LIKE so many readers of this paper, and many more beyond, I was sorry to hear of the death of Ronald Blythe (News, Obituary, 20 January), and, at the same time, stirred afresh to gratitude for his life and work. I always enjoyed his “Word from Wormingford”: his close observation of nature, his eye for significant detail, his sense of the presence of the past, and the almost personal presence of his great literary predecessors: John Clare, Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar.

Herbert and Ferrar were especially akin to him, for they both gave their best in their living and their writing, to tiny country parishes far from the spotlight and attention of the world, but always close to the Kingdom; and so, too, did Blythe.

Although I felt I knew him well from the close companionship of his writing, I met him only once in person, but it was a signal and memorable occasion. We were once asked jointly to lead the annual pilgrimage to Little Gidding, walking from Leighton Bromswold, the church which Herbert restored, five miles to Little Gidding, where Herbert’s friend Nicholas Ferrar had formed a community, where the manuscript of the Temple was sent after Herbert’s death, and, of course, the place that inspired the last of the Four Quartets.

I was to preach at Leighton, and Blythe was to preach at Little Gidding.

I was very much in awe of him, and glad that I was preaching first and didn’t have to follow him; but I was delighted to meet him. He was charming, personable, a little shy, I think, and certainly carried no stand-offishness or sense of his literary status. As we walked and talked together, on a dismally wet day, I sensed that he was walking in the company of invisible as well as visible pilgrims. He mentioned some of our contemporaries, and then, in the same breath, would quote Clare or Herbert, Herrick or Hopkins, with such natural familiarity that I would not have been surprised to turn around and find them walking at our side, or just ahead of us.

We arrived, drenched, at the Giddings — indeed, such were our numbers that he spoke at Steeple Gidding, as we would not all have fitted in the little chapel which was the end of our pilgrimage. He spoke about the Ferrars, about their commitment to place and people, their refusal of the glamour and glitter of court and city, of what it meant for them to be, in their phrase, “in the right good old way,” and of what that might mean for us.

I think of him now, walking ahead of us in that good old way towards heaven’s gate, and bless him in words I wrote once at Little Gidding, for Nicholas Ferrar:

From the folds of sleep, the late
Risers wake to find you gone, and pray
Through pain and grief to bless your journey home;
Those last glad steps in the right good old way
Up to the door where Love will bid you welcome.
Love draws us too, towards your grave and haven
We greet you at the very gate of Heaven.