From the top of Worcestershire Beacon – at 425m, the highest point of the Malvern Hills – the surrounding pancake-flat countryside looks like something out of a model village. There are Subbuteo-style football pitches, fields with toy barns and plastic sheep and the doll’s-house cuteness of Great Malvern itself.
Views stretching east to the Cotswolds and west to the Black Mountains give a sense of the often unappreciated vastness of our island and the productivity of its farmland. Apart from Great Malvern almost directly below, it’s green fields and woods almost everywhere you look.
Dakota, our young Australian shepherd, may not be enjoying the viewsother woodland flowers. Thrust up almost 0.5km above the Severn Vale, the blustery south-westerly is ruffing Dakota’s shaggy ursine coat and she’s facing into the wind and sniffing the air as if it’s carrying scent messages all the way from the dogs of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire.
