Place in Swallows and Amazons is layered and composite. This is felt right from the outset in the authorial sense of place as a kind of mosaic, as described by Arthur Ransome: 'The lake is not altogether Windermere, though Rio is of course, Bowness, because I had to take a good deal from Coniston. No island on Windermere has quite so good a harbour as that among the rocks at the south end of Peel Island on Coniston . .  . But Cormorant Island is Silverholme on Windermere' ('A Letter to the Editor', 3-5).  Within the book the children themselves use a real map to create their own, which corresponds to the way they deliberately double place by renaming places and people as a vital part of their act of imaginative repossession. At a third level the younger children spatialise and play within this second space in ways linked to earlier books (e.g. Treasure Island) – re-enacting literary events out of sight of the older children.