The name reaches back to before England existed. *Malvern* derives from the Common Brittonic words that survive in modern Welsh as *moel* and *bryn* - bare hill - and probably referred at first to the Worcestershire Beacon, the tallest summit of the range. By the time it appears in Domesday Book in 1086 as *Malferna*, the settlement at its foot was already gathering around a Benedictine priory founded in the 1080s. The growth that turned a hill-village into a town came later, and it came from the water. Springs rise all over these hills, and Malvern water - so clean it was said to contain almost nothing - became a 19th-century obsession. By 1842 two doctors, James Wilson and James Manby Gully, had set up rival hydrotherapy clinics, and the town exploded outward. Queen Adelaide visited in September that year. Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, Tennyson, Carlyle, and the future Franklin D. Roosevelt (at age seven, convalescing) all came to take the cure.

The Priory Church survives because the townspeople bought it. When Henry VIII's commissioners came to dissolve the monastery in 1539, the parish was given the option to purchase the building, and a man named William Pinnocke did so on the town's behalf. They acquired with it one of the most extraordinary collections of medieval stained glass in England - 15th-century windows that escaped the iconoclasts because they were nominally parish property rather than monastic. The priory's medieval floor tiles are similarly the finest set in any English parish church. Henry VII and his queen Elizabeth of York made substantial endowments to the priory in their lifetime; their elder son Prince Arthur, who would die before he could become Henry VIII's brother-on-the-throne, knew this church. So did William Langland, who may have been educated here and who set his great vision-poem *Piers Plowman* (1362) on "a Maye mornynge on Malverne hylles."

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were friends and walking companions, and one of their favourite destinations was Malvern, where Lewis's former pupil George Sayer had become Head of English at Malvern College. The story goes that Lewis, Tolkien, and Sayer were leaving a Malvern pub one winter evening when it began to snow. A gas lamp glowed at the end of the lane, throwing yellow light onto the falling flakes, and Lewis remarked that it would make a very nice opening for a book. The image became the lamp post in *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*. Tolkien, walking the high ridges with Sayer, would compare the Malverns to the White Mountains of Gondor; in 1952 he recorded himself reading from *The Hobbit* and *The Lord of the Rings* at Sayer's Malvern home, recordings that were later pressed onto gramophone records. The town hands these stories around freely. There is a blue plaque on the Unicorn Inn marking Lewis's visits.

The hydrotherapy boom did not last. By the early 20th century medicine had moved on, the spa hotels emptied, and Malvern's enormous Victorian buildings stood looking for purpose. They found it in education. Malvern College, founded in 1865, expanded to fill several former hotels; the Imperial Hotel, built in 1860 by E.W. Elmslie (who also designed the magnificent Great Malvern railway station you can still see), became Malvern Girls' College and then Malvern St James. The same architect's Victorian station - all decorative ironwork and painted floral capitals - turns up in television: it played a commuter-belt halt in the 1975 post-apocalyptic series *Survivors*. Two Nobel laureates and an Olympic gold medallist passed through Malvern College's gates, as did the emperor Haile Selassie, who stayed at the Abbey Hotel during his 1936-41 exile from Italian-occupied Ethiopia.

There is one more reason the Malvern Hills look the way they do. By the 1880s the spa boom threatened to swallow the open ridges in villa development, and the Malvern Hills Act of 1884 created a body - the Conservators - empowered to buy up the manorial wastelands and keep them open. By 1925 they had acquired most of it. The result is one of the longest continuously protected upland landscapes in England, a nine-mile spine of ancient Precambrian rock open to walkers from any direction. Climb to the Worcestershire Beacon at 1,394 feet on a clear day and you can see thirteen counties; turn south and the ridge runs all the way to British Camp, the great Iron Age hillfort that crowns Herefordshire Beacon. The springs that built the town still flow at St Ann's Well in its 1813 building. The Elgar statue still leans on its bicycle. Below it, on Belle Vue Terrace, the Enigma Fountain plays.