May I add a couple of footnotes to your obituary ( Gazette, May 21) of the renowned farmer and agricultural champion Gordon Capstick?

Firstly, for 20 years Gordon’s ‘Pick Your Own’ soft fruit enterprise was one of the most popular of such attractions in the district.

Situated in the lee of Park House Farm, Heversham, it enjoyed the loveliest of settings as its rolling meadows commanded widespread views down the Kent Estuary to where it broadens out towards the sea.

Here, Gordon cheerfully welcomed patrons and, when they left, he would if required convert metric weights into traditional measures.

Secondly Gordon and his wife Mary, supported by their Levens Hall estate landlords, restored the farm’s enormous barn.

Having previously been generously loaned for village events it became a distinguished venue for weddings and varied social occasions.

In this respect I am personally grateful to Gordon for encouraging me to survey the barn when I was part of the team compiling the Pevsner’s Buildings of England volume on ‘Cumbria’ in 2005.

As a result I was able to conclude that the barn, previously held to be Elizabethan, is 200 years older as it was probably built in c.1400 when it served as a tithe barn for St Mary’s Abbey at York to which many local churches, at that time, belonged.

With its ‘very fine seven upper-cruck-trusses’ it is , after some of our older churches and castles one of the largest and most handsome medieval structures in South Lakeland.

Unfortunately because of current circumstances Gordon could not have the funeral and send –off he deserved. But, I understand, that his family are considering a later celebration of Gordon’s successful and enterprising life.

If so I will be impertinent and suggest that the Park House Barn would be and appropriately big setting to celebrate a much liked Big Man.

Roger K. Bingham

Ackenthwaite