Beatrix Potter Castle near Lake Windermere. Here Beatrix met Hardwicke Rawnsley, vicar of Wray and later the founding secretary of the National Trust, whose interest in the countryside and country life inspired the same in Beatrix and who was to have a lasting impact on her life. At about the age of 14, Beatrix began to keep a diary. It was written in a code of her own devising which was a simple letter for letter substitution. Her "Journal" was important to the development of her creativity, serving as both sketchbook and literary experiment: in tiny handwriting she reported on society, recorded
Hardwicke Rawnsley theme, and, as the "Dictionary of National Biography" put it, "as a minor lake poet, a vast output of verse." His memoir of Ruskin, described by "The New York Times" as "in many ways the best volume [of] his series of books upon some of the literary aspects of the Lake Country", was published in 1901. After 34 years at Crosthwaite he retired to Grasmere, where, in 1915, he had bought Allan Bank, the house in which William Wordsworth had lived between 1808 and 1811. Edith Rawnsley died in 1916, and two years later, Rawnsley married Eleanor "Nellie" Foster Simpson,