Jonathan Roberts was known as “the Knight of the Stihl”, after his beloved German tractor mower that he spent hours on mowing the grass of our medieval hamlet. On Friday 3 January he will be buried in the Norman churchyard of St Michael’s, Upton Cressett, in Shropshire, whose grass he mowed so lovingly and in such orderly lines.
After a remarkable personal recovery and returning to the sacraments, my 68-year-old Stonyhurst-educated uncle, head tour guide at Upton Cressett, died unexpectedly in his sleep – a heart attack – in the early hours of December 6, the feast of St Nicholas. He lived with us and had attended Mass with our family on the first Sunday of Advent. I found him dead in his pyjamas, surrounded by his library of thousands of books, in the little caretaker’s flat that we had built for him in a former pig barn (known as the “Pig Palazzo”) at our historic family home in Shropshire.
