Gatshire is unpretentious. It makes no claim to be something like ‘The Garden of England’, ‘The English Riviera’, ‘Shakespeare’s County’, ‘The Gateway to The North’, ‘England’s Best-Kept Secret’* or ‘The Burgundy of Britain’. (This could, admittedly, be a result of the Gatshire Tourist Board’s failure to do its job properly –for instance, which county town other than ours tells approaching motorists nothing more than that it welcomes careful drivers and is twinned with a couple of obscure towns in Tuscany and Belgium?** On the other hand, tourism is now Gatshire’s most profitable industry, so the board must be doing something right.) If it wanted to go in for such antonomasia, one epithet it might award itself is ‘Yane Country’. For the county, with its picturesque scenery, served to inspire Gail Yane, one of Hamish the Hermit’s contemporaries and undoubtedly Gatshire’s greatest literary figure. Several collections of her work are available. The newcomer may find Selections from Gail Yane [1975; Yeovil; Rus in Urbe], containing a well-written introduction by Angie Lay, a good starting point, while for those interested in a more comprehensive presentation of the output of this exceptional writer I can thoroughly recommend the recently published Gail Yane: Everything She Ever Wrote [2003; Leeds; University of Leeds Press]. As a layman who has not studied her verse in detail, but who nonetheless takes great pleasure from it, I am very pleased that Eli Ngaya, the world’s leading Yane authority, has graciously permitted me to reproduce his seminal article on the poet from the June 1999 edition of Aperçu magazine, commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Yane’s birth. I hope some readers will be sufficiently stimulated by this piece to go on to sample more of the genius who was Yane: