Tributes have been paid to a man who officially opened Aberystwyth’s Magic of Life Butterfly House.

The Earl of Cranbrook died on Monday, 24 August and Neil Gale, who owns the butterfly house, has paid tribute to him for very special and personal reasons.

He said: “I am very sad to learn about the passing of the rainforest conservationist, the Earl of Cranbrook.

“He officially opened the Magic of Life Butterfly House in 2002 along with the Mayor of Aberystwyth.

“In his speech, he distilled the very essence of what work the butterfly house was going to do in its future — the appreciation of the beauty of nature — remarking, ‘No good learning things by rote!’”

He added: “From the 1950s onwards, he was a lifelong rainforest conservationist focusing on Malaysia and Borneo.

“He was known for helping students and researchers. A chance meeting (or was it?) in Paddington train station one time led to him helping me stay at the Kuala Belalong Field Studies Centre in Brunei, a station that he had helped set up.

“Here I was researching how trees die. Fiercely intellectual and never one to mince his words, he fired a question at me: ‘How do trees die?’ ‘In the extremes’, I replied without hesitation, to which I could see a momentary flicker of appreciation for keeping it concise.

“The rainforests of Borneo are, to me, some of the grandest and most special forests in the world.

“While his legacy will be carried on by many, I can't imagine there will be another single person who will have saved so much of Borneo's forest as he did. And a chorus of morning calls of the gibbons, the ‘tuc tuc terooks’ of the barbets, and the soothing pipes and whistles of the frogs will all still be heard because of him.”