Ioan Bowen Rees

Ioan Bowen Rees, poet, essayist, polemicist, mountaineer, internationalist, father to Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals and a White Robe Druid of the Gorsedd of Bards, who has died aged 70 was summed up by the TLS four years ago as "one of an old breed of highly educated, civilised public servants".

A proud Welshman, Ioan's roots were in the "mild grey well-built labyrinth of warm-hearted Dolgellau" - the little town under the shadow of Cader Idris where his father taught English at the King's School. Ioan's mother had been one of the earliest students at the new university college, built from North Wales quarrymen's subscriptions, in Bangor. The influence of his parents on Ioan was profound - not just culturally, but also in his recreational activities: "I remember the first time the hills became a pleasure for me was on the Bwlch y Rhiwgyr above Bontddu. As we arrived on top, my father began to recite Keats's sonnet On first looking into Chapman's Homer, and there in front of us was that skyline of the Lleyn Peninsula over the water, stretching down to Ynys Enlli. There came a magic that day which the Welsh hills have never lost for me."

By a neat reversal those selfsame hills came under his professional protection through working for many years as county secretary then chief executive of Gwynedd county council. In that post he exercised a wise awareness of how the conflicting demands of visitors and local inhabitants might be reconciled, rather than having the interests of either group asserted to the detriment of the other. His natural inclination was to view people as indissociable from place, and to insist on the centrality of their voice in determining policies that might affect it. In this crucial understanding he rose majestically above the general level of environmental debate in Wales, conducted for the most part by English-retired-bourgeois-dominated voluntary sector conservation agencies.

The genesis of his philosophy of localism was in the tight-knit, intellectually engaged community where he grew up and his mother was active in conservation issues. About his own work in environmental protection - at times pursued with an informed diligence that won round initially sceptical local politicians - he wrote that "Almost to the end it was as if I had been programmed by my mother."

Ioan won a scholarship to read modern history at Queen's College, Oxford, and took articles to qualify as a solicitor with Denbighshire county council (he once told me, from his time in Denbigh, of travelling in an old Morris 8 with the poets Mathonwy and Gwilym R Jones, the two of whom conversed the whole way in perfect cynghanedd to impress on him that there was more to education than an Oxford degree).

Ioan's subsequent career took him by way of local government posts in Lancashire, Cardiff and Pembroke to his long reign in Gwynedd. His polemical output along the way was both vigorously expressed and enthusiastically received. Government by Community, his 1971 critique of the Royal Commission on Local Government's recommendations, was hailed by Max Beloff as "essential reading", and by Leopold Kohr as "the best book by far on its subject".

Throughout his writings he promulgated a theory of devolved government, the fruition of which he almost lived to see in the National Assembly for Wales: he served on the advisory group. Ioan was certainly categorisable as a leftwing nationalist (he stood as Plaid Cymru candidate in general elections in 1955, 1959 and 1964), but he had no truck with what Tagore calls "the cult of the self-worship of a nation". Instead he believed that the "battle for Wales is the battle for all small nations, all small communities, all individuals in the age of genocide".

He loved and knew intimately Britain's landscape. A walk with him in the hills of Eryri would be enriched and enlivened by his fund of knowledge of everything that had been written or taken place there. I remember labouring with him once up the inclines of Bryn Hafod y Wern quarries above Bethesda and raising the misconception that the Welsh were a people ignorant of their own hills - in his response the crisp flavour of the man came over: "It's a matter of class, surely? The early mountaineers didn't concern themselves with the activities of a lower class and the language in which they expressed themselves."

Ioan himself firmly identified with that "lower class" and their language. When his groundbreaking anthology, The Mountains of Wales, was first published in 1987 Welsh literature was properly and substantially represented. Ioan himself contributed significantly to that literature: a good poet in the free metres, and a mountain essayist of real style and distinction.

He was above all affable, intelligent, combative, able always to rise beyond the pettiness that all too often fogged his professional field. Maybe the mountains, after all, gave him a clearer perspective. He took his last walk amongst them, up little Moel Wnion that looks out across the drowned kingdoms, on the Wednesday before he died.

Ioan Bowen Rees, writer, mountaineer and poet, born January 13, 1929; died May 4, 1999