Column by historian Roger Bingham of Ackenthwaite:

BEATRIX Potter was far more than a genteel lady who composed sentimental tales for children featuring drawings of animals whom she illustrated wearing Edwardian clothes.

Her artistic and academic ability also made her an authority on Lakeland fauna, particularly fungi.

Despite being of ‘independent means’, she invested her royalties in buying Lakeland farmsteads in order to preserve Herdwick sheep and their shepherds.

Locals remembered her and her solicitor husband, William Heelis, as speaking la-di-da, though, in the film Miss Potter, he was given a northern accent.

Her posh bossiness could drive farmers’ wives to tears but she ‘got on’ with their husbands and meekly complied when a tenant who, fearing that ‘Mrs Heelis’ might catch cold while haymaking, ordered her 'to git yersell yam [home], ye’re mair bother than yer worth’.

Though her parents kept a carriage and she later engaged a chauffeur to take her round the shows and farm sales, she loved to walk along the Claife lanes in clogs and with a sack around her neck.

No wonder that, memorably, a tramp, sheltering from the rain, called out: "It's a bad day for the likes of thee and me."