My friend Richard Gilbert, who has died aged 80, was a teacher, mountaineer, youth expedition leader and writer.
He taught chemistry for more than 30 years at Ampleforth college in North Yorkshire, also instructing boys in rock-climbing on local crags and leading frequent trips to Scotland, as well as taking the school’s mountaineering club on five overseas expeditions – south-east Iceland (1968), Morocco (1970), northern Iceland (1972), Arctic Norway (1974) and the Himalayas (1977).
I met him first in the early 1970s when we were both involved with school expeditions and The Young Explorers’ Trust. Richard was a member of the Alpine Club, and indeed was my proposer.
He was also a prolific writer: as well as occasional articles published in the Alpine Journal, he was a regular columnist for High Magazine (no longer in print), where he defended wild spaces from assault, and wrote mountaineering and hill-walking books such as Exploring the Far North-West of Scotland (1994), 200 Challenging Walks in Britain and Ireland (1996), and, with Ken Wilson, The Big Walks (1980), Classic Walks (1982) and Wild Walks (1988).
Richard was born in Lancaster to Frank, a chemist, and Ruth (nee Ainsworth), a children’s author. After attending St George’s school, in Harpenden, he studied chemistry at Worcester College, Oxford, where he was a member of the university’s mountaineering and Alpine clubs. He graduated in 1961 and worked first as a research scientist at Tate & Lyle in Liverpool, then Rowntree in York, before taking up teaching at Ampleforth in 1965.
He met Trish Roberts, then an occupational therapist, later a teacher, on a climbing weekend and they married in 1962. His love of the Scottish hills, together with the needs of a growing family, diverted him from hard rock climbing and Alpinism on to hill walking. By 1971 he had bagged all the Scottish Munros, becoming the 101st Munroist.
As a long-term member of the John Muir Trust and the Scottish Wild Land Group, Richard was an active campaigner for outdoor access, the natural environment and wild spaces. He especially loved the Scottish islands and north-west and was angered by what he termed “vandalism” of wild places, such as hydro-electric schemes flooding valleys and pylons marching across wilderness.
He is survived by Trish, and by their children, Tim, Emily, Lucy and William.
