The Women of the Fells: Female Farmers in the Lake District

On a Lakeland fell farm in Beatrix Potter's time, women worked from before light until after dark. Yet the world they worked in belonged to men. The fell, the flock, the auction ring, the breeders' meetings — all of these were male territory. Women ran the dairy, kept the house, raised the chickens, and made the butter that brought in a steady trickle of income. That work was essential. It was also invisible, in the records and in the memory of the time.

This is the story of those women — the dairywomen, the hired help, the farmer's wives, and the few who crossed into the world the men had kept for themselves.

---

The Farmer's Wife

The backbone of any fell farm was the farmer's wife. She ran the dairy. She milked the house cows, made the butter and cheese, raised the chickens, managed the farmhouse kitchen, and — on a working farm — hired and managed any domestic help. When a shepherd needed feeding through the clipping season, she fed him. When a lamb was brought in cold from the fell, she was the one who put it by the kitchen fire.

The work was unrelenting. A farm without a capable wife was a farm in trouble. Local knowledge of the district passed through farmwives as much as through their husbands. They knew which neighbours were honest, which fields carried fluke, which families could be trusted to take on a farm.

The Herdwick farming community acknowledged this, in its way. A farmer hiring a new manager or shepherd would consider the wife almost as carefully as the man himself. Beatrix Potter was explicit about this. When she was looking for a new farm manager at Troutbeck Park, she interviewed his wife, Lucy Walker, as a separate matter. She understood that in a remote fell farm — isolated through long winters, dependent on steady domestic management — a capable wife was not optional. She was half the appointment.

---

The Dairymaid

Below the farmer's wife in the farm's domestic order was the dairymaid. She was a hired worker, usually young, who helped with the milking and the dairy. Before Tom Storey and his family moved to Hill Top Farm, Beatrix hired a dairymaid. A milk separator was in use; the cream became butter or cheese. Shorthorn cows — the standard dairy animal of the period — were milked by hand, the milker sitting on a three-legged stool.

The dairymaid's work was skilled and physically demanding. Milking cows by hand, twice a day, was a repetitive and tiring job. The milk had to be cooled, the separator cleaned, the butter churned and patted into shape. In summer there was more milk than could be used; in winter, the herd's output fell. The dairymaid had to manage both.

It was also work that went largely unrecorded. The dairy accounts were kept, but the woman who maintained them rarely had her name attached.

---

What Women Were Thought Capable Of

The belief that women were unsuited to outdoor farm work was widespread — and fiercely held. In 1916, when wartime labour shortages forced the question into the open, The Times reported on the debate. Most farmers, it noted, believed that women were "incapable of performing dirty jobs, using horses, or working in bad weather."

Beatrix Potter, who had been farming for more than ten years by then, had her own view. She wrote a letter to The Times in March 1916, under the name "A Woman Farmer," on the question of women working on the land. Her point was practical: there were skilled farm women who were being drawn away from the land into munitions work by much higher wages that no farmer could match. She was not arguing that all women could do farm work. She was arguing that the right women could. The Women's National Land Service Corps, she felt, was handling the recruitment the wrong way. It was recruiting by touting "theatrical attractions of uniform and armlet." It should have been looking for women who were genuinely suited to the work.

She described what she wanted: "the right sort of woman." She had employed such a woman herself.

---

Louie Choyce

After Beatrix's letter appeared in The Times, she received an enquiry from a woman named Eleanor Louisa Choyce — "Louie," as her family called her. Louie was about forty, a former governess from Gloucestershire with some farming experience. She applied for the farm work position that Beatrix had described.

Beatrix checked her references carefully. She wrote back an honest and rather unusual letter: she described Hill Top in detail, explained her own situation, confessed she did not attend church regularly, and ended by asking, bluntly, whether Miss Choyce had a sense of humour. She did not want a "sham lidy."

Louie arrived in Sawrey in the spring of 1916 and contracted measles almost immediately. After two weeks in quarantine, she settled into Hill Top. Louie's letters home described the household and its mistress with affectionate precision: "She is quite out of the common — short, blue-eyed, fresh-coloured face, frizzy hair brushed tightly back, dresses in a tweed skirt pinned at the back with a safety-pin... Mr Heelis is a quiet man, very kind. They believe together in the simple life."

Louie proved exactly what Beatrix had hoped for. She worked hard, knew what she was doing, and was good company. The employment that began as a wartime arrangement became a friendship that lasted the rest of Beatrix's life.

---

The World Women Did Not Enter

The world that women rarely entered was the world of the sheep. The Herdwick show circuit, the breeders' meetings, the tup fairs, the auction rings — these were almost entirely male. They met in taverns and smoky barns. They conducted business with handshakes. They spoke the dialect of the fell country, and they did not expect women to understand it.

When Beatrix joined the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association in 1924, she was one of only a handful of women in the whole organisation. She attended the twice-yearly tup fairs and the local shows. She sat through the tavern meetings as an abstainer, often slipping off to a tearoom nearby. She wore her Herdwick tweed suit and her brown felt hat and she paid close attention.

The men, for the most part, found her strange. They had the usual assumption: a famous author who kept sheep was sentimental about them, not serious. Linda Lear records that this was a common view among the men she faced in the show pens. It was, as Lear notes, "almost always the bravado of men uncomfortable with a woman, and an off-comer."

She did not argue with them. She showed better sheep instead.

---

The Exception

The endpoint came in March 1943. The Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association voted Beatrix president-elect — the first woman ever chosen to lead it. She died that December, before she could take up the office. One woman, after two decades of exceptional work, recognised at last by the men who had made the world she had quietly joined. That was what it took, in that time and place.

The other women of the fells — the dairywomen, the farmer's wives, the hired help, the Louie Choyces of the district — had been doing essential work all along, without any such recognition. They kept the farms running. Their names rarely appear in the records.