It’s fair to say that ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ has inspired quite a few of our holidays since its release in 2015, with my husband and I visiting several of the filming locations in the intervening years. Our first holiday together was to the west coast of Ireland – specifically to visit Skellig Michael, a stunning island with an ancient monastery. In the film it’s the planet ‘Ahch-To’ where Rey finally tracks down Luke Skywalker. It was thanks to that trip in 2017 that we discovered Cork and gained a love of the Rebel city. We’ve also taken a trip down to Puzzlewood, an ancient forest in Gloucestershire, which is a truly magical place. In the film it was a forest on the planet ‘Takodana’ where Rey was captured by Kylo Ren. I’ve written about both locations in previous blogs – Skellig Michael was deserving of three!
This summer Andy and I wanted to visit somewhere we’ve never properly explored before – an area that just so happened to have a Star Wars location… The Lake District in the northwest of England is only a few hours’ drive away from our home, and we’ve passed it many times heading up to Scotland. I think we’ve always been put off by reports of how busy the place gets, but this year we decided to finally make the effort. To avoid too much driving around we decided to split up our stay – 2 nights in Ambleside, located at the top of Windermere and another 2 nights in Keswick by Derwentwater, so we had two bases to explore from.
We did a bit of research online before our trip and knew that there were never actual sets built or any live action scenes filmed with actors in the Lake District for ‘The Force Awakens’. We discovered that lots of footage had been taken around Derwentwater and some of the other lakes for use in CGI manipulated shots – scenes where spaceships such as X-Wings and buildings like Maz Kanata’s castle were dropped in afterwards. There’s a great making of video showing the process here with the clip of Maz’s castle at 1 minute 22 seconds.
It was Keswick that gave us the opportunity to search for Maz Kanata’s castle as the town is a great starting point to explore Derwentwater on foot. The route around Derwentwater is about 10 miles, with the path mostly flat and close by the water’s edge. We had good weather on our side after some heavy rain the day before, it even got quite warm after a while and we had to slap on the sunscreen. We also added a few more miles to our anti-clockwise trek by going up to the wonderfully named viewpoint ‘Surprise View’ which was a fantastic, if a little exhausting, detour.
In the film Maz Kanata’s castle is superimposed over a promontory at the south end of the lake. We worked out pretty much the exact point when we briefly spotted a distinct white building in the making of video – it disappears quite quickly under layers of CGI imagery. A little help from Google Maps allowed us to locate it on the day. The walk up to Surprise View gave us the most stunning overview of the location.
We found this YouTube video made by people with far more knowledge of the Lake District than us and saw that even they struggled to work out exactly where some of the shots used for X Wings flying by were taken. Given that there’s so much digital manipulation of real landscapes we didn’t worry ourselves with trying to take screen matching shots.
The final part of our journey took us back towards Keswick and the north end of the lake, where we found an area used for establishing shots of the battle – interestingly at the totally opposite end of the lake to the castle location.
It was a great way to spend the day – our geeky quest had added to what was already an enjoyable walk. We were rather tired by the time we got back to Keswick and treated ourselves to some fish and chips followed by a few nice beers. A tip for anyone exploring the craft ale pubs of the town – some of them can be a little pricey as my husband discovered when he got a round in. He looked a little pale after realising that one of them was the most expensive pint he’d ever bought at £9! They tasted very nice though as we sat in the sun and watched it slowly set on a lovely day.
Useful information
We used the guide found on this site The Derwentwater Walk for our walk. Maz’s Kanata’s castle was superimposed near point 13.
