Visiting Catbells

Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905) is set on Catbells. A little girl called Lucie, who lives at a farm called Little-town, climbs a steep path looking for her lost handkerchiefs, "up and up" until she could have dropped a pebble down the farm chimney, and finds a hedgehog washerwoman at home inside the hill.

Lucie was real: Lucie Carr, daughter of the vicar of Newlands, whom Potter met while staying at Lingholm in 1901. The book's last line says the narrator has "seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells". Little Town is on the Newlands side, so that is the side to look.

For many summers the Potter family took a house on the west shore of Derwentwater, at Lingholm and for one summer at Fawe Park next door. Beatrix sketched the woods, the fells and the lake, and the books followed.

In The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) the red squirrels paddle on rafts of twigs to Owl Island, which is St Herbert's Island in the middle of the lake. The Fawe Park kitchen garden became the garden in Benjamin Bunny. Red squirrels still live in the Lingholm woods, and the walled garden is now a café.

In 1902 the Brandelhow estate, the woods and shore at the foot of Catbells, was offered to the young National Trust for £6,500. Canon Rawnsley and Octavia Hill raised the money by public appeal in about six months, with gifts from Princess Louise and from factory workers in the Midlands.

Princess Louise opened it on 16 October 1902, and four oaks were planted that day. It was the Trust's first property in the Lake District. Its centenary is marked by a pair of carved wooden hands by the shore. The drawing above, by Thomas Hearne, shows the same wood more than a century earlier.

Halfway up the first rock step there is a slate tablet that most people climb past. It remembers Thomas Arthur Leonard, a Congregational minister who in 1891 took a group of young men from his chapel on a walking holiday, and went on to found the Co-operative Holidays Association and the Holiday Fellowship, now HF Holidays. He became the first President of the Ramblers.

Catbells was his favourite fell. The tablet calls him "father of the open-air movement in this country", and ends with Wordsworth's line about "joy in widest commonalty spread".

The novelist Sir Hugh Walpole bought Brackenburn, a house on the lower slopes of Catbells above the lake, in 1924 and lived there until he died in 1941. He wrote the Herries Chronicle there, starting with Rogue Herries (1930), and called the place a paradise on Catbells.

He was also a serious art collector who left paintings to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam. A stone seat on the fellside looks down on the house, put there in his memory by his friend Harold Cheevers. The house is private.

Three lead mines worked Catbells. On the lake side the Brandlehow mine fought water, at up to 150 gallons a minute, until it was abandoned in 1891. On the Newlands side, Yewthwaite closed in 1893; its spoil heaps and blocked levels are still there.

Potter's little door into the hill was drawn from the doors used to close old mine levels in these fells. Over the ridge, German miners began working Goldscope in earnest in 1564 and called it Gottesgab, God's gift: the name wore down to Goldscope, and there was never any gold.

The view that sends people up Catbells is the one from Friar's Crag, the little headland ten minutes from Keswick. John Ruskin's earliest memory was of being taken there by his nurse, and he is said to have ranked the view among the three or four most beautiful in Europe.

A memorial to Ruskin stands on the crag, and the National Trust bought it in memory of Canon Rawnsley. Arthur Ransome made it a lookout in Swallows and Amazons.

Keswick Mountain Festival calls Catbells the busiest hill in the North Lakes, and the boots wear the path away. Fix the Fells, the partnership that repairs Lakeland's paths, has rebuilt it in stages (one stretch below the summit was part-funded by HF Holidays, Leonard's old company), and in 2026 rangers and volunteers are working near the summit, where walkers spread out and the ground is wearing away.

Keswick Mountain Rescue is called to Catbells about six times a year, usually for a slip on the way down. The advice is simple: good shoes, take the descent slowly, and keep to the main path.