Les Preston receives his award from White Cliffs Ramblers group secretary Helena Trevelyan
photo: East Kent Mercury

Kent LDWA members will be saddened to learn of the death from Covid of Les Preston, who organised car parking arrangements at Dover’s Duke of York’s Royal Military School during our Cinque Ports 100 in 2018.

Les, who would have been 80 in February, was a stalwart of the White Cliffs Ramblers – to which several Kent LDWA members belong – and the White Cliffs Walking Festival, which he helped to set up in 2014. He was a lynchpin of the festival’s organising group and also served as vice-chairman of Kent Ramblers. In 2020 he was presented with a Ramblers Volunteer Award, signed by then national chairwoman Kate Ashbrook, for outstanding services to walking.

Former Kent LDWA chairman Graham Smith, who served with Les on the committees of the White Cliffs Ramblers, the White Cliffs Walking Festival and Kent Ramblers, has written an obituary of Les, which will appear in the next edition of South East Walker, sent out to Ramblers’ members in the South East with Walk magazine.

Thoughts are with Les’s daughter Sarah and son Adrian at this sad time.