Last updated 09:59, Monday, 30 June 2008

One of the Lake District’s most famous landmark buildings, the purple house in the Newlands Valley near Keswick, was destroyed by fire early today.

• Slideshow: firemen tackle the blaze

The Purple House

Two fire appliances from Keswick were called out shortly before 7am, but there was little they could do to save the mainly wood built property.

Rigg Beck was bought for £470,000 just over a year ago by Surrey-based management consultant Charles Carter.

There is permission for two houses to be built on the site although some delay in re-developing was expected because the property was a bat roost.

The purple house was last occupied about five years ago by Mrs Varya Vergauwen, who is understood to now be living in a residential home in the South Lakes area.

She was rumoured to have bought the house for just £500 in the 1950s. Two members of her family were present at the sale in 2007.

She raised a large family there and provided lodgings for several actors and writers involved with the Century Theatre in Keswick.

Among her lodgers were Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins and poet laureate Ted Hughes who was a frequent visitor.

Rigg Beck was build in the 1880s by a Canadian, and was originally a hotel in the days when horses and carriages travelled over the Newlands Hause between Keswick and Buttermere.

An eye witness at this morning’s blaze said: “The whole place has collapsed. It’s just a pile of rubbish. The purple house was one of the best known local landmarks, but now it’s totally demolished.”

The house roof had already caved in by the time firefighters arrived on the scene.

Latterly Rigg Beck had been boarded up because it was proving an attraction for youngsters who knew it as “the haunted house.”

An investigation will take place later today to establish the cause of the fire.

Cumbria Fire Service Group Manager Adrian Holme said he could not rule out the possibility that the blaze was started deliberately.

He said: “We are looking into a deliberate motive. The cause is under investigation.”

“We think the fire started about 4 am. It was reported by someone driving past the house. It’s been reduced to a pile of ash and it is just a matter of damping down using pumps from the nearby beck.”

Mr Holme said the owner had been contacted and would probably be coming up from London to view the damage later in the week.