SYLVIA Short seemed easy to size up, an endearing elderly eccentric with a ramshackle self-built home by the Wye where she raised geese and goats.

Sylvia, though, was worth so much more than face value, as friends have since discovered and future generations of Herefordshire school pupils are to learn.

The former teacher amassed an £800,000 estate and willed it all to the county's young.

Interest on that sum alone allows the education charity set up in Sylvia's name two payouts of £20,000 a year given as grants. Applications from groups or individuals have to expand on her enthusiasm for learning opportunities outside the classroom.

The woman behind one of Herefordshire's biggest bequests is something of an enigma.

She spent time at Byford as a teenager and retired there in 1971, having devoted a teaching career to Haggerston Secondary Girls School in London's East End.

By all accounts Sylvia was an inspiration, a 'Jean Brodie' or maybe 'Miss Chips' with her vivid, engaging approach to geography, history and the arts.

She would regularly take her inner city charges to camp beside the Wye at Byford, sharing a love of nature that such surrounds nurtured in her at the same age.

It was her hope that this site - with its two cottages, one of which she built herself - could become a study centre for culture and the environment. Her estate was left to Herefordshire Council with this in mind, but - as the Hereford Times reported in 1999 - several criteria meant the project was not possible.

The Sylvia Short Educational Charity was set up instead to promote 'fieldwork and extra mural studies'. Any of the county's schools or their pupils can apply for its bi-annual grants.

Trustees Richard and Sallie Morgan were among the few who knew Sylvia as well as anyone could.

The couple - themselves former teachers - met Sylvia while holidaying here and forged a friendship after coming to live in the county. They say her public face masked an authoritative idealist who lived independently, if somewhat eccentrically, raising 'great numbers' of geese and goats.

But not even the Morgans were aware of Sylvia's brave battle with cancer in her final months. True to form, the 83-year-old had kept the condition a close secret until hours before she died at the then Hereford General Hospital on Christmas Eve 1996.