tarns (mountain lakes) framed by rugged, mountainous scenery.Other Cumbrian claims to fame are the two highest peaks in England – Scafell at 964m and Scafell Pike at 977m towering above the Lake District landscape. This mountain range was formed when volcanoes erupted when the North American and Eurasian continents collided and what a good job they did – according to the thousands of climbers who converge on the area 12 months a year. It seems the worse the weather the greater the challenge.
And it’s not just climbers who battle their way to the top. Each year the local (and only pub for miles) the Bridge Inn, plays host to a competition, held in honour of the original landlord Will Ritson (1808–1890) who created another superlative for the area when he became the World’s biggest liar. Hopeful liars come from far and wide to claim this coveted title. This, in honour of Ritson, “a sincere and genuine man” who would tell visiting climbers stories of the turnips in Wasdale that were so big that after the dalesfolk had “quarried” into them for their Sunday lunch, they could be used as sheds for the local sheep. Today’s entrants go more with stories such as how the Lake District was formed – not by ice or volcanic action, but by large moles and eels!
We took the easy way up to and drove through the mountains, sharing the breathtaking views with the local Herdwick sheep with their distinctive coarse dark wool. These rugged sheep, specially bred to withstand the rigours of mountain life shared a great place with bunnies, piglets and mice in the heart of children’s writer Beatrix Potter. For it was as a farmer in the Lake District that Beatrix Potter really found happiness as well as her work with the National Trust.
Everyone knows Potter the writer, but for a large part of her later life she stopped writing to concentrate of being a full-time farmer.
Her love of the area started when her family closed up their London house and headed off to the country for the summer. When she was 16 her life changed forever when Potter, while staying at Wray Castle near Ambleside in the Lake District, met the local vicar, Cannon Hardwicke Rawnsley. Rawnsley was a “champion” of the Lakes, fighting anyone who threatened to taint the area by building “bungalows, railways or other unsightly dwellings”.
Potter had also fallen in love with the unspoilt beauty of the area and was particularly impressed to discover that Rawnsley was a published author. She showed him her drawings and he encouraged her to publish her now famous first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She needed his encouragement as it wasn’t “done” for young ladies to follow such pursuits in this era.
This was also the time of the cotton boom in the nearby Lancashire towns such as Manchester and many of these wealthy industrialists started buying up the most beautiful land and building big country houses, doing away with what had been unspoilt farm and lake land. This ultimately led to Rawnsley founding the National Trust in January 1895, with the aim of buying as much land as possible to stop people from outside the area buying and building on it.
From then on Potter went back each year but it wasn’t until the death of her publisher and fiancée Norman Warne in 1904 that a grieving, devastated Potter heard about a small farm, Hill Top in the village of Near Sawrey that was coming up for sale. Everyone, including her parents were horrified. Again it was something else that “nice young women” didn’t do in Victorian England – buy property on their own. But strong minded Potter wasn’t to be deterred and in 1905 and with the help of local solicitors, Heelis and Company and money earned from the profits of her “little books”, she paid the grand sum of £2 805 (R36 000) for it. She didn’t know then but seven years later she would marry that same solicitor, William Heelis.
Hill Top Farm, today a living museum, was the inspiration for many of the illustrations in her book, particularly Samuel Whiskers (1908) and The Tale of Tom Kitten.Here you can wander through the house, left as it was in her day, reading her letters and looking at the original art work used in her books.
She also used local people as characters in her book, such as Farmer Potatoes in Samuel Whiskers, who was in fact Farmer Postelthwaite, whose descendents still farm in the area. Sometimes she didn’t even bother to change people’s names as with John Joiner, the dog in Samuel Whiskers who rescues Tom Kitten and who was William Heelis’s law clerk. In fact at some point or other Sawrey people and the village itself were dotted in to many of her books. Today Sawrey is virtually a shrine to Potter and anyone who’s even read one or two of her books will get enormous pleasure out of a visit here.
When her father died in 1923 Potter inherited a lot of money which she used to buy Troutbeck Park Farm, a 1 900 acre sheep farm on the lower slopes of Kirkstone Pass. She’d heard it was under threat of development so it was an easy decision for her. Three years later, with the help of shepherd George Walker, the brother-in-law of Tom Storey who ran Hill Top Farm, she took on perhaps the happiest role of her life – that of a sheep farmer.
Potter isn’t the only literary reason to visit the area. The poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born at Cockermouth in what is now known as Wordsworth House, went to school at Hawkshead and never left the area again, ending his years at Rydal Mount at Ambleside. Again the National Trust has control of all these heritage monuments and you too can sit in Wordsworth’s school room or stroll through his library and gaze in awe at the view out to Lake Windermere.
The National Trust plays a large role in keeping this pristine area and its heritage alive for visitors and Potter played an important role here. When she died at 77 in 1943 she left them 4 000 acres of land including 15 farms, cottages and many local areas which are landmark beauty spots today. She wanted her gift given back to the land she loved, to help preserve it for future generations, and anyone who visits the beautiful, unspoilt Lake District today with its herds of Herdwick sheep wandering the fells will give thanks for this.
We stayed at Lindeth Howe Country House Hotel where between 1902 and 1913 Beatrix Potter illustrated two of her most famous stories, Timmy Tiptoes and Pigling Bland. Her father Rupert was a keen photographer and today Lindeth Howe proudly displays many of his original photographic plates as well as original letters written by Beatrix. In 1915 when her father died Beatrix bought Lindeth Howe for her mother Helen to live in. Today when you stay there you feel more like an invited guest, for whom the owners can’t do enough, from ensuring that you see the very best sites around to offering you gourmet food and luxurious rooms. The best part is that, even with the state of the South African rand, this hotel is truly affordable and well worth a visit.
Marion Scher for Sunday Independent May 2009
- For more information contact: http://www.lindeth-howe.co.uk/.
- For more information on the Lake District contact: http://www.visitbritain.co.za/.
- Marion Scher flew courtesy of Virgin Atlantic
