Great novelist and now I know we share a hero!   Penelope Lively picks WG Hoskins in the Guardian 26/11/11.  She says “those [Hoskins inspired] years stumping around in muddy fields gave me an imagery of the juxtaposition of past and present, of the random nature of memory, of the way in which, in the head as in the landscape, everything happens at once, that would feed into fiction for years to come.”   I like that.