Simon Armitage is one of Britain's finest contemporary poets, whose work is firmly rooted in the life and culture of his home county of Yorkshire. Penguin published Armitage's acclaimed collection of essays about the north, All Points North, in 1998, and King Arthur in the East Riding is a selection of five characteristically mordant, finger-on-the-pulse pieces from that book.

Marsden is a village of a few thousand people - why bother counting them when you can see most of them from the top of Scout Head, the horizon that looks like an Indian Chief laid flat on his back. One of your friends had the name of the village and his birth-date tattooed under his heart but didn't show his mother for two years - it's that combination of rough and smooth. Your parents live here, and the last of your grandparents, and your sister and her family live just down the road in Slaithwaite. Somebody once asked your dad how long a person would have to live in Marsden before they were no longer 'comers-in'. Your dad looked him in the eye and said 'Fifty years, and you'll be dead then.'

Samuel Laycock was born in Marsden. He was a poet. When he was eleven he had some kind of brain dysfunction and moved to Lancashire, ending up in Blackpool for his troubles, but he's remembered in the village in the shape of an up-ended megalith with a square, metal plate bolted to it. The plate bears a small, embossed image of Laycock from the shoulders up, with his balding head, beard and double-breasted jacket, and the words SAMUEL LAYCOCK, MARSDEN BORN POET. Laycock wrote in Pennine dialect. He was only famous through a handful of towns and villages in the north, but sold thousands of copies of his poems, more than most poets manage to shift throughout the whole country in a lifetime. There's only room for one poet in a village the size of Marsden, which makes Laycock somebody to move past or knock over. The best way to get at him is to take his poems and translate them from whatever version of English he wrote in to whatever version of English you practise yourself. But Laycock died in 1894, so he isn't easily ruffled. He looks out over the bowling green and the tennis court and the bandstand and the flag-pole, his metal face going noticeably greener these last few years - a combination of damp weather and envy.

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