Near the middle of England, where the Malvern Hills rise abruptly to a
height of nearly 1,400 feet above the sea, is the double-peaked rugged
Raggedstone hill about which several strange old legends centre. A
restless spirit is said to haunt the bleaker portions of the summit,
but a stranger legend is that of the Shadow Curse, called down upon
this hill by a monk of Little Malvern in the olden time.
Little Malvern lies in the plain at the foot of these hills, and at the
Benedictine monastery there, as the old story tells, there was once a
rebellious brother. His offences against the monastic discipline were
so serious that the Prior decreed, as his punishment, that he should
crawl on hands and knees every day and in all weather, for a certain
period, from the monastery to the top of the Raggedstone and back again.
The wretched monk had to obey, and day after day, week after week,
he performed his penance. But the pain and degradation of his task
embittered him, and they say that before his punishment was completed
he died upon the hill of exhaustion and humiliation. Others say that he
sold his soul to the devil in order to be free of his hated task, but
anyhow before he disappeared from human ken, he put a bitter curse upon
the hill that had caused him so much suffering.
He cursed with death or misfortune whomsoever the shadow of the hill
should fall upon, having in mind that in those days of sparsely
populated land the people who would suffer most would be the Prior and
his brethren in the monastery beneath.
Now the shadow of the Raggedstone is very seldom seen. Only at rare
times when the sun is shining between the twin peaks does it appear,
and those who have seen it describe it as a weird cloud, black and
columnar in shape, which rises up between the two summits and moves
slowly across the valley.
Many stories were told, in times past, of the misfortunes that happened
to those upon whom this uncanny shadow fell; and it is recorded that
Cardinal Wolsey was once caught by this weird cloud, and to that the
old folk attributed the misfortune that came to the proud man when at
the height of his power.
Wolsey in his early days was a tutor to the Nanfan family whose
house was at Birts Morton Court, a couple of miles from the foot of
Raggedstone. The young tutor fell asleep in the orchard one day, and
awoke suddenly, shivering, to find the strange unearthly shadow moving
across the trees.
Much of Little Malvern Priory, the home of that miserable monk of long
ago, remains to-day. Its domestic buildings are almost intact, with
amazing good fortune having escaped the common fate of such edifices.
There are, too, the old monkish fish ponds, now lily spangled in spring
time, and an old preaching cross. The parish church is part of the old
priory church and contains a finely carved rood screen and some most
interesting stained glass.
Great Malvern, some three miles away, clinging as it were to the side
of the great Worcestershire Beacon, is a place with world-wide fame.
It, too, has its great priory church, and all the attractions and
conveniences of a favourite inland resort.
But the chiefest charm of the Malverns--there are seven of them--is
their hills. These form a glorious range, of varying barren and wooded
mountainous country, flung as it were as a far outpost beyond Severn of
the wild Welsh mountains many miles to the westward.
The view from these Malvern Hills is, perhaps, unequalled. They say
nobody knows exactly how much of England and Wales can be seen from
them. Fifteen counties are certain, and in that range is included the
Wrekin, the Mendips, and the Welsh mountains as far as Plinlimmon.
On the fine upstanding Herefordshire Beacon is, perhaps, the best
specimen of an ancient British camp that we have. Tradition says that
here Caractacus defended himself from the Romans.
It was “on a May morning on Malverene Hulles” that Piers Plowman had
that vision of which Langland wrote five hundred and more years ago.
Few centres in our country offer such varied scope to the holiday-maker
as the Malverns, where nature and history vie with one another in the
matter of attractions.
The fresh upland air is tonic and health-giving. That weird dark shadow
of the Raggedstone can never have fallen here, or, if it have, its
mystical power has become impotent by reason of the many beauties of
the place.
[Illustration: _The Malvern Hills._]
[Illustration: Shepherd in ragged clothes watching his sheep.]