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
Amazons Mitylene, who, on his part, drew on Thymoetas states that before the Amazons of the Thermodon there were, much earlier in time, the Amazons of Libya. These Amazons started from Libya passed through Egypt and Syria, and stopped at the Caïcus in Aeolis, near which they founded several cities. Later, he says, they established Mitylene a little way beyond the Caïcus. Aeschylus, in "Prometheus Bound", places the original home of the Amazons in the country about Lake Maeotis and they later moved to Themiscyra on the Thermodon. According to Pseudo-Plutarch, the Amazons lived in and about the Tanais () river