Peel Island, Cumbria with of woodland, in 1932. Peel Island is considered to be one of the origins of the fictional Wild Cat Island in the 1930 book "Swallows and Amazons" and its sequels, by Arthur Ransome. Taqui Altounyan, sister of Roger Altounyan and inspiration for one of the characters in "Swallows and Amazons", described Peel Island in her semi-biographical novel "In Aleppo Once" as "like a green tuffet, sitting in the water, the trees covering the rocks". The island also features in W. G. Collingwood's novel "Thorstein of the Mere, A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland". Ransome, at the age of
Swallows and Amazons series Broads before moving to the lake in the north. "We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea" and "Secret Water" are set in coastal Suffolk and Essex, with the former involving a voyage to Flushing, Netherlands and the latter the exploration of the islands of Hamford Water near Walton-on-the-Naze. The books "Peter Duck" and "Missee Lee" involve voyages of the schooner "Wild Cat" to the Caribbean and the South China Sea. These stories appear to be metafictional in relation to the rest of the series, and were originally planned by Ransome (see below) as stories written by the children. The final