GIGGLESWICK author, journalist and local historian Dr Bill Mitchell recalls some famous visitors to the Dales.

WULSTAN Atkins found pleasure in visiting Giggleswick. His father, Sir Ivor, was fond of music and also loved the Settle-Carlisle railway, using this route annually for trips to Scotland. Wulstan was a man I loved to meet. My interest quickened when there were references to Edward Elgar, a favourite composer.

Elgar had arrived joyfully in the limestone country of Craven, his visit being based on the home of Dr Buck. At first, it overlooked the market place. It is now a branch of the Nat West bank. The Giggleswick home was a venerable building in Belle Hill. It had been a hotel until the turnpike arrived and the proprietor switched his business to a new site.

When I chatted with Wulstan, he remarked that his father “saw Elgar every day, pretty well”. Dad had been to the first performance of every single one of Elgar’s works since 1890. When members of the British Medical Association were about to celebrate their 50th anniversary, in part by music, John Beare, an old friend of Wulstan’s father, was among those who attended.

He mentioned they were short of stringed instruments. Beare knew Dr Buck, of Giggleswick, who was in attendance. He played the cello. Elgar and Buck met for the first time in 1882. Buck, 25 years of age, delightedly invited the not-yet-celebrated Elgar to “come up and stay with me”. Elgar, who was free of jobs in a week’s time, entrained for Hellifield, then for Giggleswick - and beheld the limestone country he grew to love.

Elgar was accustomed to “our gentle Worcestershire and Herefordshire”. He had never seen country like that which abutted Giggleswick. There was a light grey upper layer to the hills. Ere long, Elgar sensed its appeal and heard about local traditions when he travelled from farm to farm in Buck’s horse-drawn carriage. Buck, as a medical doctor, had a scattering of patients..

Buck’s life in a fine old house at the bottom of Belle Hill, Giggleswick, was shared with “his young mother” who “took a fancy to the young man (Elgar) and encouraged them.” Elgar deduced from letters that Buck had met a girl and was going to marry her. That was so. His first wife had been Miss Beare, sister of the man who had introduced them. Beare was the name of a family of solicitors.

Elgar loved walking. “He was thrilled to see the streams, bridges and the name of a local inn, The Naked Man," which appears in the letters quite a bit. He eventually acquired a photograph of what was to become a favourite bridge - the single arch of greystone spanning the Ribble at Stainforth.

The influence the North Country had on Elgar’s music is not apparent but – said Wulstan to me – “there are touches of the north in quite a bit of his music.” Buck was presented with a chair by Elgar, who had found it in a second-hand shop. The chair had an optional extra – a free-moving music stand. When Freda, my late wife, and I visited a farmhouse in Lakeland which had associations with the Buck family, she was invited to use this chair. And did so.