Patrick Gordon Duff Pennington was known as “Patrick of the Hills” and dedicated his life to representing the hard-working hill farmers of both Scotland and Cumbria.
He worked as hill farming convenor of the Scottish National Farmers Union (NFU), convener of the Scottish Landowners Federation, chairman of the Deer Commission for Scotland, county chairman of the Cumbrian NFU and was on the Lake District Special Planning Board for many years.
Pennington, who has died aged 90, was brought up near Findhorn in Moray before being educated at Eton and Trinity College in Oxford.
Before undertaking National Service with the Cameron Highlanders, where he carried the regimental colours through pouring rain at the Queen’s coronation parade in 1953.
His parents disapproved of him becoming a shepherd in Scotland and, in 1955, he married Phyllida, adding her surname of Pennington to his two Scottish surnames.
The couple brought up their four daughters Prunella Gordon, Anthea Osborn-Jones, Iona Frost Pennington and Rowena Morris-Eyton on a mixed hill farm in Dumfriesshire.
Then he moved with his beloved wife to her ancestral home of Muncaster Castle in the Lake District in the early 1980s.
He wrote to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 after the Chernobyl disaster deposited clouds of radioactive dust on the Cumbrian Fells, but the Russian Embassy refused to accept his letter as they didn’t believe anyone had three surnames.
However, he persisted and it resulted in a long association with the British Soviet Friendship Society and a tour of collective farms in Siberia followed by a return visit with two Russian farmers to Cumbria.
Regardless of his prickliness in dealing with authority, he was awarded the MBE and later the OBE for services to agriculture and served for many years as a Deputy Lieutenant for Cumbria.
