Number in series 26; Year of publication 1932 - Fell and Rock ...

194W. G. COLLINGWOODA MEMOIRBY R. B. GRAHAM" I think he knew the Lake District better than anyone else."This simple epitaph, casually spoken on the death of W. G.Collingwood last October, will express the sense of loss felt bymany of us at the passing of a kind and learned man.As a boy, he spent long holidays with his artist father in afisherman's cottage on Windermere. And for forty-two of hisseventy-eight years he lived at Lanehead, Monk Coniston, ahouse built on the site of the old Halfpenny Alehouse, whereHawkshead and Langdale farmers of former years used to callfor a drink on their way home from Ulverston market. His heart,too, was in the District: he came to be as thoroughly a part ofit and of its people as anyone can be who has neither farmedin it nor been born in it.Of his " first" in Greats at Oxford, his companionship withRuskin (for whom his admiration was always " this side idolatry")and of his Professorship of Fine Arts at Reading, there is notspace to speak. We are concerned with him as a Lakeland figure,and above all as the Lakeland historian, by far the fullest andsurest repository of knowledge about our hills and valleys,mines and churches, farms and villages, and about the folkwho in times past have left their mark upon them. As a boy, hecame here, like most of us, as to a great playground in which towalk and climb. There is no one now alive who shared the climbsof his youth ; they happened a long time ago and were for themost part solitary and experimental scrambles in places that hadnot then been explored. But he had a combination of lightness,coolness and muscular strength which enabled him to go aloneinto a number of places which are now recognised " climbs."And he much enjoyed these scrambles. Almost to the end, hewould rise from weeks of sedentary work to do long walks at agreat pace over the hills ; and he had a habit of sitting sketchingon the tops of mountains in the middle of winter when anybodyelse would have been frozen to the rocks.He saw our District with the eye of an artist, and could put