Greetings from the historic town of Malvern in Worcestershire

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Welcome to our 'hobby' website which has migrated to new domain www.the-malvern-hills.uk from www.123-mcc.com. If you have bookmarked individual pages you will need to replace the old domain name by the new one.

Our pages provide an overview of The Malvern Hills area of the UK, for friends and visitors, including some suggestions for how to get here, where to stay, and what to see. Some of the pages are many years old now, so check for up to date information if you are travelling.

You will find additional information which can be navigated by clicking the 'Other Resources' button above. There are, for example, pages that reflect on life from a retired person's point of view, about safety in the home, and researching your family history.

Our expanding 'History Section' contains short stories about bygone Malvern. See, for example, our feature about the Victorian 'mock gothic' houses in Abbey Road and the story about the Victorian 'water cure' Doctors of Great Malvern. These stories build upon the work of earlier historians, adding biographies of some of the people featured, and it is hoped these may be of interest to those researching local history.

There are also a few miscellaneous stories about people we have researched, having no connection with Malvern, that might be judged to fall within the category social history; another of our interests.

During 2014 we dipped briefly into the world of Victorian art, researched casualties of the Great War for the Guarlford History Group and recorded Rolls of the Fallen at Great Malvern library, the Priory, Madresfield, Newland and Hanley Swan. There are also some notes about the Commonwealth War Graves in Great Malvern cemetery.

In Autumn 2015 we finished creating a photographic record of headstones in the churchyard of St Mary's Guarlford, and we have added this to the Guarlford web-site. We also transcribed the 1884 - 1894 pages of the burial register of Great Malvern cemetery for the Malvern Family History Society which led us to Norman May died 1889 who founded a well known photographic studio in Church Street circa 1878. During 2015 we also added biographies, particularly of the founders of early Malvern Schools, and added to stories about Victorian houses in Great Malvern and some of the people that lived there, which we continued in 2016 - we were particularly fortunate to receive stories and photos enabling our page about past Malvern schools to be expanded considerably. Details of additions and changes to the website can be found on the What's New page.

In January 2018 we rebadged our website 'Angus and Rosemary's Miscellany of Malvern' and in August 2018 we moved the website to new hosting and took the opportunity to acquire a new domain name; see  our new logo opposite.

A big thank you to those who continue to contribute to our articles; that is greatly appreciated and of course it makes the stories much more interesting. We still have material to be added to the website in due course, for example more about Clarendon school and Malvern Wells cemetery.

During 2019 local residents campaigned vigorously to prevent the Malvern Hills Conservators 'selling' part of the Common on the unspoilt approach into Malvern to facilitate access to a housing development.

In 2020 the UK was hit by the first wave of the Chinese Coronavirus Pandemic. Otherwise known as COVID-19, this was probably the most serious Public Health emergency since the Spanish Flu that occured in two waves in 1918 and 1919 causing many deaths.  So during 2020 we started a Coronavirus blog, essentially a diary, to shine a spotlight on Worcestershire and the Malvern Hills for the retired community. Following a programme of vaccination, which began in December 2020 and the lifting of most restrictions in July 2021 things were slowly getting back to normal when in December 2021 the Omicron variant of COVID-19 arrived from South Africa, leading to a large spike in cases in January 2022. Hospitalisation was limited by the rapid deployment of booster vaccines the previous month and by virtue of Omicron possibly causing less serious illness than earlier variants. Just when we thought the pandemic was over cases soared again following the ending of all legal restrictions in England on 24th February 2022 so it was not until 2023 the pandemic was mostly over with our final weekly blog published on 2nd April 2023.

The ending of COVID restrictions in England coincided with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The fear then was not of respiratory failure from the Wuhan virus, but  NATO being drawn into direct conflict with Russia triggering WWIII. So in February 2022 we started a new blog The Russian Invasion of Ukraine which is a record of events and opinions. Sadly this war is continuing into a third year with no end in sight.

The Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October 2023 from Gaza sparked the Israel-Hamas war leading to heightened tension in the Middle East and we wonder where that will lead.

With emphasis mostly on the history of the area, you will find little here about forthcoming events in the town - for that it is suggested you either look at the Malvern Gazette website or contact the Tourist Information Centre which has moved to new premises off the Lyttelton Well courtyard, near the entrance to the Priory, in Church Street. Alternatively click to open the excellent official Tourist Information Centre website about The Malverns.

There are some 'archived' pages about Quothquan and Biggar in Scotland which we visited a long time ago while on holiday; here we had experimented with a slightly different style for the navigation buttons.

The 'Index' button at the top right hand side of the Home page will take you to an A to Z index that supplements the site map, and may help if you get lost!

Those of you who have upgraded to Microsoft Windows 10 and are using the  Microsoft Edge browser may have discovered, on some pages, a little book shaped 'button' to the right of the website address bar named either 'Reading View' or 'Immersive View' (similar to that shown right). If you click this, and you are using a desktop PC, you may find many of our pages expand to full screen making the text easier to read. Immersive View may also be switched on and off by pressing the F9 function key, from the menu (three dots) top right of page, or by right-clicking the page and selecting Immersive View.

In Windows 11 this button seems to have been replaced by 'Read Aloud'  a rather nice feature which allows you to listen to the text on the page.

'Read Aloud' can also be activated by pressing Ctrl+Shift+U

The latest feature we have been exploring for dictating our memoirs is Voice Typing (or Speech Recognition) which can be activated by holding down the Windows Key and pressing 'H'.

If a page does not display correctly in your browser, links have stopped working, or information needs correcting do please let us know.

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Photo above; a glimpse of Great Malvern Priory seen from the path up to St Ann's Well.

Great Malvern and Priory viewed from the east