Hill Top House and The Lake District

About a year ago we made a semi-spontaneous trip to the Lake District for what would prove to be one the best weekends of my life! I say ‘semi-spontaneous’ because outright spontaneity isn’t really our style. About a week before Easter bank holiday weekend we discovered that we were all going to be free, something that never usually happens, so we thought we’d make the best of it and take a trip somewhere.

The Lake District had been on my radar for a little while because I wanted to visit Hill Top House, the home of Beatrix Potter, and a little research proved there was plenty of other stuff to do too.

We stayed at a very pleasant hostel in Kendal. I don’t think I’m really cut out for hostels but the price was reasonable and it was in a great location! It being bank holiday weekend everywhere was super busy and there was a constant queue of traffic from Kendal to Lake Windermere, but once we arrived there and headed off to Hill Top were on the back roads and it was absolutely fine.

There’s no photography inside the house so you’ll have to rely on my inadequate descriptions, in fact, the only way to describe it is to say it’s like something out of a Beatrix Potter book because it quite literally is!

Inside they have copies of Potter’s books in each room opened to the page showing an illustration of, say, a mouse running around a bedstead and then you look up and the flipping bedstead is right there in front of your eyes! Potter was clearly influenced by her surroundings, and it’s easy to see why they provoked such marvellous little stories. The cottage and landscape are gorgeous and they have real life rabbits hopping around the garden.

The photos above show us stood outside the front door and the special ‘From Hill Top’ copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit we got from the gift shop.

We stayed in the Lake District for two nights and on both nights we ate at The Waterhead Hotel’s Bar and Grill. If we find somewhere good to eat we’ll eat there until we’re sick of it! They had such good food and drink! It’s right on the shores of Lake Windermere so we spent our evenings sat out on the dock listening to music and admiring these views:

On day two we went on a little roam. We spent the morning on a Victorian Steam Yacht Gondola on Lake Coniston.

And the afternoon at the Lakeland Miniature Village. This is literally just in someone’s back garden. The owner began making these tiny replicas of local landmarks for therapeutic reasons and now his garden is full of them.

We also visited The Puzzling Place in Keswick, which was a lot of fun and provided an opportunity to take such charming photographs as this.

I wish we’d have had more time to maybe got on some rambles, do some water sports, or see more of the lakes, so we’ll definitely be going back at some point!