Ledbury's poet is John Masefield and many of the sights he celebrated in verse and prose are still to be seen in his "little town of ancient grace".

Other poets have lived and written in the area, but the former Poet Laureate was actually born in Ledbury, in "The Knapp" in 1878.

Before he died in 1967, he was dreaming of returning from Oxfordshire to his childhood roots.

His nephew, Bill Masefield, explained: "He wrote to me and said he wished to come back to Herefordshire, and perhaps, I might find him a black and white cottage; and he mentioned Bosbury, I think. He certainly loved this part of the world. Ledbury in particular."

John Masefield made visits home to his family. But from his teenage years, when the poet of Sea Fever first went to sea, Ledbury seems almost to have been a theatre of his imagination, glimpsed mainly from exile, in which the sights and sounds of his childhood were transformed into personal myths, characters and beauty.

In 1951, the poet wrote a small booklet, The Ledbury Scene, which was sold to raise money for the restoration of the Ledbury Church bells. In this rare publication, Masefield provided a clear map of his poetic world, which may still be followed today.

His long poem of 1911, The Everlasting Mercy, made Masefield's reputation, with its rugged account of Saul Kane, a drunkard and blasphemer, who undergoes a sudden conversion to Christianity. Considered shocking in its day, not least because of its swearing, the masterpiece may be valued for its glimpses of old Victorian Ledbury.

Masefield set the famous fight scene on the "somewhat barren pasture above the Coneygree Wood on the field track leading to Eastnor Knoll and Eastnor".

In The Ledbury Scene he writes: "After the fight, the winner and his friends return though the wood to the Worcester Road, turned left, towards Ledbury, and then turned right, along what was called Cabbage Lane, to the southern side of the church."

Then the ruffians passed down Church Lane, to what Masefield called "an imaginary tavern, directly north of the Market House" which may have been based on the old "Seven Stars", the pub gutted by fire this July.

Leaving this Homend tavern, Saul Kane decides to ring the town's old fire bell out of mischief. This bell has now gone, but Masefield correctly places it "near St Katherine's Chapel, just below the Feathers Hotel".

The poet's next long work, The Widow in the Bye Street of 1912, shows how even a poet firmly rooted in place can alter geography when it suited him.

The melodrama begins: "Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town..." Ledbury has been moved north to fit Masefield's metre! He was writing in strict iambic pentameter and needed just ten syllables in that line, and "Herefordshire" would have given him 12, and ruptured his rhythm.

That Masefield's Bye Street was Ledbury's Bye Street was admitted by the poet in The Ledbury Scene. He wrote: "The Bye Street still exists, though much changed from what it was in my early childhood. The tale includes a description of the October Hiring Fair, held in the midst of the main street, to the intense delight of all children."

In his late prose work Grace Before Ploughing, Masefield gave another account of the October Fair, which today offers rides that the poet would have smiled at, but little of the rural pageantry he knew. He wrote: "The Fair Days were days of wonder. I know now that there were things that I shall never have the chance of seeing. Two teams of mummers, with their tales of wonder...all those men of skill, now vanished. All the joy of that old England was there..."

But much remains of the Ledbury Masefield knew, not least the church's golden weather-cock, which he immortalised in Wonderings as something, "Steadfast as life, as certainless as luck/ Seeing him swinging to the wester's drive? I ever thought the golden bird alive."

John Masefield too is alive, to those who knew him and remember, and to those who glimpse, even beyond the genius of his work, a genial and courteous soul, who strove to please.

Bill Masefield remembers an occasion in 1934: "I was nine, and at Prep School in Minchinhampton. My mother arranged a reading in the Feathers and I was brought over from school. My uncle read Reynard the Fox and other things. It seemed to have a wonderful effect!

"He pressed two half crowns into my hand when I was saying goodbye to him. You could never fail to get on with him. He had the knack of making himself available, to listen to people."