Qualla: Great Malvern

Great Malvern: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 4.0. Edward Elgar liked to compose while walking. He would set off from his house on the eastern slope of the Malverns with a notebook in his pocket, climb until the Worcestershire plain spread out below him, and let melodies arrive on the wind. The Enigma Variations, the *Cello Concerto*, the *Dream of Gerontius* - they were assembled, in part, from notes scrawled on these hillsides. A century later you can still walk the Elgar Route through Great Malvern and find his statue on Belle Vue Terrace, leaning on his bicycle, gazing up at the hills that taught him how to listen. The town below him is Victorian in a way few English places still are: a steep tangle of red brick and stone climbing the slope, threaded with springs, watched over by an 11th-century priory church.

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Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Great Malvern: Bare Hill, Healing Water

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mrfinch, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

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Image: Mrfinch | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Malvern: Priory of Glass

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Akoliasnikoff, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

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Image: Akoliasnikoff | CC BY-SA 4.0

Great Malvern: Lewis, Tolkien, and the Lamp Post

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Embleton, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: Bob Embleton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Great Malvern: Spa Town Twilight

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mhygelle, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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;...

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Image: Mhygelle | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Malvern: The Hills Still Belong to Everyone

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trevor Rickard, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 o...

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Image: Trevor Rickard | CC BY-SA 2.0