“The Lake in the North” June 29, 2011
.An Arthur Ransome Trust “Camp Fires” Public Lecture
This is a review of “The Lake in the North”, a public lecture by Christina Hardyment at Brantwood, Coniston, on June 29, 2011.
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This was the Trust’s inaugural Camp Fires event, a talk by Christina Hardyment, Arthur Ransome’s Literary Executor and the author of Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk.
Christina took about fifty guests on a tour of Ransome’s links to people and places in the South Lakes, concentrating on four places and periods: his childhood holidays at Swainson’s Farm, in Nibthwaite; his “adoption” as a young man by the Collingwoods at Lanehead; the writing of the first four Lakeland novels at Low Ludderburn in the early 1939s and, finally, his return to Coniston, to write The Picts and the Martyrs, his last Lakeland novel, during the Second World War.
You can see a short gallery of photographs from the event here.
The talk was part of a series held in partnership with The Brantwood Trust, at Brantwood, alongside the temporary exhibition Imagination and Reality: the Art of Arthur Ransome.
Christina Hardyment
Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk was first published in 1984 by Ransome’s publishers, Jonathan Cape, to mark the centenary of his birth. It contributed significantly to a growth in interest in the real world places, events and people that inspired Arthur Ransome, a process that led to the founding of The Arthur Ransome Society in 1990. A fully revised edition was published in 2006.
Christina writes extensively on domestic history and literary geography. Her published works include Literary Trails (National Trust, 2000), Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford (Frances Lincoln, 2007) and a biography, Malory: The Life and Times of King Arthur’s Chronicler (Harper, 2010). She also writes a regular column reviewing audiobooks for The Times.
At the time of her lecture Christina was working on a historical novel and also on Arthur Ransome, at Home and Aboard (sic), currently scheduled for publication in Frances Lincoln’s “Authors at Home” series in 2012.
