Wedding Photographer Malvern — the Malvern Hills, Great Malvern Priory and Elgar’s Worcestershire
Malvern is one of England’s most dramatically positioned Worcestershire spa towns — a Victorian hill town built on the eastern slopes of the Malvern Hills, the ancient pre-Cambrian ridge rising to 425 metres at the Worcestershire Beacon and providing from its summit a panoramic view encompassing fourteen English counties, the Severn plain below with the Cotswolds on the horizon to the east and the Black Mountains of Wales beyond the Herefordshire plain to the west. The town’s Victorian hotels, spa infrastructure and Great Malvern Priory — the magnificent Norman and Perpendicular church with its medieval stained glass and the misericord carvings of the choir — provide a Victorian hill resort of considerable architectural dignity. For Malvern wedding photography, the combination of the Priory, the Victorian townscape and the hills’ ridge walks provides a portrait setting of Victorian English spa town and ancient ridge landscape of remarkable quality.
Great Malvern Priory, the Victorian Townscape and the St Ann’s Well
Great Malvern Priory — the twelfth-century Benedictine priory church, substantially enlarged in the Perpendicular period and notable for its complete collection of medieval stained glass (the largest concentration outside York and Canterbury), the Norman nave pillars and the carved misericords of the fifteenth century — provides a ceremony and portrait setting of significant English ecclesiastical character within the town itself. The priory’s churchyard, with its Victorian gravestones set among ancient yews on the slope above the town, provides an exterior churchyard portrait setting. The Victorian spa built environment of the town centre — the Pump Rooms, the Belle Vue Hotel and the terraced villa streets on the hillside — provides period architectural street portrait settings of Victorian hill resort character.
The Worcestershire Beacon, the Ridge Walk and Elgar Country
The Worcestershire Beacon’s summit — the highest point of the Malvern Hills at 425 metres, reached in forty minutes’ walk from the town, whose 360-degree view encompasses the Severn plain, the Cotswolds escarpment, the Black Mountains, the Shropshire hills and the Brecon Beacons beyond — provides a summit elopement portrait setting of panoramic multi-county view character available to couples prepared for a modest hill walk. The ridge walk south from the Beacon toward Chase End Hill — the complete length of the Malvern ridge, walking the spine of the ancient pre-Cambrian rocks on the watershed between Worcestershire and Herefordshire — provides a walk-along-the-ridge portrait sequence of considerable elemental English hilltop character. Elgar’s Worcestershire — Broadheath village seven miles north (Elgar’s birthplace, now a museum), the Severn water meadows at Severn Stoke and the quiet lanes of the Teme valley to the north — provide additional portrait settings in the composer’s own Worcestershire landscape.