FORGOTTEN works by one of Scotland's most celebrated poets have been discovered in his Dumfriesshire birthplace a century after they were written.

The 15 poems by Hugh MacDiarmid were penned under his real name, Christopher Murray Grieve, and have been found among the archives of the Old Library in his home town of Langholm.

The first of these appeared exactly a century ago today in the local newspaper when he was just 22 years old. Like the rest they had not seen the light of day since.

Titled - 'A Recruit's Farewell to Eskdale' - it was written while Grieve was stationed at Hillsborough Barracks in Sheffield in the early stages of the First World War.

In it the poet - who was to become internationally renowned and a leading light of the Scottish Renaissance - reflects on his youth in 'The Muckle Toon', as Langholm is known. Part reads:

'And so, farewell, fair-spreading lands I joy in!

Farewell, ye happy haunts, I played, a boy, in.

My face lit by the level sun, I kneel,

On this high place and take my leave of you,'

The collection was unearthed by Ron Addison, a retired teacher and historian who runs the library - the same building the young Grieve grew up in at the end of the 19th Century.

Addison's search through the back-copies of the Eskdale and Liddesdale Advertiser began after he became convinced that someone determined to make his mark as a poet must have been eager to comment on the Great War in which he was to see active service in Greece.

Having spent months searching his theory was confirmed with "an incredible find."

"You can imagine my delight when I turned a page and there amongst the adverts for liver pills was a wee poem by 'C.M.G', that's what he was writing under. I was stunned. In the following days I unearthed another fourteen missing poems" They cover the two years to 1916, and are sentimental.