GOLDEN autumnal sunlight bathed Ledbury town centre on Monday evening for the grand launch of the two-day Mop Fair.

Following a gathering in the panelled room of the town council offices, Ledbury's new town crier, Clive Gunn, led out a procession of dignitaries, including visiting town mayors and representatives from the Ledbury-based Salters Hill charity, for adults with learning difficulties, down the cobbled Church Lane and into the High Street.

At the waltzers, as is by now traditional, Ledbury's mayor, Cllr Elaine Fieldhouse, asked a Salters Hill student to help her with the ribbon cutting and declared the fair open for one more year.

The fair is also known as the Hop Fair, because it came at the end of the hop harvest and would be both a cause for celebration and also a hiring fair, when agricultural labourers would be hired for the year ahead.

Within living memory it has also been a fair where traders would sell items on stalls, from plates to sheets; but now it is purely a fun fair, run at the request of town council, which holds the ancient charter, by the Rogers family.

Road closures for the fair take place over two days in the High Street, and a section of the Homend and Bye Street.

The fair's origins stretch back to Elizabethan days, although it is certain that early October was not the original month.

In fact, Ledbury's Royal charter grants the town the right, in perpetuity, to hold not one but two streets fairs every year, and strictly speaking these should be taking place in late spring and early summer.

However, for generations, October has been the month.