THE county's 29th blue plaque is to honour the memory of a man who was content with the life of a village shepherd.

Mont Abbott lived and worked on the land for 80 years and was made famous by the book Lifting the Latch.

Its author, Sheila Stewart, will unveil the plaque on Friday at Fulwell in west Oxfordshire where Mont spent the last 28 years of his life before his death in 1989.

He was a farmboy, carter, shepherd and gardener who, apart from his first few years, lived in the area around Enstone.

The humble man of the land joins the company of some more illustrious men and women.

The book about him was based on a long series of conversations and was first published by Oxford University Press in 1987, then reissued in 2002 by Day Books in Charlbury.

The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has been placing memorials in the county since 2001 and has so far put up 28.

It meets twice a year to consider nominations and tries to spread the plaques, which each cost about £400, throughout the county. They honour not just people but places with a history.

The plaque scheme is more than 140 years old. It was first introduced in London after the MP William Ewart proposed memorial tablets to honour places where the great and famous lived or were born.

Plaques have already been put up in the county for: John Alder, Sir John Betjeman, William Carter, Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, Thomas and Martha Combe, Sarah Jane Cooper, The Cutteslowe Walls, Daniel Evans and Joshua Symm, Humphrey Gainsborough, Prof Gathorne Robert Girdlestone, Cecil Jackson-Cole, Frank Lascelles, William Morris, Sir James Murray, Walter and Clara Pater, William Potts, Barbara Pym, Ripon Hall, Sir Bernard Samuelson, Sir Francis Simon, Felicia Skene, The Star Inn and Oxfordshire Yeomanry, the Rev Edward Stone, Oxford University Sports Ground, JRR Tolkien, Jethro Tull, William Turner and Westfield House.