Transportation Potential

Great Malvern has a bit of a weird relationship to the hills it sits on the side of. Some 250 meters above here is the Worcestershire beacon, the highest point on the Malvern Hills. Ideally tourists would be drawn to the area to visit both, but that's where the problem starts. You see there isn't any direct links between them.

If you want to visit the beacon you park your car on the hills and walk up, and if you then want to visit the town centre you have go back to your car and drive again. You could walk between the two but the hills are formed as a ridge with steep sides so it's not for the faint hearted.

Over the years there have been many suggestions how to address this issue and this is the location of the latest. Looking away from Rose Bank Gardens you would have been looking over the lower station of a cable car taking you directly to the beacon. Situated near the top would be the opposite station containing a cafe with fantastic views over the valley giving tourists another reason to make the journey.

Now as you can see there is no cable car station as the idea (as well as many others) was thrown out. After people saw the designs they decided that the changes needed to the hills, both environmentally and building wise,  just wasn't worth it. I also think that making access to the beacon so easy would somewhat remove the achievement of spending your time and effort to reach the top by foot.

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BBC News - Malvern Hills cable car and beacon-top cafe plan proposed

Europe / UK-England

Lat: 52° 6' 29.895" N
Long: 3° 20' 50.469" W

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Taken with a Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8G fisheye lens. Mounted on a Nodal Ninja 5 panorama head and R-D16 rotator atop a Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod. Shots taken at 6 positions 60° apart, tilted 15° down and another shot taken looking straight up. Raw files then processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.7 before being stitched together using PTGui 10.0.15 Pro and converted using Pano2VR 6.1 beta3b.