The Parish of Guarlford

About the website

The Guarlford History Group formed in 2003 to write a history of the village, based largely on the reminiscences of residents and particularly local historian Joan Bradshaw who had lived in the village all her life.

Joan Bradshaw and Donegal

This led to publication of the Guarlford Story in 2005, when the decision was taken to create the Guarlford History Group website.

The website was envisaged as a community asset to provide a record of the history of the village, and information about the Parish Council, the church, the village hall, and the Womens' Institute.

The website was built by John Elkington to a design by Michael Skinner, and has been further developed by Angus McCulloch who took over as webmaster in 2006.

St Mary's Guarlford is one of four churches in the Benefice of Powick, Guarlford and Madresfield with Newland, and in July 2019 the Benefice launched its own website. Consequently the emphasis of the Guarlford History Group website will be on the history of the church and its churchyard, and enquiries about services and events should now be directed to the new church website which has been given the friendly name Old Hills Malvern; The churches 'pivot' around the Old Hills between Clevelode and Callow End, a good spot for picnics and walking the dog in the summer, and blackberrying in the autumn.

Abby Bradshaw  with 'Guarlford Dairy' horse and cart

Our web pages are created and edited using the free version of Microsoft Expression Web 4 which is functionally very similar to Frontpage. A cascading style sheet is used to control much of the formatting making the construction of the web pages simpler. It was decided at an early stage that using Javascript, eg for drop down menus, was much too complicated for us; that is, apart from using a small segment to provide the date and time on the Home Page from your computer clock. Cookies are not used.

The navigation bar is a simple HTML list, but relies on a cascading style sheet to display the buttons in a row as block level (floating) elements. To cope with different screen sizes we have chosen to use fixed width pages, compatible with a smallest screen resolution of 800 X 600 px. If necessary adjust the zoom on your browser to make the text easier to read.

Clicking or tapping the menu button at the top right hand side of the Home page presents the navigation bar as a simple list which may help those using devices with small screens.

Please let the webmaster know of any problems using the website, any errors, and stories/photos you would like to offer.