On Sunday, June 14, the only Grade 2-listed alehouse in Britain closed. Its proprietor, Miss Florence Lane, one of the oldest licensees in the land, had died in hospital the previous day after a brief illness. She was 94.

Visitors from around the world in recent years, surveying the aged piece of nature before them, would ask “Flossie” how old she was. “Plenty,” she would reply. “I’ve seen life. In the country you never ask how old a body is — nor the name of their father. It’s called manners.”

She presided over the Sun Inn in Leintwardine, the largest settlement on the Herefordshire part of the River Teme. She lived in the armchair in the gloomy far corner of her little sitting room next to the stillages.

For many visitors, a trip to the red-brick bar of the inn was a life-changing experience. There was only one good beer, some rude tables and benches — and an occasional coal fire to fight off the river mist. Into this emptiness people poured their freshly rediscovered abilities to tell stories and offer amusing instruction. Confidence was restored. Sometimes they found a village feast in progress, for Miss Lane occasionally allowed the standard table d’hôte menu (of a pickled egg in a bag of crisps) to progress into a bizarre rural cuisine. The always oversubscribed feasts involved heaps of goat and mutton and hare and wild duck and rook cooked by village matrons. The modern national fashion for fricassée of grey squirrel started there in 1994.

Smiling above her surgical stockings and looking out from behind her ginger ale — as a lifelong teetotaller she once threatened to sue Jeremy Paxman for describing her lifelong tipple in The Spectator as a brandy and soda — she was a tight bundle of very English prejudices. Preferring other people to herself, shockingly indulgent to children, wickedly accurate with nicknames, intolerant of facial hair in men, a pillar of support to the genuinely troubled, the mistress of the cutting aside, she calmly managed the roaring galère and easily persuaded a host of willing villagers to work for her without payment. A scheme was proposed to export her to the Harvard Business School as a world-class manager fully the equal of Jeremy Bentham at the University of London; she declined but on the ground that Harvard was a foreign place.

After hours, she would lock the door and declare a private party. Once hearing a hammering on the door to the street, she opened it to find a stranger to whom she took an instant and unchangeable dislike — for he wore a beard. He asked to come in. There was a roar of singing and shouting coming from under the bar door. “No,” she cried. “You can’t. We are closed for tax purposes.” Such eccentricity was infectious.

The local, annual regatta for coracles (those small round vessels impossible to steer) was started there, as was the cricket club with its famous victories over the national teams of Portugal and The Gambia, not to mention the office of the Mayor of Leintwardine, the beer festival, trout and grayling fly-making classes, the Versailles lectures and the project to train Staffordshire longbacks as truffle pigs.

The Versailles lectures were an irregular series of talks lasting 50 minutes given in the red-brick bar by academics at the leading edge of their subject. There were no rewards except a seat by the fire in winter and the right to be served rather than get your own. These penurious terms notwithstanding, the organisers of the lectures attracted a fine field. Ranks of villagers seated on the piled-up benches in an arrangement mockingly known as “the chained library” gave the thumbs up or down signal at the end, very like a corrida. Lady Fielding, sometime Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, got the thumbs up for her revolutionary talk on the Domesday Book. Jeremy Paxman was turned down for a lecture on Britishness; Canon Rodney Bomford, an honorary canon of Southwark Cathedral until 2001, got elected for a brilliant pitch on “The mathematics of God”. Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, was scheduled to talk on “String Theory” but that is now cancelled.

A famous cricketer sat in the red-brick bar after scoring a nice little 50 at the village wicket and observed that “while there is a place like this and we still have cricket, there is still a chance for England”. The listed building will remain, and there are now schemes afoot to make sure that the village keeps its famous alehouse in its material form. But the old oaks are falling. The average English toper, squeezed between the health and safety demands of government, the financial needs of the great pub-owning combines and a lack of colour and panache in the characters of their landlords, begins to gaze out over a shattered heath. The eyes grow bloodshot. No longer can the rolling English drunkard swing brightly down the rolling English road.

Florence Emily Lane was born in 1914, one of six children — two daughters and four sons — to Charles and May Lane. Her father was the village policeman. When they grew up one of Florence’s brothers, Charlie, bought the Sun Inn and thereafter presided behind the bar with Flossie as his helper. When he died prematurely she became the landlady and remained in situ ever afterwards.

Flossie will have a very permanent memorial. The local church of St Mary Magdalene (an Edward III chantry church) contains choirstalls rescued by villagers from Thomas Cromwell’s Commissioners just before Wigmore Abbey was destroyed during the Reformation. There are 12 such stalls. Only five of their misericords have been carved and seven therefore remain blank. It is expected that permission will be granted to have all seven carved in the next few years. And a misericord, carved to set out Miss Lane’s influence on the village, will be the first to be completed.

Flossie was a relaxed impresario of genius. More modern women with all their opportunities and education have something to learn from Miss Lane who had neither formal career nor fecund family. The Sun Inn perhaps was her very own nunnery — another institution which the modern world has all but done away with.

The Sun Inn’s staff are continuing to serve behind the bar until the pub is sold. The Campaign for Real Ale lists the Sun Inn as one of “Britain’s true heritage pubs” and “possibly the most unspoilt pub in the country”. For several years it was the only one of its Basic Pubs of Great Britain with five stars.

Flossie was unmarried.

Florence Lane, pub landlady, was born on July 10, 1914. She died on June 13, 2009, aged 94