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Source: Reuters -
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As I sat beside Moss Eccles Tarn near the village of Near Sawrey, a duck swam up towards me.
He looked like he was about to speak to me - a relation of Jemima Puddle-Duck perhaps?
The sun had come out from behind the clouds and for a few minutes it was actually warm as I wondered if I was sitting in the exact spot where Beatrix Potter was inspired to create her duck heroine for her children's books.
Later when I toured her house, Hill Top Farm, one of the guides said Potter, who based seven books in the vicinity, enjoyed walking up to the tarn (a small mountain lake), and spent a lot of time there.
"That's where she found Jeremy sitting on a waterlily," he said, knowingly.
"Jeremy?"
"Yes Jeremy Fisher." (The frog character for those who don't know.)
To Beatrix devotees, it's almost as if the animal characters from her books are real.
But wandering around the fields and villages which inspired her you can almost imagine Peter Rabbit popping up with a carrot or Mr McGregor chasing you through a vegetable patch.
Her world comes alive as you even recognise nooks and crannies of her farmhouse and garden in her illustrations.
After arriving by train, and picking up a rental car, my first port of call was The World of Beatrix Potter in Windermere.
The attraction is heavily aimed towards very small children and Japanese and Korean tourists, and now includes an organic vegie garden using plants only known to Potter.
The best thing I found there was a gorgeous little book in its shop, Walking with Beatrix Potter - Fifteen Walks in Beatrix Potter Country by Norman and June Buckley. And over the next two days in her country I attempted some of the walks.
With directions full of kissing gates, fells and tarns, they give you the opportunity to pass by the settings of the stories, follow in her footsteps and visit some of her farms and other land holdings.
Its introduction says that although country walking in the modern sense, with maps, guide books, rucksack and other equipment would have been virtually unknown to Potter, "there can be no doubt that she walked around the area covered by the routes in this book". None of the walks include mountain ascents as there's no evidence Potter climbed the mountains or hills.
First as a young woman on holidays she would collect fungi and other botanical specimens, "absorbing, drawing and painting scenes which might later be used in illustrating the little books and generally rejoicing in the splendour of the countryside".
Potter's journal for 1882 records a walk from Wray Castle to Hawkshead during which she had to ask the way three times, was stuck in stiles and chased by cows (and probably got wet if Lake District weather was the same in the 19th century as it is now!).
Potter bought Hill Top Farm in the village of Near Sawrey in 1905 and later other farms, cottages and land in the area - in all 1,619 hectares.
As a farmer, landowner and conservationist, she personally supervised their upkeep and also the farming practices of her tenants.
Her husband solicitor William Heelis's office was in nearby Hawkshead and it's now the Beatrix Potter Gallery, housing exhibitions of her delicate watercolours.
Motivated particularly by conservation, in 1930 Potter bought the Monk Coniston Estate, which stretched from Little Langdale to Coniston and takes in Tarn Hows - another beautiful roughly one-hour walk.
She died in 1943, leaving all her land to the National Trust, together with her flocks of Herdwick sheep.
As a condition of her will, Hill Top's furnishings, library and pretty garden are as she left them.
She was cremated and her ashes secretly scattered by her farm manager near Hill Top Farm.
"She was cremated - she didn't want to be buried and trampled on like Wordsworth," the guide in her farmhouse says, referring to the famous Romantic poet William Wordsworth who also lived in the Lake District but died 16 years before Potter was born.
And he tells me he believes her ashes may have been scattered right near the tarn where I saw the Jemima-like ducks.
I thought I could feel her spirit there.
Some Beatrix Potter facts:
More than 40 million copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit have been sold worldwide in more than 35 languages - it has never been out of print since it was first published.
An engineer Leslie Linder collected Potter's drawings and succeeded in breaking and then converting the secret, miniaturised code she had used to note thoughts and observations in her private diary (covering the years 1881 to 1897, it was published in 1966).
Potter memorised all Shakespeare's plays by heart.
Potter discovered the process by which fungi reproduced but her research was not acknowledged by the scientific world until the 1990s.
Potter's parents disapproved of her two serious relationships - first with Norman Warne, from her publishing company, who died shortly after her engagement and then William Heelis who she married when she was 47.
Japan is the biggest market for Beatrix Potter in the world - The Tale of Peter Rabbit was one of the first English books to become available in translation there, and is still used as a teaching aid. And in 2006 Hill Top was recreated brick for brick at a children's zoo near Tokyo.
If you go:
World of Beatrix Potter, The Old Laundry, Bowness-on-Windermere. www.hop-skip-jump.com .
The Armitt Museum and Library, Ambleside: It contains a large collection of Beatrix Potter's fungi, natural history and archaeological watercolours and drawings and a display on her life. Call: 015-394-31212 or visit www.armitt.plus.com .
Tarn Hows, Nr Hawkshead. En-route you will see Potter's beloved Herdwick sheep along the route. See here for details.
Hill Top, Hawkshead. Make sure you book a visit early as they're timed. Parking is very limited. Call: 015-394-36269 or see here for details.
Beatrix Potter Gallery , Hawkshead: Call: 015-394-36355.
Accommodation: Storrs Hall, Windermere. 015-394-47111. On the shores of lake Windermere, the 1790 Georgian mansion is set in woodland and landscaped grounds. See here for details.
Restaurants:
The Bay Restaurant at the
Waterhead
Hotel: uncomplicated modern European cuisine in light and airy
contemporary surroundings.
The Hideaway at
Windermere : Phoenix Way, Windermere, Cumbria. Call: 44
(0)15394 43070.
Windermere and other towns in the Lake District can be reached by train from London.
BritRail Pass products: see here for details.
