Beatrix Potter cremation location

If someone mentions Beatrix Potter you imagine pastoral Lake District settings or the miscellany of fictional animals she invented. Though she died at her home Hill Top near Windermere there is no grave to visit. Her body was driven sixty miles down to Blackpool’s main crematorium to be turned to ash. Here I am showing the building where she was returned to dust.

Even though she was immensely successful and worth about £15 million in today’s money she gave up illustrating to farm sheep. There were no children from her thirty-year marriage to her solicitor husband William but she was motherly to his nieces. She died of pneumonia and heart disease just before Christmas in 1943 aged 77. She’d amassed a property portfolio of which most was left to the National Trust: 4,000 acres of land, sixteen farms, cottages and her beloved sheep. The remainder was left when her husband who died nearly two years later.

Here I am at Carleton Cemetery and Crematorium which is north of Blackpool Tower. It was built eight years before Beatrix died and she was one of the first notable people to be cremated here. She was brought 62 miles south to Blackpool - a journey of about ninety minutes. This seems odd but the other crematoria in Lancaster and Barrow-In-Furness weren’t built until the early sixties.

Nobody alive knows where her ashes were scattered. Beatrix (first name : Helen) decreed that she should be cremated and her shepherd Tom Storey sprinkle her ashes in a secret location in the Lake District. Sadly he died without telling anyone the location.

I circled the crematorium and had a good look at the big flues, pipes and ducts that makes the burning happen. Cremation normally takes about four hours in total - two hours to cremate and another two to cool down. I did a salute and left.