The opening of the beautiful Gothic revival station at Great Malvern in 1860, sponsored by Lady Emily Foley, was far from the end of the project to provide a direct railway link between Hereford and the rest of the English cities. The project stalled while engineers considered how to progress the railway to Ledbury by constructing a tunnel through the hard igneous rock of the Malvern Hills and Worcestershire publisher Edwin Lees had written, in February 1856, that the tunnel

Early in the morning of Christmas Eve 1856 Scottish geologist, essayist and evangelical Hugh Miller rose from his bed and wrote a final note to his wife. ‘My brain burns. I must have walked; and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell.’ He then shot himself in the chest, severing the pulmonary artery at its root. He was 54 years old. Post-mortem r