Posted by Peter Ceresole on May 29, 2014 at 04:16:40 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Beckfoot Layout posted by Mike Dennis on May 29, 2014 at 01:31:08:
My overwhelming thought still is that AR wrote about the layout as it fitted the plot (similarly to his creation of the 'lake' etc from various parts of the Lake District.) Through this method he seems to have contradicted himself, perhaps a definitive layout for Beckfoot is impossible!
That's the only possible conclusion if you look at AR's own drawing of Beckfoot, in PM. For instance the chimneys at the ends of the living and servants' blocks are simply impossible. It seems quite clear that he didn't have anywhere real in mind- just a useful setting for his story.
Of course, it's fun trying to reconstruct it, but it seems to me that the reality is that whatever emerges, it won't correspond to any physical place that AR might have had in mind. In there, it was clearly conceptual- a feeling of a place that needed to be neither realistic nor consistent.
I still think it was Lanehead. Not physically, but as a mood.