The Lake District: A Landscape in Amber

By Jim Hargan | British Heritage  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The fight to block these intruders included Beatrix Potter, the author of Peter Rabbit and a Lakeland sheep breeder. Potter used her Peter Rabbit profits to purchase tracts that were under threat, then convert them to well-run sheep farms to preserve them. She used many of these farms as models for the watercolors in her “little books,” and a tour booklet is available that lets you match the drawing with its inspiration.

The most famous and popular Potter site is the first farm she purchased, Hill Top, in the straggling little village of Near Sawrey. It now is a museum run by the National Trust.

Her husband’s law office in nearby Hawkshead is also a National Trust museum, displaying her original drawings. In fact, Potter gave all her property to the National Trust, more than 4,000 acres that form the core of the National Trust’s huge holdings in Lakeland (nearly 25 percent of the mountains). Formed in the Lake District town of Kendal in 1894, the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty (as it was then known) has become England’s largest private charity, its vast property now valued at more than $11 billion.

Its current headquarters in Swindon is named “Heelis” — Beatrix Potter’s married name, and an indication of Potter’s importance to the Trust’s mission. When you tromp over the mountains of the Lake District, the land you are walking across is most likely owned by the National Trust.

The National Trust isn’t alone in working to preserve Lakeland’s beauty. In 1951, the Lake District became Britain’s first national park — not an area of government-owned land as you would expect in America, but rather an area of strict and specific land zoning, carefully tailored to protect Wordsworth’s much-loved landscapes — landscapes created by medieval farmers and now preserved like a bug in amber, officially declared to be “natural beauty” by Act of Parliament.

This use of the term “natural” may seem odd, but is entirely understandable. All you have to do is have the good fortune to stand in the midst of these mountains and allow yourself to be awed.

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Tags: British Heritage, Exploration, Historical Figures, Social History

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