Scenic Point in Worcestershire

Broadway in Worcestershire is widely regarded as the most beautiful village in the Cotswolds, a broad main street of honey-coloured limestone buildings extending for over a mile through the village with a quality and consistency of architecture that creates one of the finest streetscapes in rural England. The village has been celebrated as a picturesque ideal of English village life since the nineteenth century when American and British artists of the Broadway Colony, including John Singer Sargent and Edwin Abbey, made it their base and established its reputation as one of the finest landscapes in England. The broad street from which the village takes its name is lined with buildings of Cotswold limestone in styles ranging from the medieval to the Georgian, the consistent use of the local warm stone and the characteristic Cotswold vernacular of steeply pitched roofs and mullioned windows creating an architectural harmony that absorbs buildings of very different periods into a coherent whole. The village green and the individual buildings of exceptional quality, including the Lygon Arms, one of the finest Cotswold coaching inns, punctuate the main street at intervals. Broadway Tower, a folly tower on the Cotswold escarpment above the village, provides exceptional views from its position on one of the highest points of the Cotswolds, the panorama extending across the Vale of Evesham to the Malvern Hills and beyond on clear days. The Cotswold Way national trail passes through Broadway and the walking to the tower from the village is one of the classic short walks of the national trail.

The Malvern Hills on the Worcestershire-Herefordshire border are one of the finest ridge walks in England, a narrow range of Pre-Cambrian rocks rising to over 400 metres above the surrounding Midland plain in a wall of hills extending approximately fifteen kilometres, providing panoramic views of extraordinary extent from their accessible summit ridge. The hills give their name to the Victorian spa town of Great Malvern below, whose spa tradition was based on the pure spring water emerging from these ancient rocks. The ridge walk from the Worcestershire Beacon provides the finest continuous walking, views expanding east over the Midland Plain and west over the Herefordshire and Welsh border countryside in a panorama of great pastoral richness. The Pre-Cambrian rocks of the Malverns are approximately 680 million years old and quite different in character and origin from the rocks of any surrounding region. Edward Elgar, born and raised in Worcestershire, drew on the Malvern Hills landscape throughout his creative life, and the hills have been associated with his music since his lifetime. The combination of the walking, the spa heritage and the Elgar connection creates a destination of considerable cultural and natural depth.

Snowshill is one of the most perfectly preserved villages in the Cotswolds, a small settlement of honey-coloured limestone buildings on the western escarpment above Broadway whose combination of the village green, the cluster of fifteenth and sixteenth-century cottages and the extraordinary contents of Snowshill Manor creates one of the most rewarding and most distinctive destinations in the Cotswolds. The National Trust manages Snowshill Manor and its unusual contents, and the village itself provides one of the finest examples of organic Cotswold village development without commercial intrusion. Snowshill Manor is famous for the collection assembled by its eccentric owner Charles Paget Wade between 1919 and 1956, a vast and extraordinary accumulation of objects from across the world and across time that fills every room and corridor of the manor house and overflows into the outbuildings. Wade collected with no dominant theme beyond the aesthetic pleasure of unusual or finely crafted objects, and the resulting collection includes Japanese samurai armour, Flemish weaving tools, children's toys, clocks, musical instruments, bicycles, farm tools, spinning wheels and thousands of other objects whose accumulation in this particular Cotswold manor house is one of the most surprising and most memorable house contents in Britain. Wade himself slept not in the manor but in a small cottage in the garden, preferring to keep the house as an undisturbed museum of his collection, and his relationship with his objects was intimate and intensely personal. The garden he created at Snowshill, with its terraced compartments and strong geometry, provides an excellent formal setting for the eccentric contents of the house. The village of Snowshill is also close to the Cotswold Lavender farm that provides spectacular summer flowering on the hillside above.