A marathon reading of Arthur Ransome’s children’s story Pigeon Post is to be staged at Coniston Coppermines valley.
It’s being organised by the team that staged a similar reading of Ransome’s classic Swallows and Amazons on the lakeshore at Coniston two years ago. Ransome fans, including writers, actors, and adventurers old and young are being invited to sign up to read a chapter each.
The event will be on Sunday September 29 outside the Coppermines YHA hostel.
The organiser is English Literature lecturer Chris Routledge, in association with The Arthur Ransome Trust.
The last event was a huge success, when Sophie Neville, the actress who starred in the original film version of Swallows and Amazons, was joined by Hannah Jayne Thorp who was in the 2016 film.
Also reading were novelist Ruth Sutton, actor Matt Addis, interior designer Alison Tordoff, Becky Heaton Cooper, director of Grasmere’s Heaton Cooper Studio, and Christina Hardyment, who has written two books about Ransome: Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk (which resulted in her becoming executor of the Arthur Ransome Literary Estate) and The World of Arthur Ransome, part biography, part companion to all 12 books of the Swallows and Amazons series.
Chris Routledge said: “As soon as we finished the last event, we knew that the Coppermines area would be a natural setting for Pigeon Post. Many people regard this as the best in the whole series and the one for which Ransome won the inaugural Carnegie Medal from the Library Association.”
The story features the children from the earlier books and their adventures during a hot dry summer when they go exploring and searching for gold in the Coniston fells.
Here’s what happened last time: https://nancyblackett.org/2017/09/04/as-it-happened-the-marathon-reading-of-swallows-and-amazons-at-coniston/
And here’s where you can sign up to read a chapter this time.
