Where exactly is Mrs Tweedy's farm?

This question came about when re-watching the cult classic 'Chicken Run (2000)' last Sunday evening with my house. The short answer is Yorkshire but I had a feeling watching the film a more exact answer could be found knowing the detail Aardman studios put in to their productions, I decided to give this entirely pointless task of finding a fictional location from a 20 year old animated film a shot.

Just to give a bit of context at first in case you haven't watched the film recently. This purely takes place on Mrs Tweedy's farm with the only other location being the 'Chicken paradise sanctuary' in the Epilogue. This other location appears to be a lake a likely short distance away from the farm but I will get to this at the end.

The biggest clue to solving this question comes from one particular scene when the plane to escape the chicken coup is being built. As Ginger walks through barking orders to the other chickens to keep moving since time is running out, a signpost is being raised up by Mac.

 Clearly Halifax is 32 miles from this location. Nick and Fetcher (the rats) were the likely suspects to supply this sign to the chickens and due to their size would need to source relatively nearby materials. Therefore this sign couldn't be far from the farm.

Inputting a Radius into 'Map developers.com' from the Halifax town hall (since that is where mile markers are set) leads to this result:

 

The Yorkshire Dales are the prime location so looking positive already. 

Another location can be deciphered from this scene. Noticing the location is 40 1/2 miles away and ends with 'ster', the only major settlement that would make sense is Lancaster. 

Inputting Lancaster town hall into the radius website produces this result:

Fantastic! A relatively clear crossover. However with a little bit of guesswork a third location can be read from the signpost to triangulate the exact position even further. 

Ginger's thumb is in a very annoyingly location but the first 2 letters can just about be deciphered as 'Su'. 

A large settlement beginning with 'Su' would have to be Sunderland. Not sure why I'd assume this sign would follow Pythagoras' theorem I inputted 51.6 miles into the website for the Sunderland radius. 

Well what do you know, that surprisingly worked! But it wasn't quite close enough. 

I thought I'd watch a few more scenes of the plane taking off to see if the sign can be visible from any other angles. Fortunately the sign spins just slow enough to confirm my suspicions from the previous scene.

With Sunderland being 59 1/2 miles away I edited the previous Sunderland radius to match the new information. This created around the perfect little triangulation with one settlement within the boundary. The village of Lofthouse.

A terrain view first to get the full scale of the village we will be sizing up.

However going in on street view in the village centre reveals it doesn't quite have the ancient crossroads capacity for a village to have major settlements signposted. It was perhaps a stretch to think there would be a sign similar to the film in this village but was worth a look anyway.

Now on to the Tweedy farm scouting.

Narrowing the location down to a few farms that piqued my interested

Farm 1: 

Just off Trapping Lane and just a short walk from Lofthouse. A prime suspect for where the chickens could go in and pies come out.

Farm 2:

Closer to the village of Middlemoor, this farm is on the other side of the valley

There's a few landscape shots in the film that give a rough topological view of the area. A prime example being the plane leaving the farm and heading down the valley 

A frustrating lack of google street view in this area of  rural Yorkshire hindered this task a little. However using nearby street view locations, both of these farms  would have sweeping views of the valley.

To get to the bottom of this, I would need to do some archival research. The following map is an OS map from 1930 of the Lofthouse area. Only one farm appeared to fit the criteria I was looking for regarding the location on the hill and proximity to the village.

Just for peace of mind, to see if this farm would farm chickens as opposed to crops. A quick check of the present day agricultural records of the area gives us this:

The brown indicating a 'Very Poor' soil quality for crop production. These farms would need to focus on pastoral farming instead. Primarily Chickens

Therefore,

Mrs Tweedy's farm is High Lofthouse farm near Lofthouse.

One final location to ponder on is the 'Chicken Sanctuary'

The possible 'Chicken Sanctuary' island they land on would be just down the valley assuming the plane would run out of steam very quickly.

The final film screenshot is what we're looking for here:

The Gouthwaite reservoir is the only possible location. It's 4.2 miles down the road from Lofthouse and entirely on a downward trajectory. However this looks a lot more bleak in real life. With no chicken or even bird sanctuary in sight.

It's worth noting at this point that Nick Park and Peter Lord wrote the script for Chicken Run in WensleyDale ~ 35 miles away from the village of Lofthouse. Do I believe two cockney rats carried a sign all this way to Tweedy's farm to help out. Less likely.
In conclusion, this was possibly all entirely pointless but in case you ever wanted to watch the movie once again and the question 'Where exactly is Mrs Tweedy's farm?' cropped up, this is at least one possible theory.



References:

• https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php#
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkD1dhWMYts
• https://www.oldmapsonline.org/
• http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/130043
• https://screenrant.com/chicken-run-movie-behind-scenes-unknown-facts/#:~:text=Nick%20Park%20and%20Peter%20Lord%20have%20both%20made%20a%20career,and%20breakfast%20in%20Wensleydale%2C%20UK.