Belle Vue Terrace runs along the front of the town, and directly behind it the ground goes almost straight up. The Malvern Hills rise abruptly from the shopping street, the Worcestershire Beacon's steep eastern face looming over the shopfronts. You are never in any doubt about where the walking starts.
The town centre is a Conservation Area of independent shops, cafés and delis strung along Belle Vue Terrace, Church Street and the Victorian arcades below the Priory. The hills themselves supply roughly seventy freely accessible springs and spouts, and residents still fill bottles from them as a matter of routine. Dr John Wall analysed the water in 1745 and concluded that its virtue lay in its purity — famous, as he put it, "for containing just nothing at all."
For a drink, the Nag's Head sits on the lower slopes, a real-ale pub with a rambling interior, a wide rotating range of cask ales and a terraced garden. It welcomes dogs, serves lunch and evening menus Monday to Saturday and food through Sunday afternoon. The Foley Arms, a Regency coaching hotel named for the Foley family who once owned much of the land here, is now a Wetherspoon with a terrace looking out toward the Severn Vale.
The climb to the Worcestershire Beacon is a brisk thirty-five to forty minutes from town, steep the whole way, via St Ann's Well or Happy Valley to the 425-metre summit. From the top the toposcope claims parts of thirteen counties, the Bristol Channel and three cathedrals — Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford. The ridge runs eight miles north to south along the county border and can be walked end to end along the crest. If you want a gentler objective, the Worcestershire Way finishes its thirty-one miles at Belle Vue Island in the middle of town.
At St Ann's Well, on the hillside directly above the streets, there is a spring spout and a café that has been there a long time. Lady Emily Foley opened the spring to the public free of charge and in 1892 gave it a Sicilian-marble dolphin's-head spout over a shell-shaped basin. For about fifty years from 1880, Blind George Pullen played the harmonium and dulcitone here, and was said to know his regular visitors by the sound of their footsteps and play each one their favourite tune.
Great Malvern Priory stands at the centre, Norman in origin from 1085 and rebuilt in Perpendicular stone between 1440 and 1502. It holds the largest display of fifteenth-century stained glass in England, one window given by Henry VII, another by the Duke of Gloucester who became Richard III. When the monastery was dissolved in 1541, local people raised twenty pounds to buy the building and keep it as their parish church.
The station, half a mile downhill, is a Victorian listed building by E. W. Elmslie, with direct trains to Worcester, Hereford, Bristol, Birmingham, Oxford and London. The A449 runs along the western edge below the hills.
Anne Darwin, Charles Darwin's daughter, is buried in the Priory graveyard. Her father had brought her to Malvern for the water cure.