During the 1960s and 70s, you might have passed a tweedy looking gent striding over the Lakeland fells. All of the Lakeland fells. Pipe clamped between the teeth, rain dripping off the cloth cap and the bushy eyebrows, he'd have been spotted, by those quick enough to keep up, completing the circuit of the four three-thousanders, climbing the rocks of Dow Crag, or heading up from the Kirkstone to Red Screes in the shortest possible time.

Any of which activities should be enough to indicate that, no, I ain't talking about Alfred Wainwright.

The man who was, as it were, the Rolling Stones to Wainwright's The Beatles, the Helena Bonham-Carter to Wainwright's Meg Ryan – well anyway, I'm talking about A. Harry Griffin here.

He contributed over 1300 entries to the Guardian Country Diary column, one every fortnight for 53 years

Intelligence officer during World War Two, journalist on the Lancaster Evening News, Harry Griffin was the one who, as the paper's music critic, criticised the conductor for playing Rachmaninov's 3rd concerto too fast – the player being Rachmaninov himself…

It was Harry Griffin who got Wainwright his first commission, making endpaper maps for one of Griffin's own books. Up in the hills, however, he wasn't just a walker in Wainwright style, but a rock climber, a scrambler, a tarn swimmer, a skater on Rydal Water, and almost any other strenuous sort of thing you can think of. He was one of the Coniston Tigers, the first to realise that Dow Crag wasn't just some ugly gullies fit for only the most serious sort of mountaineers, but a set of lovely buttresses and one of Lakeland's very best beginners' crags. He identified the one east-west grid line that crosses Lakeland all the way without getting wet in any lakes, and then walked along it. And though never a fell-runner, he broad-mindedly didn't consider them as weird and disreputable aliens. Indeed, it was a newspaper article of his, in the 1960s, that celebrated Bob Graham's 42-summit circuit of 25 years before and led to it becoming the standard fell-running challenge ever since.

If you ever read anything about Lanty Slee, the whisky smuggler of Little Langdale, then it was written by someone who got it from Harry Griffin – or, these days, from someone who got it from someone who got it from Harry Griffin. Same goes for 'Auld Will Ritson' of Wasdale Head. He interviewed people like George Abraham the photographer, the ones who were putting up Lakeland's first climbing routes way back in the 1890s.

I met him myself once, in the beer tent at the end of the Lake District Mountain Trial – a 20-mile fell race that's been using the conventions of orienteering since before orienteering was even invented. Meaning that I've shared a beer with a man who's shared a beer with the man who put up the New West climb on Pillar Rock in 1901…

As a proper journalist, Harry Griffin didn't believe in selling a piece to a newspaper unless he could sell it again to a magazine and put it into a book after that. And then, perhaps, into another book a few years later on. So out of Inside the Real Lakeland (1961); In Mountain Lakeland (1961); Pageant of Lakeland (1966); The Roof of England (1968); Still the Real Lakeland (1970); Long Days in the Hills (1975); A Lakeland Notebook (1975); A Year in the Fells (1976); Freeman of the Hills (1978); and Adventuring in Lakeland (1980) I haven't felt the need to own more than one Harry Griffin book.

He contributed over 1300 entries to the Guardian Country Diary column, one every fortnight for 53 years – some of those are collected into 'A Lifetime of Hills' (2005). "His writing's presiding characteristic was simple-hearted delight. For economical evocation of mood and soundness of approach, there was not a mountain writer to touch him," Jim Perrin wrote in his obituary in The Guardian – where his final 'Lakeland Diary' had appeared just a couple of weeks before.

And no – he isn't Alfred Wainwright.