Coniston Water G. Collingwood wrote a historical novel "Thorstein of the Mere" about the Northmen who settled on the island in the lake. The Victorian and Edwardian artist Henry Robinson Hall settled in Coniston during the Great War and is buried in the parish church graveyard. Arthur Ransome set his children's novel "Swallows and Amazons" and the sequels "Swallowdale", "Winter Holiday", "Pigeon Post" and "The Picts and the Martyrs" around a fictional lake derived from a combination of Coniston Water and Windermere. The fictional lake resembles Windermere, but the surrounding hills and fells resemble those of Coniston Water. Some of Coniston Water's
Swallows and Amazons series discussion and theorising about precise relationships. This contributes strongly to the series' air of authenticity. The first book, "Swallows and Amazons", and four sequels — "Swallowdale", "Winter Holiday," "Pigeon Post" and "The Picts and the Martyrs" — are set in and around an unnamed lake in the English Lake District. Most of the unfinished "Coots in the North" would also have been set on the lake had Ransome completed it before his death. The lake and the surrounding fells are based on an amalgam of Windermere and Coniston Water, places where Ransome spent much of his childhood and later life.