composer Edgar Bainton (1880–1956) set The Crier by Night to music. An early environmentalist, Bottomley's writing was always closely grounded in geographical location. A Scottish influence (echoing Yeats' Irish revival) appears in his late plays, while much of his earlier writing was rooted in Lakeland. Thus for example the ghost or bogle of Claife Heights, Windemere - the so-called Claife Crier - is used to resolve the conflict between a cruel farmers-wife and a serving maid in The Crier by Night; while one of his best-loved poems is known as Cartmel Bells: "O, Cartmel bells ring soft tonight/And Cartmel bells ring clear, But I lie far away tonight,/Listening with my dear; Listening in a frosty land/ Where all the bells are still..." A collection of Bottomley's poems and plays was edited and introduced by his literary executor, Claude Colleer Abbott, in 1953. Art collecting Among the most notable of his friendships was that with the artist Paul Nash. The two men were brought together in 1910 by Nash’s love of poetry and Bottomley’s extensive knowledge of painting. Bottomley encouraged the young artist and in exchange Nash made several designs for Bottomley’s plays that he exhibited or used as illustrations. Despite increasingly divergent tastes in art, their friendship survived and a prolific lifelong correspondence between the two men was published in 1955. Bottomley studied the work of artists and was a dedicated collector. He bought artworks when he could afford to and his friends also gave him their art in gratitude for his support and friendship. In the 1940s Bottomley and his wife Emily gave their personal art collection of six hundred paintings, prints and drawings to the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle, Cumberland. The bequest included a nationally important collection of works by the Pre-Raphaelites including pictures by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Ford Madox Brown, Elizabeth Siddal and Simeon Solomon. The collection also included work from artists of other genre including those of Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Albert Moore, Frederic, Lord Leighton, Henri Fantin-Latour, Lucien Pissarro, William Nicholson, Walter Crane, Charles Conder, Jessie Marion King, William Morris's daughter May Morris, William Rothenstein, Charles Ricketts and of course Paul Nash. Works Poetry Plays Editions The Poems and Plays of Gordon Bottomley, edited with an introduction by C. Colleer Abbott (1953) As editor The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg (1937) edited with Denys Harding,