Alfred Wainwright........

Alfred Wainwright..........Lakeland Colossus.

      Just thinking about AW the other day, made me recall that I've met him upon three occasions and always on the fells.  The first time in the early sixties, I was with my father on the lower slopes of Wansfell, not many people about in those days. My father got talking to him, they were both Lancastrians, AW gave me a bag of Lemon Drops.
      Some years later, I met him at Dow Crag, on the Coniston range, he didn't recognize me, though I knew him and made a reference to the Lemon Drops and the years just rolled away, we must have chatted for a good ten minutes.
      I've heard it said that AW was a man who liked his solitude and would happily avoid other walkers, something which I never saw in his character.
      Our final meeting came at a not too distant past, upon a fell side near Grasmere, at a point where there is a natural break in the hillside. It was a warm and sunny evening, close to the end of a late summer heat wave, there was a haze over the land in the bottom of the valley. Of course there was some talk of Lemon Drops, as we sat together.
      "You know," he said, "this is probably my favourite place in the world, you can see everything that's going on down there and you only want to be up here."