Sir – Your obituary of Lady “Nibby” Bullock (February 26) makes brief mention of her involvement in the ‘Tin Hat’ (North Oxford) bypass campaign, but this was just the tip of Lady Bullock’s envrionmental activism, within and without the Oxfordshire branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

As for the ‘Tin Hat’, in 1992 Alan and Nibby Bullock quickly realised that the North Oxford and Barton proposals, so-called free-standing local bypasses, were in fact part of a linked programme for a proposed east-west route, Felixstowe to Fishguard, as part of a euroroute from Omsk to Cork and didn’t hesitate to throw their considerable campaigning skills behind protesting Bartonians, North Oxfordians, and many others.

As such, Nibby Bullock, then in her mid-seventies, made it clear that she would have been at the vanguard of those protesters who would, had the need arisen, been willing to chain themselves to a bulldozer or a JCB.

As it happens, the then Transport Secretary, John Macgregor, announced in March 1994 that the fake bypasses had been dropped from the Tory Government’s roadbuilding programme, a cause for a victory party at the Barton Neighbourhood Centre, with perhaps just a hint of regret from Nibby Bullock that her protest attachment to a roadbuilidng machine never came to pass.

Her presence in Barton over the years of campaigning was always characterized by grace, wit, and modesty: if Alan Bullock could very reasonably be characterized as a man for all seasons, his consort was without doubt a woman for every season, and Oxonians were fortunate indeed to have had Nibby Bullock in their midst in all sorts of extraordinary ways.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington