Frequently (and not so frequently) asked questions

What does everybody need when they arrive somewhere after a long journey?  You've guessed !

Question:  Where are the toilets?
Answer:  They're in the garden, half way up on the right hand side but subtly hidden and you may be distracted by the garden!

The Toilets 

The garden

And a not so frequently asked question- but it does happen!
Question: How long have you lived on this island?
Answer: We just get the map out for this.

Crossing to the 'island'

Question: Where was Beatrix Potter buried?
Answer: Beatrix was a very private person.  She was cremated and her ashes were scattered by her shepherd, Tom Storey, in a secret location.

Question: When is the quietest time to visit?
Answer: A hard one.  Generally it's quieter in the afternoons but at very busy times you may find we've sold out.  Saturday and Sunday afternoons are often surprisngly quiet.

Question: The car park's full.  What should I do?
Answer: A few options: - You could come back in a little while when there may be spaces - but please don't wait on the road.
There's a car park in Far Sawrey.  The 30 minute walk along the off road footpath gives you a great rural introduction to Hill Top.

If you click on this you should see a bigger version !

 There's more parking, and a Beatrix Potter trail, at the Esthwaite Fishery pay and display car park round the bottom end of Esthwaite Water - about 40 minute walk up.
National Trust car park at Ash Landing by the shore of Windermere and a lovely walk up - mainly off road and takes about an hour.

Sam on the footpath from Far Sawrey

Question: Referring to the Windermere car ferry - can I buy tickets for Ireland on the ferry?
Answer: Another one for the map!

Question: We've got some time to wait before going into the House.  What can we do?
Answer: Sawrey House Tearoom and the Tower Bank Arms pub can provide you with sustenance.  There's an excellent children's play area with picnic tables just down the road.  The walk to Moss Eccles Tarn, following in Beatrix's footsteps (it was one of her favourite places) takes about an hour. Go beyond the tarn to get fantastic views over to the Langdales.
Alternatively, you could get tickets for later in the day and fit in a visit to Wray Castle or the Beatrix Potter Gallery.

Play area

Sawrey House terrace

Moss Eccles Tarn

Water Lilies were Beatrix Potter's favourite flowers.  She planted a white one and a pink one in Moss Eccles tarn and they have since spread!  On her birthday, 28th July, we pick some from the tarn for the House

Question: Which is the nearest Underground Station? - Yes, it happened!
Answer: We'd guess Watford but ........ unless you're talking rabbit burrows of course!


Ticket Office Team

How many staff and volunteers can you fit inside Wray Castle?

The answer is............ nobody knows! But its quite a lot!!

Today was the grand opening of Wray Castle for the 2013 season but if you had seen how the Castle looked at the start of the week you may have thought that opening day was weeks away. Luckily for us we had an amazing group of volunteers on a working holiday at the Castle all week and they have worked miracles: dusting, hoovering, carpet cleaning, putting up shelves, throwing out the rubbish, painting blackboards, linseed oiling the portcullis, polishing floors and panelling, the list is endless.......

The volunteers were also joined by a wide range of staff; we had members of the Retail Team, Ticket Office Team, Wray Castle House Team, Direct Labour Team, Consultants, our very own Digital Media Guru Linda and of course the South Lakes Ranger Team. And as if that wasn't enough we brought in the big guns in the form of 'The Lengthsmen'!



Here is Harriet, a member of the Wray Castle Team with one of our back up members of staff!




Lottie, Christina and Corrin, also part of the Wray Castle Team giving the Oak Staircase a dust and polish.



Brian and Eric from the Direct Labour Team taking a quick break from making desks, putting up signs and helping fit out the shop.

Retail Manager Gill shows us that its not just men that can use power tools!



The Ranger Team and Volunteers survey the laying of the AstroTurf and the building of a dry stone wall!

The Castle looks amazing and it has been a real transformation this week from a dusty, dirty and rather messy building site to a polished visitor attraction.

The finished shop looks fantastic in the former music room.

We have added lots of new features this year, like a shop, new interpretation, a site managers office and some new furniture. Some of the best bits of last year we have kept and made even better- like the Castle Building activity that all kids and big kids thought was brilliant!



Our new Castle Building Blocks.

 Whilst everyone else was hard at work, dusting, hoovering, painting and moving furniture about, I was swanning around (or should that be flying around) in a cherry picker high up above the Castle. This was a very important job however, as we need to have lots of documentary photos of the Castle now that the roof has been fixed, but it did feel a bit like I was skiving off work!!




Me, doing a very important job taking photos!

Wray Castle is now open 7 days a week, 10am- 5pm, and not even snow can stop us! Hope to see you there soon.

Bringing it to life once again...

This time we hear from Paul, who's responsible for volunteer development on our 'patch', about what the new season means for our 'house' volunteers.

The houses re opening is a great time of year for me; I get to meet all our volunteers again, and hear their wonderful stories as they enthral our visitors.  The buzz that they create really brings the places to life, and this year being the 100th anniversary of the marriage of William & Beatrix gives us even more opportunity to do this.

a volunteer in Beatrix's Hill Top bedroom helping explain something to one of our visitors

The scene set for our visitors in previous years was ‘the house is left as if Beatrix has just popped out’, but this year is a bit different. This year the house is firmly in the year 1913 and we'd like you to imagine that Hill Top's famour owner is definitely here in the house, somewhere.

As visitors go round they will be met by clues that Beatrix and William are closeby, living a normal life and making their plans in the run up to their wedding, for example maybe Beatrix is ready to take a couple of quiet hours and do some painting. 

maybe Beatrix is ready to start a new illustration?

On our 'familiarisation' days for our volunteers (when they come in before the season starts to hear what's new for the year ahead) it was great to see the enthusiasm and excitement these changes bring to the stories they will tell….we hope you enjoy them as much as they did.

Not all our houses are open yet of course, Wray Castle is in its final two weeks before opening, and the old adage ‘many hands make like work’ is very true with such a vast site.  With a major building repair project now coming to an end at Wray Castle, this year getting ready should be even more of a challenge than last time around...a glimpse at one of Rose's photos of the current 'state of play' there confirms the probable scale of the challenge!!

yes, this is how the front door of the Castle currently looks!!

We've got the clean-up planned for next week, a great example of teamwork with staff and many of our volunteers from across the property all ‘mucking in’ to ensure everything is ready for our first visitors to the castle on Saturday the 23rd March. This year promises to be even better then previously ... but must dash, as I need to get back to hoovering!!



Paul with hoover

Fancy getting involved as a volunteer at Hill Top, the Beatrix Potter Gallery or Wray Castle?
go to our national volunteering page and follow the 'search for an opportunity' ;
or  send an e-mail to paul to find out more.

Find out more about the Wray Castle repairs project at its own dedicated project blog:
link to Rose's excellent castle repairs blog

post by Paul Kear
photos various NT sources

Valentines Day 1913/2013

On Valentine's Day in 1913, Beatrix was already engaged to William Heelis, though a formal announcement had not been made due to pressures from Beatrix's parents because they did not entirely approve of their daughter marrying a country solicitor.

On Valentine's Day in 2013 matters are conducted in an entirely different manner... romance was definitely in the air!

In Mr Macgregor's garden at Hill Top at noon, Jason Birch asked his girlfriend, Vicky Boyes to marry him. She said yes and all the staff did a collective sigh of relief! We all approved of Vicky marrying Jason! Particularly as Vicky is a big Beatrix Potter fan.

Jason and Vicky went to explore the house and when they came out of the front door staff had a big surprise for them.... sparkling pink bubbly and a bag of Peter Rabbit goodies.

 Jason and Vicky looking very happy outside Hill Top with their celebratory drink of pink bubbly

Vicky's gorgeous ring - diamond solitaire in a white gold band

As the sun was shining, Jason and Vicky followed in Beatrix's and William's footsteps and went for a walk round Moss Eccles Tarn before returning for an overnight stay at the Tower Bank Arms. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they set the date for 15th October - 100 years to the day when Beatrix and William married in London.

Congratulations to both Jason and Vicky - we all hope you will be very happy!

Three indisputable facts...

Three things are clear when you work here:
1 the weeks when we are closed to the public in the winter disappear at an impossibly fast rate
2 you never know what you might be asked to do next
3 you can encounter Beatrix Potter in surprising ways and places.

With only 4 weeks left before we re-open Hill Top and the Beatrix Potter Gallery (see what we mean about time?!) the race is on to get everything relating to the new Gallery exhibition done. This is where unusual task requests come in as Rose our Operations Manager at Wray Castle and John our Lead Ranger found out. As part of our multi-media presentation of the exhibition in the Gallery we needed to create audio files of extracts from Beatrix Potter's letters and books as well as interviews with those who knew her. Everyone involved headed for Dayve's makeshift sound studio in the Gallery hoping there were no noisy deliveries scheduled for the street outside!

Dayve gets the 'cans' on as Rose does her 'best' Beatrix voice

John plays farmer Tom Storey while Liz is narrator

Rose was asked to reprise her role from last year's exhibition as an 'audio Beatrix Potter' and John (typecast I'm afraid) has become the voice of Beatrix's farm manager Tom Storey; meanwhile Liz our House and Collections Manager provided some conventional narration along with the more lyrical bits.

Now Rose has a northern accent and at the risk of being controversial that may suggest to some that she is not qualified to the be the voice of Beatrix Potter. However, although Beatrix Potter was born and brought up in London she was educated at home and her main vocal influence would have been her parents who were both born and raised in the north west of England. As there is no actual recording in existence of Beatrix speaking it has been impossible to say exactly how she would sound but some of those who remembered her recalled a soft northern accent (hence Rose).

Finally those participating in this audio endeavour suggested that they felt that the spirit of Beatrix  was strong in the room and looking more carefully in the corner (see from the photo below) we can appreciate why!

Who is that in the corner?!

You'll be able to hear the results of the recordings, once Dayve has worked his magic with the audio software when the Gallery re-opens with its new exhibition on Saturday the 9th of February.


post by Linda
photos by Dayve Ward [photographybyward]

In this new year...

We hope you all had a great Xmas holiday and as it's January and a good time to look forward here's a quick snapshot of just a few of the important things on our houses team's planner for 2013...

New-look characters - in the Beatrix Potter tradition but with a modern twist

On Sat 9th February 2013Hill Top re-opens for the new season. We think a new generation of children might become fans of Beatrix Potter's characters this year as a new 3-D animated version of Peter and His Friends is brought to television by Nickelodeon, to be shown in the UK on the CBeebies channel. You might have seen the Xmas special already as it was broadcast in both the US and UK over the holiday season. If you'd like to watch the US preview for the Xmas episode (complete with American accents, the British version had British accents!) here's a link to where you can find the promotional video.

Also on Sat 9th Feb...

A soft & cuddly Pigling Bland

A brand new 2013 Exhibition opens at the Beatrix Potter Gallery helping us to celebrate two Beatrix centenaries, one personal (her marriage) and the other professional (the publication of her 'Tale of Pigling Bland').

On Sat 23rd March
Wray Castle re-opens for the season showing off improved visitor facilities and (hopefully) a less leaky roof!

In July
Beatrix Potter's birthday, on the 28th is an annual celebration for the house team.

In October

Beatrix and William

We'll be celebrating the 100th anniversary of Beatrix's marriage to William Heelis (a marriage that endured for over 30 years until her death).

On 31st October
Halloween, when Wray Castle will be at the centre of our fun again.

In December
Xmas - and the question is will Wray Castle be able to beat its Xmas tree record with an even taller tree this year?!

We look forward to telling you all about our year here on our blog, some of it planned and some of it no doubt unplanned! In the meantime best wishes for a Happy New Year.


post by Linda
photos Nickelodeon | National Trust Shop | National Trust