Introduction

Collingwood Ingram, ornithologist and plantsman, was a remarkable man who recorded his own life through his sketches and journals. Here he tell his own story with minimal editorial commentary. Our starting point is an “autobiography”, written when he was 16.

My name is Collingwood Ingram, the son of Sir William Ingram B^t  who married my mother (then M.E.C. Stirling) in the year 1874 (about). I have two brothers, Herbert and Bruce Stirling. Bertie, as Herbert is always called, is the eldest, then comes Bruce and lastly – I hope not least – myself; our respective ages are 21, 20, 16.

Here he recalls family visits to Over Silton and the North York Moors.

Those three visits have been some of the most enjoyable periods of my life. It all comes back to me, my first rabbit, the old keepers, those quaint cricket matches, and above everything that landscape. It was not a majestic landscape, just a simple one, nor was it anything extraordinary. Great field after field, intersected by tall ‘bullfinches’ and hedgerows, stretched down to the south with an occasional tree here and there. Behind was the hilly moorland, and to the right and left were the slopes of the range, covered with woods mostly of pines and larch. In some places the view was wonderful for you could see as far as the eye could reach right over Yorkshire and again in the north-west as far as Bonnie Scotland if the day was sufficiently clear. I have not mentioned before my infatuation for moors and wild districts, I love them - revel in them!.

As well as his love of landscapes, his love of birds began early.

Good and bad, everything has to come to an end sooner or later and those pleasant months in Yorkshire at last terminated. Sometimes now when I hear a Robin warbling among the dew-covered leaves of September I think of the old place, for Robins were frequently singing in the orchard and they seem to belong to that grey-coloured Manor House; they seem true Tykes, straightforward and honest.

He had already travelled widely.

I have often noticed this with birds – it is one of the pleasures of studying their ways – they remind one of the past. One note of a migrant under the beating rays of the sun in a far off country will bring you back to some sequestered nook in dear old England, as suddenly as a vision in a fairy tale. The palms, the Egyptian orange sellers, the donkey boys, all seem dream-like: once more you are under the swaying birches in Surrey and once more you hear the ripple of the stream, the croak of a Moorhen, the cheerful note of a Chiff-chaff – ah but that’s too realistic, he is not hopping among the birch trees but is in amongst the palms, far, far from Surrey.

Hunting was also a central part of his life.

The morning was a beautiful one, and as I rode along a feeling of light-headedness came over me. Sport is a fine thing; it is our animal instincts coming to the top – its kill, kill, the maxim of all things. But what I say is kill with as much mercy as is possible. So this morning, as the sun rose over the low hills of Thanet, I felt like so many other sportsmen before me, cheery, happy and exhilarated. Where the sun struck the heavy August dew upon the herbage, a silver streak shone like metal, and the larks twittered merrily at the thought of the fine day before them as they rose at the approach of my horse

He had some of the more usual interests of a 16 year old boy.

I met at the hotel a Scotch girl that rather, let us say, took my fancy. She was not beautiful nor, for the matter of that, plain; she had a head of unmanageable hair that was never very tidy looking, but this to my thinking rather improved her appearance than otherwise and you could almost imagine her a wild uncouth lassie among the mists of some Highland town. She walked with a springy step that I have noticed is very common in the Scotch girls. I will not mention any name for the good reason that I myself will know to whom the above paragraph refers and to others it is of no great interest

He left a legacy of thousands of sketches and hundreds of thousands of words He always wrote his journals. as he did this early autobiography, as if with a reader in mind.