Posted by Duncan on September 14, 2013 at 02:17:58 user Duncan.
Okay - this will eventually be a post on "Great Northern?" (about time I added to that blog anyway!) but I thought I'd try and get people chatting about it on here first. I know I've banged on quite a lot about Belle Grange as a possible Beckfoot (or part of a composite Beckfoot) - well I'm getting closer to feeling a bit more confident about this!
The origin of my theory is a purely geographical one, Belle Grange is in "the right place". Comparing the original Spurrier map with remarkably similar OS maps of Windermere if you ask the question: "is there a big house near Beckfoot?" the answer is "yes, Belle Grange". But there's a bit more to it than that now...
One of the oddest bits of the geography of the Lake in the North - especially on some of AR's pictures - is the Beckfoot promontory. It appears in many illustrations as a big, treeless hill jutting out into the lake. At first glance there's nothing quite like it on Windermere or Coniston. But then I looked at the painting "Approach to Belle Grange Park" - an admittedly rather embellished 18th century landscape painting and there is Beckfoot promontory, complete with flagpole and enormous flag. Although I am not 100% sure of the scene the picture depicts, it appears most likely that what we can see is "The Mount" - the oddly-named little promontory next to Belle Grange.
I do not know (yet) when the Mount became wooded, as it is today, or whether AR would have ever seen it without trees (other than on the painting, which he would have seen, as the original hung in Belle House on Belle Isle for many years). But I'm now pretty confident that this is the promontory AR had in mind, and that certainly increases Belle Grange's claims to be Beckfoot or at least be in the mix of potential Beckfoots.
The other question was - was there any link between AR and Belle Grange? I'm still working on this one, but I understand that, certainly when AR was a schoolboy at Windermere, the house was still owned by the Curwens - friends of the Collingwoods and of AR's Windermere-based Aunt, although the Belle Isle house was their main Lakes abode.
So - still a work in progress, but I'm closer than I was!