Tributes have been paid to the founder and chairman of one of Cumbria’s leading civil engineering firms, who has died aged 90.
Hylton Irving started RH Irving Construction Ltd as a small groundworks firm in 1974. One of the first jobs he secured as an independent subcontractor was working to complete the new Manchester Airport complex.
Specialising initially in roads, sewers and other infrastructure projects across the county, over the next 50 years the company expanded its own portfolio of major engineering and construction projects across the north of England and southern Scotland.
These included the new veterinary hospital in Penrith, the Amazon depot at Longtown, and the acclaimed Oven Project in Dumfries.
In 2010 work was completed on Houghton Hall Garden Centre – the first of 11 similar garden centres they have built for the national Klondyke chain.
Among their most recent projects was the redevelopment of the Spar garage at Longtown, close to where the company employs over 100 staff at its headquarters at Borders Business Park.
Richard Hylton Irving was born in Yorkshire and grew up in Low Hesket. Initially part of the family farming business, he soon struck out on his own.
Over the next few years his entrepreneurial zeal saw him running a freezer business in Carlisle and a two-man haulage firm with his friend Bob Blaylock – which almost came to a disastrous end when their HGV drove into the middle of the Iran-Iraq warzone.
It was while working as a cattle dealer in Cambridgeshire in 1959 that he met Moveen Arnold, a trained radiographer and daughter of livestock auctioneer Robert Arnold.
The couple married two years later and returned to Cumbria, where they had two daughters, Jane and Louisa.
Jane, who is resource director at RH Irving Construction Ltd, said: “In Cambridge he’ll always be known as the Border Reiver, who came down from the north and swept my mum off her feet – although she didn’t take kindly to becoming a farmer’s wife and soon got a job at Infirmary.
“In Cumbria he was part of a generation of uncompromising, self-made men who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, commanded huge loyalty, and who at the end of the day could usually be found putting the world to rights over a few pints at the Border Club in Carlisle.
“But at home he was an unfailingly loving and generous husband and father, with an unfailing streak of mischief, who insisted on giving me and Louisa a childhood straight from the pages of Enid Blyton.
“In later years he was thrilled to be an equally doting ‘Tata’ to his grandchildren, Georgia and Bruce.”
Always a farmer and conservationist at heart, Hylton went on to build his own house on land at Penton. He and Moveen, who survives him, lived there for nearly 40 years, until his death this week.
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