The Farm's Economy: How Hill Top Paid for Itself

Beatrix Potter always said she farmed "as a business." She meant it. Hill Top was not a wealthy woman's ornament or a place to paint in the summer. It was a working property, and she expected it to work. This is the story of what the farm earned, what it cost, and how the money moved.

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What She Started With

When Beatrix bought Hill Top in November 1905, she paid £2,805 for the farm. The purchase came largely from her book earnings — money she had made from Peter Rabbit and the little books that followed.

What she got for her money was a mixed farm in need of attention. The farmhouse required repairs. The buildings wanted work. And the stock was modest: ten cows and thirty-one sheep, along with the pigs her manager John Cannon had been raising.

The pigs were an immediate income stream — bought only with pedigree papers, sold across the surrounding villages. The butter scales were also wrong — the farm was selling short weight without knowing it. She had them corrected and certified at the police station. Both discoveries pointed to the same lesson. A farm was a business, and it needed to be run as one.

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What the Farm Produced

Hill Top in its mature years was a mixed farm. It earned from several sources, not from one.

Milk was an early income stream. In the early years a dairymaid ran the dairy. Butter and cheese went to market and to the village shop, where Beatrix sometimes bartered farmstuffs for extra sugar.

Turkeys and chickens brought in regular money, especially in wartime. Beatrix was not entirely comfortable with the slaughter. "Poor dears," she wrote of her turkeys, "they are so tame and tractable, but they do eat." She was philosophical about farm death as a rule, but tame animals tested it. They brought "a fair price," as she noted, which was what mattered.

Pigs remained part of the operation for years. She slaughtered lambs at the farm too — Tom Storey "butched" them, as he put it, and dressed meat was sold cheaply through the village. "Meat was cheap in those days," Tom recalled. "Dressed lamb brought about sixpence a pound."

The sheep were not primarily for wool or meat in the early years — they were, as she slowly came to understand, harder to profit from than the other animals. The Herdwick breed that she loved was known for its coarse fleece and modest meat. It was not fashionable wool, and it never would be. This was a tension she lived with for the rest of her farming life.

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The 1916 Snapshot

In the spring of 1916, Beatrix wrote a long letter to a woman named Louie Choyce who had enquired about farm work. She wanted to give an honest picture of the business. Hill Top, she explained, then covered 120 acres: nine of them arable, the rest meadow, hill pastures, and intake land. It kept two horses, nine or ten cows, and sixty sheep, forty-seven of them lambing ewes. There was also a "sizeable flock of chickens, turkeys and some ducks."

She was clear about one thing: "I do not depend on my 120-acre farm exclusively for a living and I can pay a proper wage." Her income from the Peter Rabbit books and their licensing, though declining, was still considerable. She did not need the farm to pay her rent. She farmed her own land outright.

This was a real advantage. In the same letter she wrote: "I am fortunate in not having to pay rent, as I farm my own land. The tenant farmers are having a severe struggle; if things don't improve next year many of them will have to give up." She understood the difference clearly. The farm had to be run well, but it did not have to subsidise her life.

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The Galloway Cattle

After her marriage to William Heelis in 1913, Beatrix began building a herd of Galloway cattle. Galloways were a hardy hornless breed, black-coated and suited to rough grazing. She was convinced they could do well on the mixed ground at Troutbeck Park, where conditions were too hard for softer breeds.

By the late 1920s the Galloway herd had become, in Lear's words, "a close rival" to the Herdwicks in her affections — and also in the farm's accounts. Her shepherd Joseph Moscrop knew cattle as well as sheep, and she relied on his opinion when the time came to buy new stock. The cattle could be sold for quality beef. They earned differently from the sheep, and at better margins.

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The Wool Question

The wool from Herdwick sheep was always a problem. It was coarse, hard-wearing, and out of fashion. The luxury wool markets wanted soft fleeces. The Herdwick produced nothing like that.

She talked about it with unusual frankness. By the time of the Second World War, with wartime subsidies propping up prices, she was still worried about what would happen once the war ended. She wrote in 1943 to her American friend Bertha Mahony Miller: "It's doubtful if Herdwick sheep farms can survive another slump unless a fresh market can be found for the harsh hard-wearing wool. The government is buying it all, reported to be for khaki — and a rumour that the cloth is going to Russia. Herdwick cloth never wears out! I should think it's suitable for Russia."

To her shepherd Joseph Moscrop she was even plainer: "There's no use pretending that it is equal to other wools; but it is the most useful and waterproof wool for the Lakes' climate."

The Herdwick was not a profitable breed in the ordinary commercial sense. She knew that. She kept them anyway, because they were the right breed for the high fells, and because she believed in them. The question of how hill farms could survive — financially — without compromising that commitment would outlast her.

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The Scale at Its Peak

By the Second World War, the Heelis farms had grown well beyond Hill Top. Troutbeck Park, Monk Coniston, and properties in Eskdale and Little Langdale were all in operation. The combined scale was very large.

In a letter to an American friend written around 1940, she put some numbers to it. "We were reckoning up the farm accounts," she wrote. "W. says I have marketed just over a thousand sheep in the twelve months — not fat, of course, except a hundred or two. Most of them store sheep for fattening in the low lands."

A thousand sheep marketed in a year. That was the scale she was operating at. It was not a hobby.

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What the Farm Was Really For

Did the farms pay? The honest answer is: not always, and not fully — and Beatrix knew it. The Herdwick wool was a poor earner. The sheep market had bad years. Farm wages, repairs, and stock costs were steady drains. Her own independence from the farm's income was the thing that made the whole operation possible.

But she was not farming for profit alone, and she was honest about that too. The farm was the purpose. The land mattered. The sheep and the traditional farming methods mattered. Her book earnings and her land purchases were all pointing in the same direction. She wanted to keep the Lakes working — in the old way, by the right people, with the right breed of sheep.

The farm's economy was not separate from that goal. It was part of it.