A TRUE countryman who loved local traditions has died six weeks before his 100th birthday.

Friends who would have been at Jim Spedding's centenary birthday party instead filled Brathay Church to celebrate his long life, which began at Holmeshead Farm, Skelwith and ended at Fern Cottage, Clappersgate.

The youngest of five, Jim went to Skelwith School but missed nearly two years of education when he developed an abscess on his lung and was sent to a sanatorium near Skipton. After leaving school at 14, the doctor recommended an outdoor job for Jim’s health and his first job was as a farm boy at Hawkshead Hill.

Here he milked the cows, cut hay, mended walls and worked the horses, which earned him £6.10s every six months.

When war broke out Jim was deemed medically unfit to serve so he went to work for the Board of Trade in the woods over Claife Heights, cutting timber to make pit props for the mines.

Work often went on both day and night, usually with little more to keep Jim going than jam sandwiches and a bottle of tea, kept warm in an old sock.

After the war fuel was in very short supply so Jim and his brother set up a logging business to supply homes and fuel factories.

The two continued logging firewood throughout the 1950s, running first one wagon, then two more and in the 1960s, they trucked stone and aggregate from quarries all over the northwest to build the Kendal bypass.

Jim then turned to local building work and eventually to walling, becoming well-known for his craftsmanship in drystone walling and particularly in ‘gap’ walling, re-using and shaping old stone to rebuild tumbled walls.

Jim was a true countryman with strong values and a love of local traditions. He was a keen follower of the Coniston Foxhounds often travelling to hound puppy shows as far away as the Cotswolds with his friend Gordon Gregory, who was Master of Coniston Foxhounds.

Bird-lover Jim also loved the countryside and after corncrakes were no longer to be heard in Ambleside at hay-time he would travel up to North Uist in the Outer Hebrides where they flourished, just to hear their distinctive cry.

He never had a television but was an avid library borrower, reading books to satisfy his love of knowledge and compensate for his lack of schooling.

In 1965 he moved from Jiffy Knots to Fern Cottage at Clappersgate, where he loved growing dahlias, his late mother’s favourite flowers.

Jim finally retired from walling at the age of 85 after a life of sheer hard work, using his newfound leisure to get out and about in the company of his good friends and neighbours.

In later years he not only survived cancer and a number of other serious illnesses, but also had two new knees at the age of 95, which granted him yet another lease of life.

Jim died peacefully at home in the loving care of his friends, and his funeral at Holy Trinity, Brathay, was followed by burial in the churchyard.