Distance: 10.6 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

Get the Route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Walk from the heart of Worcester across the River Severn and River Teme and through the grounds of Madresfield Court a house with connections to both Evelyn Waugh and Charles Dickens, ending in Great Malvern.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

A Country House With Two Literary Connections

Lying just east of Malvern, in the shadow of the hills, where Worcestershire’s wide River Severn valley ends, Madresfield is a little village with a grand name. On the edge of the settlement lies Madresfield Court, a stately home with a remarkably large number of literary associations.

Madresfield Court’s early history is typical for a country house in the UK. It is first recorded as a manor in the late 11th Century in the possession of Urse d’Abitot, before passing into the hands of first the de Bracy family in the 12th Century and then the Lygon family in the 15th. As is the way with the British aristocracy, members of the Lygon family still own Madresfield Court to this day. In a striking example of outwardly pre-capitalist practices continuing at Madresfield the house and its grounds are one of the properties in England that have never been sold, instead having passed between owners via inheritance since the middle ages. 

The property’s earliest literary association is with Charles Dicken’s Bleak House which centres upon the fictional inheritance dispute of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which by the time of the novel’s setting, likely in the 1830s, has been tied up in the Court of Chancery so long that most of the disputed inheritance has been consumed by lawyer’s fees and there is nobody left alive who can remember what the case was initially about. 

This inheritance dispute is patterned upon the real court case of Jennens v. Jennens, which involved the estate of reclusive financier William Jennens, who lived for almost the entire 18th Century being born in 1701 and dying aged 97 in 1798 worth hundreds of millions of pounds in 2020s prices. William Jennens died intestate leaving his descendents to squabble over who was owed what from estate in the absence of a will. The Lygons of Madresfield Court were distant relatives and major beneficiaries securing a share worth over £40 million in modern money. However, despite the case ostensibly having been settled quite quickly between Jennens’ closest living relatives, who were mostly wealthy and powerful people, claims kept on being made upon the estate, including by Americans who happened to be called Jennens or who possessed a closely related name like Jennings. The final official claim lodged for the fortune was dismissed by a court in 1915, but occasional potential and prospective claimants were occasionally mentioned in the media up until the time of the Second World War, almost 150 years after William Jennens died.

Quite possibly some of William Jennens money, or at least the rents or interest extracted from it, paid for the extensive remodelling of Madresfield Court between the 1860s and 1890s which led to the construction of the house which exists to this day.

It was shortly after this building boom that William Lygon, aka the 7th Earl Beauchamp, came to possess Madresfield Court. Lygon was a Liberal Party politician in the final decades that the party was a major force in British politics capable of leading governments. Prior to entering the cabinet during the Liberal government’s administration in the years prior to the First World War from 1906 when he was one of the few members of the House of Lords relatively amenable to the administration, he was the Governor of New South Wales. Even more unusually for a peer Lygon was associated with the radical reformist wing of the Liberal Party advocating for significant legislative interventions to improve working conditions, raise wages, and improve rural housing, as well as chairing the Central Land and Housing Council established in 1913 to support David Lloyd-George’s quest to introduce land value taxation.

William Lygon’s life is the basis for Madresfield Court’s second literary association. This is in forming the purported basis for the character of the exiled inter-war aristocrat Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh met William’s son Hugh Lygon at the University of Oxford in the 1920s and they became friends as well as lovers. This led to Waugh spending time with the family at Madresfield, an experience which fed through into the writing of Brideshead Revisited during the Second World War.

Being gay, or certainly bisexual, was not unusual in the Lygon family in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. It is understood that Henry Lygon the 5th Earl Beauchamp who from his election in 1853 as an MP for Worcestershire and his death in 1866, who was a mid-Victorian politician, had relationships with men. William Lygon, Hugh’s father, too, was quite widely known to be “a homosexual” to use the language of the time. While also being married, seemingly not entirely unhappily, to the extremely well connected Lettice Grosvenor, part of the family of the Duke of Westminster.

It appears to have been fairly widely known unofficially that William Lygon was gay or at least had relationships with men, although it appears fairly certain that Lettice his wife was unaware of this element of his life. However, her relative the Duke of Westminster, who personally disliked Lygon and as a Tory wanted to damage the Liberal Party, decided to make it common knowledge. 

By 1930 Lygon was still a politician in the increasingly marginal Liberal Party, serving as their leader in the House of Lords. In this capacity he travelled to Australia with Robert Bernays a journalist and aspiring Liberal politician, who would later bizarrely largely ally with the Conservative Party by joining the Liberal National Party, while also being an unusually trenchant and prescient critic of the Nazis and advocate against appeasing them. While they were travelling the Duke of Westminster informed King George V and Queen Mary that the two men were lovers. Purportedly the king reacted in disgust expressing the view that the two men should kill themselves, and banning his son George, the future George VI and father of Elizabeth II, from continuing his romantic relationship with Lygon’s daughter Mary.  

Upon his arrival back in the UK Lygon, his family now riven by strife, was advised that nothing would be made public if he retired from political life, left the country never to return, and agreed to his wife’s divorce from him. He accented to these conditions and spent the final years of his life prior to his death in 1938 as a wealthy, peripatetic figure travelling the world as an elderly, almost openly gay man, visiting cities and other places, far from Madresfield and rural Worcestershire, where same gender love and relationships were much more tolerated than the UK almost 100 years ago.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

The walk from the heart of Worcester across the River Severn and River Teme snd through the grounds of Madresfield Court a house with connections to both Evelyn Waugh and Charles Dickens, begins from Worcester Foregate Street Railway Station.

Upon exiting Foregate Street Railway Station turn left walking along High Street deeper into Worcester city centre.

Cross over two roads which join with High Street.

Presently coming level with Broad Street running off High Street to the right, cross over the road and head to the right along Broad Street.

Continue down Broad Street which is pedestrianised past the Crowngate Shopping Centre.

Upon reaching the busy western part of Broad Street, cross over the road, then turn right.

At the corner turn left heading for Worcester Bridge which carries the A44 across the River Severn.

Walk straight across Worcester Bridge with its famous view of Worcester’s relatively small, but very picturesque and strikingly situated, medieval cathedral.

On the far side of Worcester bridge turn left. Here there is a gate onto a riverside walkway which you pass through.

Keep on walking straight along the tarmac path, known as Bromwich Parade beside the Severn on the far side of the gate.

Carry on for quite some distance passing Diglis Canal Basin where the Worcester and Birmingham Canal joins the Severn and recently installed Diglis Island Fish Bypass.

Presently after quite some way you reach the white suspension bridge which carries pedestrians and cyclists over the Severn.

To the left here there are some oxidised metal sculptures of figures from Worcester’s history, including the Civil Wars, while straight ahead a footpath, now unpaved runs past the bridge along the bank of the River Severn.

Continue along the path straight past the bridge.

Soon you reach a metal gate which you pass through.

On the far side carry on straight ahead following the path beside the Severn through a field. To your right as you walk there are great views of the Malvern Hills.

Carry on straight along the path, which is always pretty clear, straight along the banks of the Severn for some distance.

After some distance you pass through another metal gate and continue along the path on the far side.

Presently at the point where the Teme converges with the Severn, next to a sign board explaining about the Parliamentary pontoon bridge during the Battle of Worcester, the path turns sharply to the right, running parallel with the Teme along the edge of a field.

Continue along this path for quite some distance.

Soon you pass through a metal gate and continue walking around the edge of the fields a little further.

Presently the path, which has bypassed a sharp bend in the River Teme, curves sharply to the right.

Past this bend carry on straight ahead around the edge of the fields. 

You cross several narrow fields passing through another series of gates. One very homemade looking.

Soon you reach another gate leading into a field where you take a sight left to pick up the path.

Here you reach a further metal gate leading to a path across a narrow meadow, which you follow walking straight ahead to the far side.

At the top of this meadow the path leads through a gate out into a large meadow.

Through the gate the chimney of the old Powick Power Station, now flats, and the arch of the new bridge are clearly visible.

Walk straight ahead across the meadow.

On the far side of the meadow, to the left there is a gate leading through onto a path leading down beneath an arch of the new bridge.

Carry on across a small meadow on the far side of the bridge now nearing the old power station.

Through a gate on the far side of the meadow turn left to reach Powick Old Bridge. Potentially the site of the “first and last shots of the British Civil Wars”.

Usually you could just walk across it to reach the Powick side of the River Teme. However, the closure when I walked the route led me to walk up the lane from the pumping station, turn right on the A449 and walk along the main road to cross the new Powick Bridge.

Just after crossing either bridge across the Teme you reach the impressive new cycleway bridge over the busy A449 and A4440 junction.

Once Powick Old Bridge is restored it will be straight ahead along the path leading away from the western bank of the River Teme. From the top you can clearly see Powick village just in front of you.

Head up and over this bridge.

The bridge and its access ramp brings you down onto the pavement leading into Powick along the side of the A449.

Upon reaching the road turn right and begin walking towards the village. On the far side of the road there is a curry house named “Cromwell’s” after the victor of the Battle of Worcester in 1651.    

Approaching Powick village along the A449 look out on the left hand side of the road just past the Cromwell curry house for a footpath waymark pointing through a metal gate into a field. Once on the far side of the road and into the field walk along an embankment towards the low wooded hillside where Powick church stands.

Head uphill through the trees and across Powick churchyard to reach a gate which leads to a muddy farm track out into open fields. You get your first clear glimpse of the Malverns to your west on the right as you walk.

Continue along this track past a sewage works. Just after the sewage works you join the Three Choirs Way, marked with the sign of three musical staves, heading right towards the Malvern Hills.

Soon you reach the road through the village of Stanbrook near the larger village of Callow End.

Cross the road and follow a path around the edge of the grounds of the former Stanbrook Abbey, now a hotel.

Soon you reach another road and turn right up a short stretch of driveway past a couple of cottages at the far end of the abbey’s grounds.

This ends in a tree lined holloway which runs uphill.

At the top of the hill the trees peter out, and you continue along the path past a scattering of houses, before descending steadily downhill.

You follow the path heading steadily left until you reach the Old Hills estate.

Walk up Old Hills through trees and scrub until you reach the summit. Once on the top walk straight ahead until you reach a trig point.

On reaching the trig turn right and descend Old Hills, crossing some parkland to reach a gate leading out into open fields.

Follow the path across the fields, soon turning left and approaching woodland.

After crossing the woodland the path curves to the right following the Madresbrook towards the Madresfield Estate.

Nearing Madresfield Court, the grounds of Madresfield Court a house with connections to both Evelyn Waugh and Charles Dickens, there is a stile into a large paddock which you walk across.

On the far side of the paddock there is a paved path which leads you through the Court’s grounds. Madresfield Court was a grand house during the inter-war era, one believed to have inspired the setting for Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Soon the path turns into a driveway which leads to the road through Madresfield village. Upon reaching the road turn left, picking up a footpath running to the right across a house’s driveway and through a paddock. Malvern and the hills rising behind it now loom large in the middle distance.

Follow the farm track on the far side of the paddock and head into woodland.

Across a grass verge and some scrubby screening trees you arrive at the retail and trading estate which forms Malvern’s eastern fringe.

Cross the road defining Malvern’s eastern edge and head up a footpath on the far side. This path wends its way into the town through clusters of warehouse units.

You emerge near the Morgan car factory and continue up to a road which you cross before heading up a snicket on the right which cuts across a modern housing estate.

On reaching Malvern Link Common you pick up a footpath which runs straight up towards Great Malvern town centre, passing beneath the Worcester to Hereford railway line.

Past the railway continue walking across the open part of the common, heading steadily uphill.

At the top of Link Common now on the edge of Great Malvern town centre, cross the road, and then head left uphill all a residential road behind the Nags Head pub.

Upon reaching the top of the road you are in Great Malvern town centre. Turn left here and walk along the main road into the small central square at the top of the high street near to Great Malvern Priory.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

At the time of writing in December 2025 Malvern was served by hourly trains north east to Birmingham via Worcester, Droitwich and Bromsgrove and south west to Hereford via Colwall and Ledbury. There are also trains south west towards Bristol and south east towards London across the Cotswolds via Oxford. There are also half hourly buses to Worcester on weekdays and Saturdays throughout the day and less frequent buses to other destinations in Worcestershire and Herefordshire.