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Shirley Toulson, who has died aged 94, was a poet, teacher, educational journalist and editor, and the author of books about walks along the ancient tracks and roads of Britain.
Distinguished collaborators would often provide the illustrations for those; among them were the painter Oliver Caldecott, and the photographer Fay Godwin. Walking was a lifelong delight. Slight but agile, and with impressive stamina (as a child she featured as a daring girl in a pony book by Primrose Cumming), she walked in all weathers every mile of the Roman roads and forgotten trade routes she wrote about in numerous books such as East Anglia: Walking the Ley Lines and Ancient Tracks (1979), The Drovers (1980) and Celtic Journeys (1985).
In her sixties she climbed up into a North Sea oil rig to research the provision of education for the workers’ children. People who knew her as a lively and well-informed journalist were sometimes surprised to find that her poems were so sensitive and carefully crafted, the work of a thoughtful and widely read enthusiast.
She was born Kathleen Shirley Dixon on May 20 1924 at Henley-on-Thames. Her father, the author Douglas Dixon, had been a naval commander and when he died in 1964 was fondly remembered in the Telegraph’s Peterborough column as a “daring”...