We arrived in Kettlewell on the day that Nancy Cutcliffe Hyne celebrated her 96th birthday. The upper Wharfedale village was bathed in sunlight, thronged by skimpily-clad tourists and bright with summer blooms.

So many years have elapsed since I last chatted with Miss Cutcliffe Hyne, I hardly dare inquire if she was still alive.

Our last meeting followed a talk I gave at Kettlewell Women's Institute. It was summertime then. She had the sweet charm of a contented old age.

My wife's family sprang from upper Wharfedale and now and again we have the impulse to walk round the old village and seek out the grave of Joseph and Margaret Bushby, her grandparents. Also commemorated is their son, Joseph Bryan, a victim of the 1914-18 war who was interred in France.

On our recent visit, a cheerful volunteer was mowing grass. We walked on sward as fine as a bowling green. The graves were somewhat overgrown but a "strimmer" would soon be used to tidy them up. A farmer would mow grass in the unused area and, hopefully, sunshine and breeze would convert it speedily into hay.

The brightest area of the churchyard was a plot associated with the Cutcliffe Hynes. Memorial plaques were attached to weather-worn rock. Diminutive red flowers fringed the grave space.

It was in 1901 that C J Cutcliffe Hyne, the son of an Anglican clergyman and reared in Bradford, bought a house at Kettlewell, a village he loved since family holidays were spent here. The author and his family used it as a holiday home until just before the 1939-45 war when he left Bradford for this permanent residence in upper Wharfedale.

He was a huge man, both mentally and physically. He stood six feet four inches in his stockinged feet and, as Howard Spring, a novelist with Bradford connections, noted at the time of his death in 1944, he was "built to scale".

Cutcliffe Hyne had become famous through his writings and especially for his creation of a character called Captain Kettle. His main publishers, the firm of Ward, Lock, sold over five million copies of books describing Kettle's escapades.

Other publishers blessed the day they met him. This prolific author, brought up a Yorkshireman, did not like to have all his literary eggs in one basket.

The man who made a national celebrity of Captain Kettle was born at Bibury in Gloucestershire but reared in the wool-city where, being a bright lad, he had a Bradford Grammar School education, followed by a spell at Clare College, Cambridge.

On our recent visit to Kettlewell, my wife and I visited the church to see the fine array of stained glass, much of it commemorating young men who died in the 1914-18 war. Cutcliffe Hyne's son was among them.

It was then that I inquired from a villager about the great man's daughter Nancy and was told that she had attained an age of 96 years that very day. Hearing that she no longer lived alone, and keen to pass on my good wishes to her, I visited Damside House. Miss Cutcliffe Hyne, though small and frail, was steadied as she was brought to the door. We shook hands. She had bright eyes and a ready smile.

That brief encounter brought to mind former occasions when my path had crossed that of the family. C J Cutcliffe Hyne contributed a short article to the very first issue of The Yorkshire Dalesman, published in April, 1939. The article hints at his breezy style of writing: "It has always been a source of wonder to me why some man - or even woman - with an itch for writing does not dig into the ancient history of Kettlewelldale and clamp it down on paper."

When Cutcliffe Hyne died in 1944, I attended the funeral as an emissary of the Craven Herald and Pioneer. My companion was Percy Parker Illingworth, of the Telegraph and Argus. We travelled to Grassington by bus - then walked to Kettlewell.

Afterwards, at a local hostelry, I joined several academics from Bradford who were gazing fixedly through a window to where an old man was earning some beer-money through weeding cobbles. He was doing so with a pen-knife that had a broken blade.

In 1953, when I chatted with Nancy Cutcliffe Hyne, I heard of father's adventurous life. He had visited the Arctic, crossed Lapland, ventured into the jungles of Brazil and the Congo and sailed to the Spanish Main.

In the 1930s, living at Kettlewell, he had some bright ideas, such as the possibility of starting a water-cress industry based on the clear-flowing becks - and impounding Morecambe Bay with a huge dam.

He went panning for gold in local streams and found a little. It was hardly enough to repay the effort - but it did prove his point that "there's gold in them thar hills."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.