A MAN who played an active part in local government and community life in South Lakeland has died, aged 85.

Cayley Barter was born in 1931 in Farnham, Surrey. He spent a war-time childhood in Ambleside with his mother's family, going to school at the Croft in Clappersgate.

After boarding school in Wiltshire and National Service in the REME, in 1955 he returned to the Lake District to work at the Langdale Estate with his great uncle Richard (Dick) Hall.

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Mr Hall had converted the derelict Elterwater gunpowder works to a holiday centre in the 1930. Mr Barter owned and managed the Langdale Estate until it was sold in the 1980s for time-share development. With his first wife Ann, he lived in Elterwater and they had three children, Marion, Michael and Helen.

First elected as a local councillor in 1968, Mr Barter was the last chairman of the Lakes Urban District Council before it was abolished in 1974. He believed that party politics had no place in local government and always stood as an independent.

After 1974 he served on SLDC, and was a long-serving member of the Lake District Park Special Planning Board, a role he particularly enjoyed. The issues he campaigned for included affordable housing for local people, a sewage works for Langdale and that tourist development should not intrude on the landscape.

In his spare time he played clarinet with the Westmorland Orchestra and for the Lakes School opera productions in the 1960s and later sang with the Keldwyth Singers and the K Shoes Male Voice Choir.

His passion for steam railways included supporting the campaign to save the Lakeside and Haverthwaite Railway. He was a JP at Windermere Magistrates' Court, where he was chairman before resigning in 1988 to leave Cumbria for Somerset with his second wife Jill, where he continued to serve as a magistrate in Yeovil.

He is survived by Jill, Marion, Michael and Helen and his four grandchildren, and his first wife Ann.