Nature's beauty polished by man

The British Camp — also known as the Herefordshire Beacon — that buttresses one end of the beautiful Malvern Hills is one of those happy places where humanity's work has actually managed to improve on Mother Nature's.

There is no need to feel guilty about the enormous disruption our ancestors caused, even to such Arcadian surroundings, when they set about fortifying the second-highest summit of the range some time in the 2nd century BC.

The Herefordshire Beacon is just a mountain — it stands only 15 feet over the traditional 1,000-foot (304 metres) qualification — and it would have been beautiful as a natural, grassy pyramid but its sinuous earthworks make it sublime. Andy Galsworthy would die for the sort of budget or — to be accurate — the years of graft by simple people who depended on hand tools, which allowed the sculpture of the hill.

The camp offers one of the best views and also takes in the great division of the English Marches: Tame but sweetly lovely on the English side; grand and rugged on the Welsh. The first is full of lights at night, the second mysteriously dark.

On our way to the British Camp, I walked through bluebells and milkmaid or lady's smock (British wildflowers), brushed aside orange-tip and green-veined white butterflies, watched a buzzard and a sparrowhawk and avoided an adder.

This is a specially magical side to the Malvern Hills for me, for as a 7-year-old sent off from Leeds to a Quaker boarding school in Colwall, I learnt to catch butterflies. I am grateful for the love of wildlife, which I acquired through the hunt. And for the sense of history imparted by the earthworks, both the Iron Age ones and their Norman successors, which include the crest of the Camp and the Red Earl's Dyke which runs along the spine of the range.

It was magical, revisiting after five decades.

II Visit: www.malvernhills.gov.uk for details.