Extollagy!

This stone has a dense, obdurate hardness to it. It is a deep, flat shade of grey; shattered by feet or frost from its host rock, it has a certain sharp-edged flatness. It is also very ancient: cooked up 600-670 million years ago, under conditions of enormous heat and pressure many kilometres below an active volcano; far above, the planet had yet to develop large plants, or animals, or even fertile soils.

300-500 million later a phase of mountain-building placed the expanse of rock of which this stone was a part under huge pressure. Normally part of the hidden ‘basement’ which lies beneath our entire island, it was squeezed upwards, testing a scar-line that was itself ancient: the joining point of two chunks of continental crust.

Over the ensuing millennia the landscape around this great mass was transformed – new rocks formed and eroded away, old ones moulded and reshaped – but throughout this time this oldest and hardest of rocks has changed more slowly than anything around it, and the forces that reduce have had less of a levelling impact than they have had on the surroundings landscape, and our rock’s bare and frost-shattered surface has been left high above the surrounding country.

The Malvern Hills are the result: a dramatic punctuation mark in the unfolding landscape of England. As a place of igneous origin and mountainous character, they introduce with a striking drama the themes of the west and the south-west some distance before one should rightfully expect them to appear. They are thus an outlier, a harbinger. Yet their relative isolation is a reminder that more than anything else, they are a place apart. These are the oldest rocks in southern England. They are a near-shocking interruption in the southern narrative of young, untroubled rocks, a kind of exposure of a geological collective unconscious. Stories like this barely exists anywhere south of Ullapool, let alone in Worcestershire.

The hills they make are also a divider. Look west from this 9-mile long ridge, and one peers into the dark, old country of the Marches – Silurian shales, Old Red Sandstone heights, complex landforms, distant Welsh mountains. Look east, and one gazes at a fertile wide valley-plain of young, soft rock, the Severn and the M5 running roughly parallel to this north-south ridge, the gentle-looking uplands of the Jurassic Cotswolds lining up beyond. This entire valley has been created by the removal by the Severn of the soft rocks over which it slides, leaving these heights to either side: indeed, here on the Malverns there is no higher point between here and the North Sea (indeed it is said there is no higher point between here and the Urals): in effect one is gazing towards the settled heartlands of the south and east. It is fitting, then, that this wall-like flank of hills is anciently a boundary: the Earl’s Ditch follows their spine and dates from the Bronze Age; it was the focus of territorial disputes in the C13, and remains the border of Hereford and Worcestershire.

The Malverns are also a kind of toy wilderness in an otherwise tamed landscape; a place where Anglo-Saxon hermits went to found Great and Little Malvern priories; and later, major cultural figures dreamed their dreams. The vision of William Langland author of Piers Plowman, is particularly prescient. Lying by a spring beneath a ‘broad bank’ on the Malverns, he had a vision which crystallised several signature qualities of this landscape. That this is a wildness safe enough to dream in; that these hills overlook a great plain in which the worldly and the everyday is visibly milling around (witness the M5); that the hills themselves are an important source of fresh water; and that they are marked by ancient statements of power (The Earl’s Ditch is one, but perhaps the ‘broad bank’ is the forbidding Iron-Age rampart known as British Camp). Langland claimed not to know where he was in his dream, yet its landscape is firmly rooted in his locality. And his dream also embodies the cultural relationship of romantic highland and worldly lowland that would later be writ large in the Lakes and other mountain zones.

Centuries later, Elgar, too spent much of his life walking these hills and cycling the lanes beneath them as he composed his sweepingly Romantic musical visions of Englishness. In truth, all who have found in the Worcestershire landscape a certain swooping darkness – from Elgar to the wild pagan fulsomeness of And Also the Trees and the rural punk of the Dancing Did – owe something to this outburst of pre-Cambrian upland.

Our stone, lying in the grass near Herefordshire beacon — the highest point in the Malverns — is diorite, an igneous rock that is hard to work but very permanent. The steps of St Paul’s cathedral are diorite, as are some of the most durable monuments of ancient Egypt.The other main truly ancient rock up here is a pinkish granite.

The sharp lines at the edges of the stone are worth remembering, for the way it cracks is crucial to its impact on the human story. When it was uplifted somewhere 300-100 million years ago, an infinite number of such sharp fractures appeared within it, and these in turn filter the rain that hits these hilltops to a remarkable degree of purity as the water seeps downwards. When the rock changes character to something younger and less pervious, this water pours out — and thus the lower slopes of the Malverns are riven with springs around which, in the early modern era, a kind of healing cult developed. People flocked to Malvern to take the waters (locals still drink from the many springheads, and you can get Malvern Water in bottles in many places). Villas for retired, health-seeking well-to-do Midlanders; spring-head houses and hotels gave the slopes the atmosphere of a resort. The demand for this local rock for use as a building stone pockmarked the hills with quarries, like tiny bitemarks in the steep elevation. At the same time, the common land of the open hilltops began to be divided up. Development could have ruined these hills altogether and for this reason they were vested in the Malvern Conservators in 1884, a conservation measure that presages the founding of the National Trust in the true wilderness of the Lakes twenty years later.

We can thank this phase of development for one thing: the first widespread use of our hard, ungiving local stones as a building material, creating a signature to the buildings of Malvern that is as distinctive as the landscape itself. Before this, ambitious local architecture had been made of the nearby limestones and sandstones, their shades of pink, soft yellow and off-green a contrast to the dour tones of the hillside. Now, presumably thanks to the availability of powered quarrying tools, Malvern’s newer landmarks — St Ann’s Well, Great Malvern station — were made of Malvern stone — often diorite like this. This is in contrast to the national pattern, in which local rocks of low usefulness tend to dominate in any given area until the Industrial Revolution, after which those sourced from further away tend to become more common.

Once again, it is the sharp-edged quality which provides the signature. Diorite, for example (the granite is also used) is rarely seen carved, but is instead cleaved into rough polygons, which are then placed as close together as possible. Walls of Malvern stone have a clear signature: close-set, sharp-edged patterns; deep grey tones embedded with a deep and intractable hardness as much felt as it is seen. Indeed few rock this ancient has been used so extensively in buildings. In many senses the Malverns are the most striking of the few outbreaks of the archaic period south of Scotland, striking for the collision of the wild and the wealthy, the comfortable and the primitive, that they represent.