The Dartmouth grave of author Flora Thompson has become so neglected it has reduced one of her fans to tears.

The author, who is famous for Lark Rise to Candleford, her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, is buried in the town council's Longcross Cemetery.

There is also a plaque on the house in Above Town where she used to live.

But her grave is now so neglected it is covered in weeds, complained Dartmouth bookshop volunteer Oriole Newgass.

'It is overgrown. The hedge has almost fallen in and it has weeds all over it,' she said.

'People come here to look at the house where she lived in Above Town and visit her grave.

'Surely somebody should be taking better care of it.

'A lady who came to Dartmouth especially to see where she lived because she was a huge fan of Lark Rise to Candleford took flowers to her grave.

'She came back in floods of tears because of the state it was in.'

Flora Thompson was born in Oxfordshire in 1876 and began her writing career penning short stories and articles for magazines and newspapers.

Her most famous works are the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy which she sent as essays to the Oxford University Press in 1938 and which were published as books soon after.

The books are a fictionalised, if autobiographical, social history of rural English life in the late 19th century. They were adapted by the BBC for a popular TV series in 2008.

Flora moved to Dartmouth with her family in 1928 to live in Above Town before moving to Brixham in 1940.

She wrote her last book – Still Glides the Stream – at Brixham just before her death in May 1947 and it was published posthumously.

The author had never got over the death of her youngest son Peter, who was killed when the merchant navy iron ore carrier SS Jedmore was sunk by a German U-boat during a North Atlantic convoy run in September 1941.

Her tombstone is in the shape of a book and her son Peter's name in inscribed on the stone along with hers.

Ms Newgass said she had gone to visit the grave herself after being told how badly neglected it was.

'If Flora Thompson is sufficiently important to the town to have a plaque on the house where she lived, then somebody should be taking better care of her grave,' she said. 'There is something so sad about a neglected grave.

'I would like to see somebody get rid of all the weeds, cut the hedge back and make the path more accessible.

'If she is important as a Dartmouth resident to bring tourists here it look bad for Dartmouth.'

Her complaint comes in the wake of concerns about the condition of Dartmouth's First World War graves in the same cemetery.

Town clerk Tracy Rowe said the town council is currently looking at refurbishing the whole of the cemetery.

She said that all the graves in the cemetery were maintained to an equal standard.

The council is hoping to tap into South Hams Council and Devon County Council grants to pay for the cemetery work.