THE AUTHOR AND THE HILL FARMER
Beatrix Potter is remembered as the illustrator of small animals in waistcoats. The sheep breeder is a much quieter figure.
In 1905 she used the money from her early books to buy Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey. Over the following decades she kept buying land, until she had assembled a large estate of working farms.
This was not a rich woman’s hobby. She bred prize-winning Herdwick sheep, worked closely with her shepherd Tom Storey, and by 1943 had been elected the first woman president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association. She died that December before she could take up the post.