A MYSTERY buyer paid £10,575 for a collection of letters written by Beatrix Potter to her shepherd.

The 48 letters auctioned at Sotheby's in London chart the relationship between the Lake District children's author and Joseph Moscrop, who was born at Black House, a remote farm in the north west of Cumbria, and started work for Potter in 1926.

The collection includes the last letter she is known to have written, nine days before her death in 1943.