Happy Birthday Beatrix Potter!

Much of the Lakes District is packed with Potter Mania, and that’s not Harry Potter, but Beatrix Potter, the author of the beloved Peter Rabbit and other stories set in idyllic countrysides that she both wrote and sketched in superlative genius. So much so, that as a child in India, I loved the stories, and was convinced that the landscapes were fantasies ranking close to fairytales in reality. On the burning plains of Uttar Pradesh, nothing could be further from reality than Brandel Howe and Nichol End.

On July 28th, her birthday, I’m happy to share a few photographs of the shores of Derwent Water, where Beatrix Potter spent 11 summer holidays in her family’s summer home on outskirts of Keswick.

And where we spent a few happy days in 2019 before beginning our Camino in Spain. Between trailing clouds of glory behind Wordsworth’s homes in Grasmere, and hunting down his daffodils in Ullswater, we also walked around Derwent Water, to stand in the places that Beatrix Potter re-created in her stories of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, Benjamin Bunny and Squirrel Nutkin.

The forests were still sparse as an early spring can be, and the day was rainy – as you can expect the Lake District to be.

The back story always fascinates me, where did my favourite authors and poets stand and stare, and then create worlds and words that live forever. And this did not disappoint. One day I may write about my own adventures in the Lake District – and how that was my own backstory!

It’s a brimming quiet joy to follow in the footsteps of the great, and small, like Peter Rabbit on the shores of Derwent Water.