Beatrix Potter Garden Trail at Birnam Arts
Bringing Beatrix Potter’s Perthshire Story to Life
Brilliant Trails was delighted to work with Birnam Arts to create a new Beatrix Potter Garden Trail and visitor experience celebrating the author and illustrator’s special connection with Perthshire.
While Beatrix Potter is famously associated with the Lake District, Perthshire also played an important role in her life. Childhood summers spent in the area gave Beatrix opportunities to explore the countryside, study wildlife, draw and develop the fascination with nature that would later become such an important part of her work. The ambition at Birnam Arts was to celebrate this connection in a way that would appeal to today’s visitors while remaining sensitive to Beatrix Potter’s extraordinary legacy.
Working closely with the team at Birnam Arts, Brilliant Trails developed an experience that brings together the indoor exhibition, outdoor garden, family activities and interpretation into one connected visitor attraction.
Working Together to Protect an Important Legacy
With a name as significant as Beatrix Potter, authenticity was central to the project from the outset.
Brilliant Trails worked closely with the team at Birnam Arts throughout the development process, researching stories, refining content, and carefully considering how to present Beatrix Potter’s life, characters, and connection with Perthshire. We also worked within Penguin’s requirements, ensuring the Beatrix Potter brand, characters, and associated artwork were treated appropriately and consistently throughout the experience.
Every element needed to feel at home within Beatrix Potter’s world.
From the language used in the activities to the characters’ appearance and the way stories are introduced, careful attention was paid to creating something that felt playful and engaging while respecting the authenticity that makes Beatrix Potter’s work so special. The result is a contemporary visitor experience that celebrates her stories while protecting the heritage behind them.
Stepping into the Garden
The outdoor garden provides a wonderful opportunity for visitors to encounter some very familiar faces. Characters and scenes inspired by Beatrix Potter’s much-loved stories appear throughout the planting and landscape, creating unexpected discoveries around the garden. Visitors can find Peter Rabbit enjoying his picnic, Jeremy Fisher sitting on his lily pad and plenty of other surprises as they explore.
Rather than creating a conventional sequence of interpretation panels, the garden has been designed to reward curiosity. Characters, sculptures and small details encourage visitors to look a little closer, explore different areas and discover things for themselves. For younger visitors, however, there is another adventure taking place…
Where Has Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s Washing Gone?
There has been a bit of a laundry mishap in the garden. Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s washing has blown away!
Children are invited to set off around the garden and help track down the missing laundry, searching for different items along the way. A specially created Children’s Activity Book accompanies the adventure, with clues, questions, and activities that encourage children to investigate their surroundings and interact with the characters and features they discover.
But there is an important difference between this and a conventional permanent trail. Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s washing won’t be hanging around forever.
A Trail Designed to Change
From the beginning, Brilliant Trails designed the children’s experience as an interchangeable trail system.
The physical trail infrastructure provides a durable, long-term foundation for the attraction, while individual elements can be changed to introduce completely new stories, challenges and adventures. Today, children are helping Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle recover her missing washing. On a future visit, Peter Rabbit and his friends could face an entirely different problem to solve.
This allows Birnam Arts to continually refresh the experience without having to replace the entire trail.
It also gives families an important reason to return. Rather than completing the trail once and feeling they have experienced everything it has to offer, visitors can come back to discover a new story and a new challenge. The result is a flexible platform for ongoing and seasonal visitor engagement, allowing the adventure to evolve alongside the attraction.
Not Just for Children
Although Beatrix Potter’s characters naturally appeal to younger visitors, her life, work and connection with Perthshire have a much wider audience. We wanted to ensure the outdoor garden had just as much to offer visitors who weren’t following the children’s adventure. Brilliant Trails therefore created a dedicated Adult Visitor Guide, providing additional interpretation about Beatrix Potter, her time in Perthshire and the stories associated with the characters encountered around the garden.
Importantly, the guide also provides a connection between the indoor exhibition and outdoor trail. Visitors can discover original artefacts and learn about Beatrix’s life inside Birnam Arts before continuing outdoors, where the guide adds further context to the characters, stories and features they encounter.
For adults visiting without children, it means the garden remains an interpretive experience in its own right. For families, different generations can explore the same garden together while discovering its layers.
One Garden, Different Experiences
This layered approach became an important part of the finished attraction. Children have a mystery to solve, while adults have additional stories and interpretation to discover. Families can encounter familiar characters together, while visitors interested in literary heritage can delve deeper into Beatrix Potter’s relationship with Perthshire. Those simply enjoying the garden can explore the plantings, sculptures, materials, and unexpected details throughout the space.
Rather than asking every visitor to experience the garden in the same way, it offers different opportunities to engage based on age and interests.
Bringing Characters into the Landscape
A key part of the project was taking the experience beyond printed interpretation and bringing Beatrix Potter’s world physically into the garden. Bespoke sculptures and carvings create memorable points of discovery throughout the route, allowing characters and elements of the stories to become part of the landscape itself.
These pieces are not simply visual features.
The different shapes, carved surfaces, and natural textures also provide valuable tactile and sensory touchpoints, encouraging visitors to get closer and engage with the experience through touch as well as sight. This is particularly valuable for younger visitors and helps create a richer experience for visitors with different sensory and accessibility needs. By combining interpretation with sculpture, natural materials, planting and tactile features, the garden encourages visitors to look, touch, explore and discover as they make their way around.
Designing Interpretation for the Garden
The materials used throughout the trail were carefully considered to ensure the new interpretation felt appropriate within the garden setting.
For the main interpretation points, Brilliant Trails created bespoke Corten steel lecterns. Corten was selected not only for its durability outdoors but also for the way it changes in response to its environment. As the steel naturally weathers, it develops its distinctive warm, rust-coloured patina, allowing the structures to settle beautifully into the surrounding landscape.
We then took the design a step further by incorporating character silhouettes cut directly into the steel.
This transforms the lecterns from simple supporting structures into features of the trail themselves. Familiar characters appear within the Corten steel, adding another small moment of discovery as visitors explore. As the material continues to weather, the lecterns will develop even more character – becoming part of the garden rather than simply sitting within it.
New Signage Across the Site
The project also provided an opportunity to look beyond the trail itself and create new signage around the wider Birnam Arts site. The signage was developed to create a more consistent visitor experience, helping people navigate the attraction while ensuring the visual language complemented the new Beatrix Potter Garden Trail. From arrival and orientation through to discovering the garden and exhibition, these details help make the visitor journey feel considered and connected. It is an important part of the Brilliant Trails approach. A successful visitor experience is not simply about what happens at individual trail stops; it begins with how visitors arrive, understand the site and find their way around it.
Connecting the Exhibition and Garden
The indoor exhibition at Birnam Arts provides the historical foundation for the experience. Here, visitors can discover more about Beatrix Potter’s childhood summers in Perthshire, explore original artefacts and learn about the experiences that helped influence her lifelong fascination with nature. The garden then allows visitors to step outside and encounter that story in a completely different way.
The Adult Visitor Guide strengthens this connection, encouraging visitors to see the exhibition and garden as complementary parts of one experience rather than two separate attractions. The traditional children’s play area adds another dimension, giving younger visitors space to play and extending the time families can spend enjoying Birnam Arts.
Together, the exhibition, garden, trail, guides, and play area create a visitor experience with something to discover for people of all ages and interests.
From Trail Design to Installation
Bringing all these elements together required much more than producing individual signs or activities. Brilliant Trails considered the complete physical and creative experience – from storytelling, interpretation and visitor flow to graphics, printed materials, signage, sculptures, fabrication and installation. Our in-house team was able to bring these different disciplines together, developing the creative concept and content before progressing through design, production, and final on-site installation.
This joined-up approach ensured the trail signage, Corten steel lecterns, sculptures, Children’s Activity Book, Adult Visitor Guide, interchangeable activities and wider garden experience all felt like parts of the same story.
Throughout the process, we worked closely with Birnam Arts, refining details and making adjustments as the project developed to ensure the finished experience was practical, durable and, most importantly, felt at home in Beatrix Potter’s world.
Beatrix Potter Garden Trail Community Launch
After months of planning, designing, manufacturing and bringing the garden to life, it was fantastic to see the completed Beatrix Potter Garden Trail officially open to the community.
Launch day gave local families and visitors their first opportunity to explore the new experience, discover the characters throughout the garden and set off on the hunt for Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s missing washing. Seeing children exploring with their Activity Books in hand, families discovering the sculptures and adults delving deeper into Beatrix Potter’s local story was a wonderful way to mark the completion of the project. The day was also a celebration of Beatrix Potter’s lasting connection with the area, bringing the community together to enjoy a new attraction inspired by a story that began in Perthshire many years ago.
For the Brilliant Trails team, seeing the garden filled with visitors was the perfect finishing touch. A trail really comes to life when people begin exploring it – and launch day gave us the first glimpse of the many adventures still to come.
A New Beatrix Potter Experience for Perthshire
The completed trail celebrates a part of Beatrix Potter’s story that deserves to be discovered. It brings together literary heritage, family adventure, outdoor exploration, sensory engagement and interpretation, creating an experience that can be enjoyed by children, adults and lifelong Beatrix Potter enthusiasts alike.
Most importantly, it belongs to its location.
Beatrix Potter’s connection with Perthshire provides the foundation, Birnam Arts provides the setting, and the garden allows visitors to experience that story in an engaging new way.
For Brilliant Trails, it has been a real pleasure working alongside Birnam Arts and Penguin to bring this special experience to life and introduce Beatrix Potter’s much-loved world to a new generation of visitors. And the adventure certainly doesn’t end here. With the trail designed to welcome new stories and challenges in the future, we can’t wait to work with Birnam Arts and Penguin again to see what Peter Rabbit and his friends get up to next.
One thing’s for sure – another hopping adventure is never too far away!
