T here is no doubt that the southern Lake District, if not always the base for children’s author Arthur Ransome, was certainly his spiritual home.

But there was far more to Ransome's life than the Lakeland adventures of Swallows and Amazons.

As well as becoming a classic children's author he was, at various times, an essayist, critic, story-teller, bohemian, political journalist, war reporter, sailor, fisherman, amateur diplomat and spy, who once wrote that he ‘seemed to have lived not one life, but snatches from a dozen different lives’.

With so many paths, actual and in his books, and wakes after numerous boats that he owned, it is perhaps not surprising that our landscape and literature are littered pleasingly with places that many people identify with Ransome’s writing.

They include Wildcat Island on Coniston Water, Rio on the side of Windermere and ‘gold’ mines above Tilberthwaite.

There are also the igloo and Dog’s Home hidden on the slopes of Grizedale Forest, and House Boat, now in the care of the Steamboat Museum.

Generations of children have sought to disentangle the literary and actual landscapes that he wove so cleverly into his stories.

Further afield he wrote of sailing, pirates, ornithology and detective work on the Norfolk boards, captured an almost timeless vignette in the Walton backwaters, and had his family of ‘Swallows’ accidentally but successfully sailing across the North Sea to Holland in We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea.

There is very little that Ransome wrote about that he had not experience first-hand.

Admittedly, he had never sailed to the Caribbean to look for treasure.

But he was a great coastal sailor fascinated by nautical literature.

And he did go as a journalist to China, where he meet Mrs Sun Yat-sen, upon whom he loosely based his character Missee Lee.

What Ransome also experienced was a period almost free from the emasculating tentacles of over-regulation, health and safety and almost neurotic fear of allowing children to venture into the countryside unaccompanied by adults.

Having been reared on Swallows and Amazons as a child, I am probably guilty of gross neglect as a father: watching my sons age six and eight rowing unaccompanied (in lifejackets) across Coniston Water to buy ice creams, of allowing my 14-year-old son to run unaccompanied for miles across the Lake District foothills, and allowing a 17-year son and friend to sleep on the icy summit of Helvellyn to watch the sunrise the next morning.

But unless children are allowed to take risks, to flex their muscles in a Lake District that is largely free of real and imagined fears around every corner, will they ever take risks in today’s society?

Will they become the entrepreneurs of the future that we desperately need?

Will they have the confidence and physical ability to be our police or members of the Armed Forces?

And will they have the confidence to be leaders and not just followers in our professions and businesses?

I suspect that Ransome would be appalled by the lack of freedom allowed in today’s apparently free but cotton wool-wrapped culture.

Or would he? The Lake District was probably never full of youngsters in the 1920s and 30s sailing on lakes, striding the fells or trespassing down old mines.

But Ransome wrote stories in which the urban and industrial youth of that time, with relatively few possessions and less access to the countryside, could identify and escape in their imaginations; and the lucky ones were able to do so ‘for real’.

It can be a fine line between being a responsible and irresponsible parent.

At the moment I believe our children are too firmly in one of the ‘native settlements’, whereas they should be the ‘explorers in Ransome’s books.

Paul Flint, a trustee of the Arthur Ransome Trust