Guide to Malbern.* THE MALVERN HILLS. "Where Malvern, king of hills, fair Severn overlooks, And how the fertile fields of Hereford do lie." MICHAEL DRAYTON. THE Malvern Hills, lying between the counties of Worcester and Hereford, extend about nine miles in length from N. to S., and form the western boundary of the rich vale of the Severn. These hills are composed of a hard, compact, syenitic rock, chiefly covered with soft mossy turf, through which, in many places, the grey weather-beaten stone raises its rough majestic front, marbled over with rare and hardy lichens. They rise precipitously to a height of nearly fifteen hundred feet, and there is, perhaps, no chain of hills in the kingdom which can equal the undulating beauty of their outline, as it is seen far and wide over the surrounding landscape. *The origin of this name is from Moel, a bald hill, and Wern, thought by some writers to mean alder-trees, while other writers derive it from a Gaelic word signifying water B "Thousands of visitors frequent the far-famed hills of Malvern; how few know, that the very ridge upon which they stand was once a molten mass, deep down below; that the Herefordshire hills upon the west are upturned beds of sedimentary and hardened deposits, that once covered up this ancient, cool, and consolidated lava of the Malvern ridge; and that earthquake action and volcanic agency elevated, from a depth of many thousand feet in the earth's interior, the Plutonic Rock,' the once molten mass-the Malvern range! The history of the changes and complicated disturbances which have occurred in the Malvern district, and which are connected with subterranean forces on the most extensive scale, must be compared with changes now in progress in our own times, before we can understand the first letters of an alphabet that constitutes the language of our 'Old Stones.'"* Geologists do not attribute the confused mingling of strata, so remarkable in the geology of Malvern, to one vast convulsion, but rather to repeated disturbances of particular districts, and describe the uplifting of the Malvern Hills to a series of elevatory movements continued through a long period of time. The igneous rocks are devoid of fossil remains, but, from the Beacons of Malvern, we look upon two totally distinct systems of long vanished life. To the west are the Paleozoic * "Old Stones," by the Rev. W. S. Symonds, F.G.S. |