ELGAR yearned for the Malvern Hills and found solace and inspiration in them. Perhaps he accepted the legend that the last battle of the British under their General Caractacus - whose story he set to music - had taken place on the Herefordshire Beacon known as the British Camp, with its ancient hilltop ramparts.

In that regard, he followed the mediaeval poet William Langland who is today commemorated on the Herefordshire Beacon and who wrote in about 1380 at the beginning of his work Piers Plowman: "One May morning on Malvern Hills out of the unknown a marvellous thing happened to me. I was tired out after wandering astray and I turned aside to rest under a spacious bank beside a stream. And as I lay down and leaned back and looked at the water I grew drowsy and fell asleep so sweet was the music it made."

There is a connection between Langland and Elgar which establishes the essentially English culture of Worcestershire based on Langland as the father of English literature' with Elgar the greatest composer of English music' and thereby confirms that Worcestershire as the cultural heartland and heartbeat of England.

Both took inspiration from the Malvern Hills and the cathedral and their faith.

The words of Langland with his vision of the noble spirit of his idealist character Piers Plowman started a sequence of English authors writing of their dreams for better futures and allegories of images to convey images of concerns for the present life on earth. Elgar wrote music to words which have ethereal and eternal messages.

Elgar noted on a manuscript of the Cockaigne Overture based on a miserable time in London a quote from the Piers Plowman poem "meatless and moneyless in Malvern". Elgar knew his Langland.

The influence of Langland writing in 1380s would have been known to the religious thinker John Henry Cardinal Newman 1801-1884 who promoted Roman Catholicism and who wrote the poem The Dream of Gerontius in 1865, with its idealism and hope for the unseen future life, which was set to music under the same name by Elgar.

The link between Langland and Elgar is an opportunity for Worcestershire to promote itself as a centre of wit and wisdom and of music and music-making with this unique historical pedigree.