Leave your car behind and take a Guided Coach Tour of the 'Three Choirs' Country

With:  Blue Badge Tour Guide - Anne Bartlett

The Three Choirs Music Festival has been held every year since 18th century and rotates around the Cathedrals of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester. This year the festival will be held in Worcester.

Our guided coach tour will start from the cathedral city of Gloucester, the venue for last year’s Music Festival. We will pass the market town of Newent and drive on to the picturesque village of Dymock, made famous by a group of poets who met here just before the First World War. They walked and talked and wrote poetry about the countryside between the Malverns and May Hill. Hopefully we will see lots of flowering wild daffodils for which this area is particularly well known.

We will drive across the county border into the cider growing countryside of Herefordshire around the fascinating village of Much Marcle, with its ancient 13th century church and family tombs of the Mortimer family.

The coach will stop to give you time to explore the historic black and white Herefordshire town of Ledbury where the attractive 17th century timber framed market hall dominates the main street. Here you will be able to do some sightseeing, a spot of shopping or enjoy a relaxing cup of coffee in the town that was the birthplace of Poet Laureate John Masefield and childhood home of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

After your coffee break we will head for the Malvern Hills crossing the border into Worcestershire to discover some of the places that one of our greatest composers, Edward Elgar, knew and loved. We will take the Wyche Cutting to the top, and cross the border into Herefordshire to travel along the western edge of the Malvern Hills, a scenic drive created to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. We will be able to enjoy the Herefordshire countryside and on a clear day will see Hay Bluff and the Black Mountains in Wales.

We will cross the borders again into Worcestershire to see more views across the Severn plains to the distant Cotswold escarpment. We will make our way into the town of Great Malvern where we will stop at The Winter Gardens so you can explore the Priory church, admire the abbey gateway shop or find some lunch.

In the afternoon we will make our way towards the city of Worcester, the venue for the 2011 Music Festival. Here we will make a short stop for sightseeing, where you can take the opportunity to look around the Cathedral or do some shopping before we travel back to Gloucester at the end of the day.

1st Tour will take place on 23rd March 2011.  Cost £20 per person.

Pick up points in Cheltenham town centre and Gloucester city centre