The Malvern Line or Malvern Lineament is the name applied to a north-south aligned lineament

Lineament

See also Line A lineament is a linear feature in a landscape which is an expression of an underlying geological structure such as a fault. Typically a lineament will comprise a fault-aligned valley, a series of fault or fold-aligned hills, a straight coastline or indeed a combination of these...

 which runs through the Malvern Hills

Malvern Hills

The Malvern Hills are a range of hills in the English counties of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and a small area of northern Gloucestershire, dominating the surrounding countryside and the towns and villages of the district of Malvern...

 of western England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 and extends southwards towards Bristol

Bristol

Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...

 and northwards past Stourport.

It consists of a series of faults and folds

Fold (geology)

The term fold is used in geology when one or a stack of originally flat and planar surfaces, such as sedimentary strata, are bent or curved as a result of permanent deformation. Synsedimentary folds are those due to slumping of sedimentary material before it is lithified. Folds in rocks vary in...

 which have the effect of bringing old Malvernian rocks to the surface. Being largely hard igneous rocks, the Malverns Complex rocks have resisted erosion

Erosion

Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...

 better than those of the surrounding countryside and result in a striking line of hills of which the Malvern Hills are the most impressive. The Abberley Hills to their north also form a part of this lineament. This line is considered to mark the edge of two terrane

Terrane

A terrane in geology is short-hand term for a tectonostratigraphic terrane, which is a fragment of crustal material formed on, or broken off from, one tectonic plate and accreted or "sutured" to crust lying on another plate...

s - two once separate fragments of the Earth's crust now joined as one - the Wrekin Terrane to the west and the Charnwood Terrane to the east.