The Lake District is the UK’s most visited National Park and one of the country’s top tourist attractions. Its popularity is partly thanks to celebrated writer Beatrix Potter – though perhaps not in the way you might think.

Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866 and first visited the Lake District at the age of 16. After many family holidays in the area, she bought a little farm in Near Sawrey called Hill Top, setting many of her books in and around the property. She subsequently married a local solicitor, William Heelis, and continued to live in her beloved Lake District until her death in 1943.

Today, Beatrix Potter’s books are read around the world and every year hundreds of thousands of fans come in search of Peter Rabbit and his friends, driving a lucrative cottage industry. Hill Top, run by the National Trust, is open to the public and William Heelis’s former office is now the Beatrix Potter Gallery, also run by the National Trust.

But that is only part of Beatrix Potter’s legacy.

After moving to Hill Top, Potter developed an interest in conserving the area’s unique landscape, supporting the efforts of the National Trust. Encouraged by her long-time friend Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, a founder of the NT, she and Heelis bought and managed many local fell farms, including Troutbeck Park, a 1,900-acre farm under threat of development (she used Troutbeck Park as a setting for The Fairy Caravan). Potter also helped to improve rural living and local health care, opposed hydroplanes on Lake Windermere and became a prize-winning breeder of native Herdwick sheep (she became the first female president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association which celebrates its centenary this year).

When she died, Beatrix Potter left 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust, as well as 14 farms which she stipulated should all continue to graze Herdwicks. The Trust has continued Potter’s conservation work and now owns 91 hill farms in the area, most with mainly Herdwick flocks.

Without Beatrix Potter’s practical and tireless support, it’s doubtful whether the Lake District would have remained the place of spectacular beauty it is today; somewhere described by Wordsworth as ‘a sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’, and a landscape which inspired the stories so loved by generations of children.