TRIBUTES have been paid to an award-winning farmworker who has died after working on the same holding for 70 years.

Friends and colleagues of Bob Gallon described the length of his service on the Bell Estate, in Thirsk, as "phenomenal" and said it was unlikely ever to be matched.

Mr Gallon, who counted the awards for services to farming he received from the Yorkshire Agricultural Society among his proudest achievements, died at Mount Vale care home, Northallerton aged 85, just weeks after being diagnosed with cancer.

Such was his popularity it is expected St Mary's Church, Thirsk, will be packed for his funeral today (March 21), at 1pm.

Barbara Parvin, whose grandfather taught Mr Gallon to milk cows at the age of ten, after he had been evacuated to Thirsk from Gateshead in 1939, said he had shown an immediate affinity with rural life.

She said his enduring passion for nature, raising animals and the outdoors had led to the extraordinary length of his career.

Mrs Parvin said: "He was such a popular, kind man, he was like that all his life, a real true gentleman."

She said when not working Mr Gallon, who was invited to a Buckingham Palace garden party last year, enjoyed cycling, was a bell ringer at Kirby Wiske and ran a youth club there.

Friend Tony Barden added that Mr Gallon's work ethic and strength had been second to none, and recalled watching him carrying 16-stone bags of corn up the granary steps for hours on end.

The decades that Mr Gallon worked on the Bell Estate saw the number of farmworkers fall from 60 to just three, reflecting the modernisation of agricultural methods, which Mr Gallon revealed he considered as being a necessary evil to improve yields in an interview last year.

He said work on the farm in the 1940s saw him ploughing and sowing fields using horses, planting potatoes and milking by hand and weeding with a hoe.

Mr Gallon said: "The biggest change I saw was the combine harvester, because the threshing machine took 14 men, now two men do everything.

"When I first started with horses people had time to talk to one another. Now on a tractor you can't talk."

Those attending the funeral will be asked to make donations to a cancer research charity, in lieu of flowers.