they malverned me

It was our fifteenth wedding anniversary last week (crystal, since you ask); various family commitments meant that we could only get away for a night and most of a day but that did afford an opportunity to do some walking in the Malvern Hills, somewhere I'd never been. 

Any walk in the Malverns will be constrained by the shape of the terrain, a distinctive north-south spine of rock poking out of the otherwise pretty flat ground. In particular, that topography makes it difficult to construct a satisfactory circular walk without either following an essentially out-and-back route (i.e. traversing the ridge twice) or incurring a lot of low-level walking at one end of the walk or the other. Conversely, organising a one-way end-to-end traverse of the ridge involves either two cars, or a reliance on public transport of some sort.

In addition to all that, if the aim of your walk is to walk the full length of the ridge, staying on top of it as much as possible, you have to decide how much of a purist/completist attitude you're going to take (this will additionally be constrained by what the people with you are prepared to put up with). So we could have done what this guy did and walk the entire ridge from its low-level start down at the southern end at Chase End Hill, but that would have involved some logistical shenanigans that we couldn't really be arsed with, plus an early start that we equally couldn't be arsed with, considering part of the point of the trip was to have a nice night away, dinner, a few drinks and not have to get up at some absurd hour.

A brief interlude for some accommodation details, then: we stayed in Colwall, largely for reasons of navigational and logistical convenience, but it happens also to be a nice little village with, crucially, a railway station (we'll come back to this later) and also the Colwall Park Hotel, a nice little country pub/hotel with pretty decent food and excellent Butty Bach which I took the opportunity of having a few of with dinner.

So we got up the following morning, moved the car fifty yards down the road to the railway station car park, and then headed off over the station footbridge and in a generally southerly direction. Basically the choice of Colwall as start point meant that there was a bit of a walk in to get to our chosen access point to the ridge - as you can see from the route map below this results in the walk being shaped like a wobbly letter J with Colwall at the bent end. 

So we cracked on up to the summit of Herefordshire Beacon at 338 metres (1109 feet), which seemed like a satisfying southerly point, all the minor hills to the south of it being lower. This is also known as British Camp, that technically being the name of the Iron Age earthwork that occupies its upper slopes. This first bit is an up-and-back trip from the British Camp car park, which is less satisfactory than a nice neat loop but did provide an opportunity on coming back down to pop into the imaginatively-named Malvern Hills Hotel for a refreshing beverage and a toilet stop before tackling the main ridge. 

Once on the main ridge there is, as with all ridge walks, a bit more up and down than you might expect, but it is in general a delight with (thanks to the flatness of most of the surrounding terrain) spectacular views all the way over to the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons and beyond. Named summits that we passed over during this section of the walk were Black Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Jubilee Hill and Perseverance Hill, all really just the tops of gentle undulations in the ridge rather than magnificent craggy peaks in their own right. 

There's another pronounced dip known as Wyche Cutting (at least partly man-made, I think) before the last and highest section of the walk; this handily contains another pub where we repeated the pint-and-a-piss routine from earlier. And then it was off up Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point of the day at 425 metres (1394 feet), and a few more subsidiary hills (Summer Hill, North Hill, End Hill), before dropping down into the northern end of Great Malvern and making our way to the railway station at Malvern Link, but not before a celebratory pint at the Bakery Inn. Refreshed, we then caught a train from Malvern Link to Colwall (two stops, less than ten minutes), picked up the car and headed back home. 

These are definitely hills rather than mountains, but (if you're lucky enough to have a glorious clear sunny day as we did) the magnificence of the views compares favourably with much higher summits, and it's a satisfying walk of almost exactly ten miles which you'll notice conforms to a couple of my informal rules: the low-level walk just to get to where you need to be is at the start rather than the end, and the main focus of the day (the highest point, invariably) is somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way round.