By Katie Jarvis A BALLAD featuring Rodborough Common is included in a new poetry collection - Nothing like Love - by Jenny Joseph, one of Britain’s best-loved writers.

Set in an empty house on the common’s steep slopes, ‘Dog rose and elder flower/Pushed gutter high’, the ballad, tells the story of a demon who tries to win the soul of his lover over a game of cards.

"I have always liked ballads and this one is really a great mixture of all sorts that I have read and heard," said Jenny.

"In this particular story, a woman returns home to fetch a blanket for her lover, who lies sleeping on Rodborough hill, only to find her kitchen lit up.

"When she looks in through the back door, she sees a man and a woman playing cards and hears their conversation.

"When I first moved to Minchinhampton, around 25 years ago, I would often walk over Rodborough Common.

"At that time, there were a number of empty houses, which always got my imagination going.

"Stories and legends come up from the land, and that must be particularly true of this area with its distinctive landscape formation."

This new collection includes recent poems as well as verse dating back to the 1950s, when Jenny’s writing was first published.

Jenny is best-known for her poem Warning: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, which she wrote in the autumn of 1961.

First published in The Listener, it made its way through anthologies, including Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, becoming even more widely known thanks to radio programmes such as With Great Pleasure.

It has twice been voted Britain’s favourite post-war poem and is included in school syllabuses.

It was Jenny’s reputation as a writer that led her to settle in the Cotswolds, a result of being invited by the late Alan Hancox to do a reading.

He directed the Cheltenham Literature Festival for many years. Keen to move out of London, where she was then living, Jenny looked out of a train carriage window, saw the Golden Valley, and was smitten.

"In my childhood, our house was on the edge of the Chilterns, which, like the Cotswolds, is chalk with beech trees," she said.

"I think the landscape of your early years - unless you had a dreadful upbringing - remains with you as a place where you feel at home."

Nothing like Love is available from all good bookshops, including Stroud Bookshop, and the Yellow-Lighted Bookshops in Tetbury and Nailsworth, price £9.99, published by Enitharmon. ISBN 978-1-904634-84-3.