“Imagination and Reality: Arthur Ransome’s Maps”, September 3, 2011
.An Arthur Ransome Trust Camp Fires Event.
This is a review of a lake expedition and seminar, held in partnership with The Brantwood Trust and Royal Geographical Society at Coniston.
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This event concluded our programme of Camp Fires public lectures, which ran alongside The Brantwood Trust and Arthur Ransome Trust exibition Imagination and Reality: the Art of Arthur Ransome, at Brantwood in the sumer of 2011. For Imagination and Reality: Arthur Ransome’s Maps, the two trusts were joined by the Northern Branch of the Royal Geographical Society.
Sadly the good weather that had blessed all of the previous events at Brantwood turned to heavy rain on September 3. Local road flooding forced a number of attendees to cancel, but some 25 managed to gather at Brantwood, for an Arthur Ransome themed cruise on Coniston Water, courtesy of Coniston Launch. Others were able to join them later for the seminar about Arthur Ransome’s maps at Brantwood. 
The cruise was skippered and guided by Robert Thompson, who spoke about Ransome’s Foreign Legion at our event on August 3. Despite very poor visiblility, Robert took the party to see locations that figured prominently both in Ransome’s real life, and in his imaginary Swallows and Amazons world.
Speakers at the seminar included local maritime author, Jim Andrews, on Arthur Ransome’s Juggled Geography; Arthur Ransome Trust Trustee and RGS Fellow Paul Flint on “Ransome’s Rommantic Geography”, and Arthur Ransome Literary Executor and ART Trustee, Geraint Lewis, on Mapping from the Imagination: Arthur Ransome’s “Lake in the North” and Surveying the Secret Water: John Walker’s First Attempt at Mapping Reality.
Jim complimented Robert’s work on Coniston with an analysis of Ransome’s transmogrification of the eastern shore of Windermere, south of Bowness, into the equivalent features on his imaginary lake. He also looked at some of the ways that Ransome transcribed real features into his drawings, including reversing some, such as his drawing of Willd Cat Island from the South when tracing from a photograph of Rampholme.
Geraint’s first talk looked at the ways that Ransome designed his Lake District maps, using them as additional illustrations that reinforce themes, tones and atmosphere from their respective books.
In his second talk Geraint examined some of the challenges that Ransome’s characters would have faced when attempting to survey the Walton Backwaters in Secret Water.
Paul concluded the evening with a lively talk about Peter Duck (set in the Caribbean), Missee Lee (set in China) and Great Northern? (set in the Outer Hebrides).
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the RGS, Coniston Launch and Robert Thompson for all their help with this event. Likewise, many thanks are due to all at the The Brantwood Trust for partnering and hosting all of the events at Brantwood.
