Hilltop, a hilltop near Hilltop, and <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Sizergh</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Castle</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>
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I wound up sleeping in a bit on Sunday, so I didn’t go out for my early walk. Over breakfast, Mom and I talked over options. She was very keen to see Beatrix Potter’s home, Hilltop in the hamlet of Near Sawrey. I knew that would involve some more country driving, but it was fairly near Ambleside, which we’d already reached safely once; so I was pretty confident I could do it. Even the best maps were a little fuzzy about which roads would be best, but Hilltop is a big tourist draw, so I figured the signs would be good.
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We were doing fine for about a mile out of Ambleside, until the nice yellow Automobile Association signs pointing to it stopped. I took a turning that felt right, but was almost immediately launched onto a series of lanes that were just over six feet wide with traffic in both directions. Fortunately, it was very little traffic, as whenever we did meet a car coming at us, the only choice was for one of the other to pull over hard against the stone wall on the left to let the other pass. We took a stop in one spot to look at the map again, but I again read it wrong and we were off into the tiny lanes again. Finally, we reached a place called Drunken Duck. This place had so few roads that I couldn’t go wrong. Before long, we were back on a respectable ten or twelve foot wide road, and made our way in minutes to Sawrey.
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In fact, all that dashing around on back roads was very scenic, and we only had to negotiate seven or eight close passages, but I wasn’t trying to do any more of it. It also meant that we arrived at exactly the right time to get an easy parking space and get tickets for the first tour slot.
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You can learn anything you want to know about Beatrix Potter from a web search, so I’ll pass over all the biographical stuff to what I really liked about seeing the house. First, it was a typical example of a <st1:country-region w:st="on">Cumbria</st1:country-region> farmhouse, albeit a well off one; and it helped me conjure up a mental picture of farming sheep here in the <st1:place w:st="on">Lake District</st1:place>. Second, Potter had followed the advice to write what she knew, or at least to draw what she knew. Throughout the house, they had examples of her drawings sitting on or next to pieces of furniture or windows with views that appear in the drawings. I always enjoy those kind of thing in context moments. When next I’m visiting my nieces, I’m going to grab their collected Potter stories and bore them silly recognizing bits of <st1:place w:st="on">Lake District</st1:place> trivia in the illustrations.
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Beatrix was also a woman who knew how to find a good piece of property and, flush with cash from the successful publication of Peter Rabbit, she could afford to buy it once she’d found it. Hilltop isn’t actually on top of a hill. It sets next to a feature called Hilltop. Even that Hilltop isn’t really a hill. I’m not sure how it got its name, but to my eye, it looks exactly like the top of a hill without the hill under it. It’s very much like the output of those special pans that let you bake just muffin tops without the actual muffin. If you’ve never seen such a thing, trust me they exist. They’re as silly as they sound, but Hilltop looks just like the top of a hill that has been removed and placed down at ground level.
The terrain near the house rolls in a very gentle way, and it sports a deep green, lush, but short growth of grass that makes the whole area look like a mossy bank grown to giant size. That whole mix of scales – is it a tiny hill or a giant moss bank? – gives the area a strong visual appeal.
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At any rate, it was a pleasant spot in which to raise sheep and churn out illustrated stories about anthropomorphic animals, and she made a good job of it.
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After the house, we kitted up for what I planned to be a brief walk up into the hills and back down. I had eyeballed a longer circular route, but I saw that it had a lot of climbing, so I didn’t even suggest doing it. We started out going up a farm lane that got modestly steep and then held that grade for a long time. As we took breaks, I kept showing Mom what the map showed was ahead. There was a mountain pond (what they call a tarn here) a little ways up the trail. She thought that would be nice to see, so we kept going.
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It was a beautiful day for walking – sunny with a light breeze blowing to keep it from feeling too hot. The little tarn was lovely, with a few swans and ducks on duty. Mom wanted to photograph the swans, but they were all swimming head or tail on to her. She urged them to turn sideways, and they both did. I haven’t seen the photo yet, but I’ll bet it’s great. I should admit right here that she gets better pictures than I do. I can’t hold still enough to save my life. If you look at the pictures associated with this journal, you’ll notice that the <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City> ones are a bit sharper than the rest. Mom shot those.
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We were so happy with having made it as far as we had that we decided to keep going. I suggested we could either go another half mile or so up to a crossing where we could turn around or we could take the circular route I’d seen jumping off the map. I could see, and I told Mom, that doing the circuit would involve quite a bit of climbing up to a couple of modest peaks. She wanted to go for it, so we did.
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My favorite thing about this walk was that we effectively changed terrains about every half an hour. The sheep farm area was a lot like what we’d been walking in previously. That transitioned into some marshy, boggy space around a few tarns. Next, we were in a coniferous forest that could have been Limberlost in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Shenandoah</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">National Park</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>. We climbed up out of the forest onto a rocky height that gave some nice views of Ambleside and the northern end of Windermere. Down off that area, we walked into a part of the forest again that had been partly logged and partly damaged by windstorms. Mom describedit as a model of chaos – very different from the orderly landscapes <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> is so well supplied with. Chaos was followed by a more open wood with some steep descents. We ran into some other walkers who pointed us to a side trail and told us it had the best overlook of the walk and was the only place short of an aircraft from which you can see all of Windermere.
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We followed the side trail just a few dozen yards to a narrow projection, rocky and grassy, from which we did get a broad panorama of the whole lake down below us. We had the view to ourselves except for a young woman resting on the turf with a book. Then we walked down through more of the rolling stony terrain we’d seen near hilltop, and finally back to the sheep farms and the road in a spot called Far Sawrey. Looking at the map, I pointed out that where we were standing, Far Sawrey was quite near while Near Sawrey was much farther off. I’m sure this was an entirely original reflection.
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Far Sawrey has a nice pub in the Sawrey Hotel. I had a pint of bitter while Mom had a shandy (lemonade and Fosters lager, it’s better than it sounds). We sat out on a picnic table and watched other hikers refresh themselves as well. It was an easy stroll back to the car in Near Sawrey. All the way there, Near was getting nearer while Far was getting . . . oh all right I’ll let it go.
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The drive back to Keswick was fine. No accidental detours into Drunken Duck or anyplace else. I did have one lively moment when a motorcyclist passed me on a blind corner into the teeth of an oncoming car, but everyone came out alright. I think the slight, residual buzz from my pint actually calmed me down just a patch and improved my handling of the car, but I’m not going to take it up as a regular therapy.
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Garmin Facts: 6.2 Miles walked in 2:47 walking and 1:15 resting for a 2.2 mile per hour moving average with 995 feet climbed. Not too bad for a chunky middle aged man and his senior citizen mother.
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We had dinner at a nice place called Zenith. If you pretend the “e” is an “ay” you’ll be saying it like a local. We’d booked there for Sunday night on the advice of our landlady. Apparently the rest of the week it’s a standard restaurant, but Sunday night they do special meals that are really nice. We certainly found that to be the case. Even the vegetables were tasty.
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After dinner we walked over to the theatre for a show called Pooja. One woman show. The writer/performer is an Indian British woman (perhaps by way of <st1:place w:st="on">Malaya</st1:place>.) She portrays a whole pile of characters, all relatives and friends of a woman who is born with a very unfavorable horoscope and is bullied through life by some of her family forcing her to carry out rituals to try to overcome her fate and other parts of her family trying to convince her to leave all that old fashioned stuff behind. The characters were not as distinct as some shows in this format that I’ve seen, but she put a lot of life into it and told a good story. There were some women of Indian descent in the room, and I could see them nodding and silently amen sistering at many points in the show.
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On the walk home, we tried to find a level route from the theatre to our B&B and discovered that there was no such thing.
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