Posted by Iain Hobbs on March 08, 2000 at 09:22:43 from 194.82.168.3:
There are two main locations cited as being the location of Beckfoot. There are:
a: Lanehead House on Coniston Water
b: Huyton Hill on Lake Windermere
There are others but these two have the closest match to the main elements but in different combinations. Being lake front properties they both have grounds dipping down to the lake.
Firstly Lanehead House.
Proven links to AR and the Collingwoods. It has a house layout most commonly compared to the fictional Beckfoot. Its failing is that the geography of the grounds is wrong.
Secondly Huyton Hill/Pull Woods House
It is linked to AR through his drawings and the text of the lakeland set of the SA books. There is also a verified historical match to major elements of the plot. The link has been known about right back to the publication of SA although it appears nobody had studied it in detail.
Its main fault is that the house on the site is wrong although the grounds are an exact match for the Beckfoot estate, even though the Pull Beck while an exact match for the location of the Amazon River is not deep enough to support the depicted sailing up it. It is in the north west corner of Lake Windermere and if you take Rampholme as the location for Wild Cat Island's external setting then it matches the Swallows persuit of the Amazons, without having to re-arrange the physical geography to do it.
The solution would appear to be a compromise between the two. If you place Lanehead House on the site of Huyton Hill house then you have a location that would seem to meet all the requirements of AR's Beckfoot setting. We know that AR's drawing of Beckfoot in SA had the wrong house on it.
Beckfoot house as described is smaller than Huyton Hill and we know that AR hybridised the house appearance e.g. the sun dial and the trellice.
Neither location is on the Crake river or situated at Allan Tarn. As to the Amazon River and the Octopus Lagoon. Perhaps AR did use The Crake and Allan Tarn as his model because the actual versions were nowhere near as good. There is still much about the creation of SA that has not been made public yet so it is too early to make a concrete decision one way or the other. I note that no books on AR have suggested the combination of Lanehead AND Huyton Hill as being the Beckfoot solution and so far nothing seems to have been published by TARS, looking at the matter either. From the start I was not happy with the building of Huyton Hill as Beckfoot and suggested that some sort of substitution had been made. I had found a house on the shore of Derwent water shown in the 1974 SA film that seemed to fit Beckfoot but this compromise seems a better solution.