They are one of the most prepossessing sights in southern England, a polished stegosaurus back rising from the Severn plain, the spa town of Great Malvern nestling in their green flanks with an almost Italianate elegance.
I had passed the Malverns half a dozen times, but never walked them. Life was usually hurrying me to somewhere else, as it is now, but this time being cooped up in a sweltering car on such a radiant late spring day is just too much. I swing for the line of cool blue hills, an upland oasis promising an hour or two of views, breezes and lung work on the way back north.
The world is sickly-sweet, on the brink of turning. Smells of spread muck and decayed may blossom drift in through my open windows from the fields of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, the roads thickly bordered with billows of Queen Anne’s lace.
I loosen cramped limbs with the stiff but short climb up Ragged Stone Hill. A skirt of woodland suffused with the pungent perfume of flowering hawthorn and rowan gives way to a huge sweep of bluebells on the open hillside, incandescent as flaming brandy.
The bald summit gives views stretching from the very English Cotswolds to the very Welsh Black Mountains, endless quiet miles of pastoral patchwork between them. Outcropping shards of the underlying Precambrian rock seem a strikingly rugged intrusion into such a soft landscape.
On the way down, I see a red-tailed bumblebee flitting between the bluebells, gathering pollen on its tiny tibia with the focus of a craftsman. I wonder if we would look similar in the eyes of some larger being, preoccupied with our own esoteric labours and rituals. This time of year always fills me with a desire to drop everything and disappear into nature, but the rules won’t allow it; I must make do with these snatched moments.
Watching the engrossed insect has a strange effect, though. I become aware of other sights and sounds – the orange flutter of a heath butterfly, the flick of a lizard’s tail in the grass – and, just for that one moment, time stands still.
