Last night, you may be surprised to learn, dear reader, I read ‘The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’, one of numerous small books written (ostensibly for children) by Beatrix Potter, national treasure and historic regional patron of the National Trust.

This brief activity was undertaken as research for a nostalgic trip to the English Lake District, currently underway and currently being fulfilled by a visit to a childhood holiday location in the Newlands Valley, near Keswick.

It had become apparent from various sources that Skelgill – the classic Lakeland farmhouse in which our family had holidayed for several sequential years in my mid-teens – was depicted as an illustration within the aforementioned book – a suggestion which I felt a compelling need to verify.

As such, I sallied forth and infiltrated Sam Read’s delightful independent bookshop in Grasmere to negotiate the vending of a bookish commodity. To subsequently discover – on page six – that the illustration in question  looked nothing like any aspect of the Skelgill farm of memory. Being now in the vicinity, my brother and travelling companion Graham and I thus made it our business to undertake a double-whammy visit a) to see for ourselves if the Skelgill of our youth was still extant, and b) to work out why received wisdom suggested it was the reference for one of Ms Potter’s whimsical illustrations.

Being blessed with an uncharacteristically magnificent, blue-skied day, we arrived past fields of gambolling new-born lambs at Skelgill to find it pretty much as we remembered leaving it over 50 years ago. A homestead farm building in the classic Lakeland tradition – long, low, slate-roofed and whitewashed, its far end buried in the nascent slopes of Catbells – the saddle-shaped hill which delineated one side of the Newlands Valley and separated this unassuming shepherding community from the waters of Derwentwater.

We roamed unchallenged around the clearly still-inhabited property which – according to our Ordnance Survey map – now featured a camping barn, seemingly unoccupied. We took very many photographs, even accosting passing walkers with a fervent request to picture us standing (as our parents did before us) in front of Skelgill’s fox-head door-knockered porch. 

And then, emergent from the remodelled rear of the building, a striding gentlemen appeared, whom we further accosted with a brief explanation as to why we were roaming uninvited and perhaps a tad suspiciously around his open-plan gardens. Happily unfazed by such intrusions, he introduced himself as the ‘new’ owner having purchased the farm several years previously from our hosts, the now less numerous Grave family, whose seemingly inexhaustible farmhouse hospitality our own family had enjoyed all those years ago.

Having expended our entire stock of nostalgia on the poor man – and forced upon him a photo of an aged, unfinished painting I had attempted of the former owner Tom Grave shepherding Herdwick sheep up his lane (unashamedly featured here just because I can) – we took our leave (along with yet more photographs) and retreated back up the lane, this time turning towards Catbells itself, having decided we should attempt to climb it, as yet more childhood nostalgia permeated our thoughts.

And there, in passing, we solve the Beatrix Potter conundrum as we pass an adjacent farmhouse, also confusingly named ‘Skelgill’ and see immediately that this was indeed the model as Beatrix Potter’s home for  ‘a little girl called Lucie, who lived at a farm called Little-town.’

For the record, our ascent of Catbells was invigorating, breathtaking (literally) and challenging, accompanied as we were by many other enthusiastic walkers including a party of some 30 schoolchildren from London, shepherded by teachers who all appeared to be not much older than their flock. Yet more photographs are taken; drone is aerialised; views are enjoyed of the viridescent sunlit Newlands valley stretching below us – and on the opposite side, now way below us, the dark and distant wind-ruffled surface of Derwentwater, before we take our leave of the balding summit and head back down the less well-trodden path towards ‘the little lambs at Skelghyl’ again.