MOUNTAIN PORTRAIT

HEREFORDSHIRE BEACON

Jim Perrin recalls a short season picking apples below a serpentine ridge squeezed between rivers

“On Malvern Hulles mi bifel a ferly, Of feyrie mithoughte”

William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman

THE MALVERN HILLS! I love this eight-mile ridge. When I was at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Selly Oak back in the 1960s, I would often lure my fellow students out of Birmingham and away from their studies for a bracing hill walk along this spine, the hills of Wales filling the western horizon. Indeed, I’ve often admired the unmistakable silhouette of the Malvern Hills from Arenig Fawr, Cadair Idris or Y Berwyn.

It is a very special and distinctive hill group between the Rivers Severn and Wye. Just recently, on my way from hospital visits in Gloucester or Edgbaston, I’ve taken the opportunity to revisit these friendly, gentle old hills. They’ve revived so many memories of sauntering along their smooth ridge with friends from Woodbrooke: David Murray-Rust, white-headed and wise, who climbed in the 1930s with Wilfrid Noyce and John Menlove Edwards and provided me with much sound information for my biography of the latter; or of Jazmyn Chelliah, Tamil Indian daughter of the Bishop of Singapore, who took all of us Woodbrooke students from her year out for a sumptuous Indian meal at an Edgbaston restaurant, its preparation supervised and planned by herself. It remains to this day the best Indian food I’ve ever tasted. So, thank you, Jazmyn, for that precious addition to the incalculable store of memory. I wish I’d known you for longer than I did, though I’d have grown very fat in consequence. My dear old friend Jack Longland went to prep school in Malvern and I remember him telling me of a frightening early climbing experience – “the most dunderheaded thing I ever did!” – on the Ivy Scar Rock. It is the only climbing outcrop of any consequence hereabouts. I’ll not recommend it to you as it’s small, loose and hideous and the climbs are equally thus. But the walking is a delight, and the hills have such serpentine presence.