FAMOUS writers associated with the Malvern Hills are described in a new booklet.

The book, A Literary Trail Around the Malverns, has been published by the Malvern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

David Armitage, the AONB project officer, said the book was prompted by research which showed that local people often refer to well-known authors associated with where they live.

"By great good chance, a piece of work had al-ready been written but not widely published which gave form to these literary references," he said.

This has been written by Mary Constable, head of speech and drama at Malvern College, for a conference of the Society of Teachers of Speech and Drama, which was held in Malvern in 1996.

A Literary Trail, as its title suggests, takes the form of a journey across and around the Hills, dropping in on many of the locations made famous by writers.

Everyone knows that George Bernard Shaw was long associated with the Festival Theatre and that poet laureate John Masefield came from Ledbury, and Dymock is, of course, famous for the poets who lived there just before the Great War.

But it is perhaps less well known that William Wordsworth and Algernon Swinburne were both visitors to West Malvern, or that Peter Roget - of Thesaurus fame - is buried there.

Notable visitors to the area include Charles Dickens, who took the water cure in 1851, staying at the Abbey Hotel, and Lord of the Rings author J R R Tolkien, who walked the Malverns with C S Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, including The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Piers Plowman author William Langland, the poet W H Auden and Sir Henry Rider Haggard, who wrote King Solomon's Mines and opened Ledbury's Barrett Browning Institute in 1896, also merit a mention.

The book is aimed both at tourists and at local people who want to gain a deeper appreciation of the area, and includes a map and details about different places to visit, associated with the writers.

It features drawings by Dudley Brook, Barbara Davis and Ros Rowberry, and photographs by Les Clarke.

The book costs £2.95 and is sold at Tourist Information Centres and local bookshops.