I’VE spent a lot of time piecing together a biography focused on the campaigning life of the pioneering naturalist and author William Henry Hudson. Hudson has led me to many interesting places and people, not least the Hispano-Scot “Don Roberto” Bontine Cunninghame Graham of Menteith. It’s been a sort of homecoming.

Hudson was a private man and it’s often said that to thwart biographers he wanted everything burned – notes, letters, photographs, the lot. But I discovered that most of his close associates thought better of this, not least Don Roberto, whose carefully preserved letters from his long-time friend were published in 1941, five years after Don Roberto passed away.

Like most people who knew Hudson well, Don Roberto held him in the highest regard. “There was no-one I thought more

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