Skiddaw House in the picturesque Lake District was described by writer Hugh Walpole as “one of the loneliest dwelling places in all the British Isles”. The novelist was so taken with the property's majestic, eerie isolation that he set a gruesome murder scene there in his 1932 novel, The Fortress.

Located 1,500 feet (457m) above sea level and set among the sweeping, treeless Skiddaw forest in the romantically desolate lands known as Back o’Skidda, the foreboding property was built in 1829 as a hunting lodge for George O'Brien Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont.

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The world's most remote homes hidden far from civilization