Innholdsfortegnelse for 10-Jan-18 i Country Life

MARIE CURIE is holding its inaugural Casting for a Cause dinner at Fishmonger’s Hall on April 26, 2018. The event aims to raise funds for the charity’s nurses and the work they do to care for people living with a terminal illness, as well as their families. The black-tie evening includes an address from Max Hastings, an exclusive live auction led by Henry Bowring, a silent auction and a raffle. The Fishmonger’s Company is one of the 12 great Livery Companies of London and is among the most ancient of the guilds. It has played a part in the fisheries industry for more than 700 years, with the current hall standing on the northern banks of London Bridge since 1835. Tickets cost £200 each and can be booked online at…

IT’S a long time since farmers used hurdles like these,’ clarifies Simon Fowler, yet wattle hurdles, which are made from hazel and sometimes willow, have been granted a second life as garden fencing, providing privacy from neighbours, and as attractive screens to hide oil tanks and wheelie bins from view. Mr Fowler, who’s photographed here with his apprentice, Jack Crowshaw, has been making hurdles in Derbyshire since 1994 and is living proof that this isn’t a job for the faint-hearted. ‘We’re outside all year round and it involves hard work and long hours,’ he explains. Hazel rods, like the ones in the picture, are harvested from woodland that’s coppiced every seven or eight years in order to enhance the flora and fauna, then left to dry out for 4–6 weeks…

AGROMENES doesn’t go a bundle on New Year. Christmas is so much richer and full of meaning that celebrating the mere fact of moving from one year to the next is inevitably a comedown. However, given the annus horribilis that was 2017, it was with more than usual relief that we moved into 2018—although the prospects don’t look immediately attractive. Kim Jong Un with his finger on the nuclear button, President Trump making irrationality look normal and the realities of Brexit throwing the UK Government into shambles—we’re not starting off terribly well. If Agromenes is to recommend resolutions to those in power, it seems best to concentrate on three institutions where there’s a prospect of real change. First up is the NFU, for which it’s an important election year. The…

Blaise Castle A great estate near Bristol redesigned in the 1790s for the banker John Harford. Repton's dramatic carriage drive exploits the Picturesque scenery to advantage. John Nash worked with George Stanley Repton, our man's son, on a series of architectural decorations including an elaborate model village Endsleigh A holiday home in ornamental grounds created from 1810 for the Duke of Bedford on his Devon estate. Jeffry Wyatville's cottage orné, now a hotel, looks out over Picturesque scenery dotted with ornamental buildings Woburn Abbey Repton added a series of eclectic garden features fanning out from Henry Holland's Chinese Dairy from 1805, for the Duke of Bedford. Recent restoration work has brought the scene back to life Ashridge In a late project, Repton developed an elaborate series of proposals for gardens…

SIR WALTER ELLIOT, father of the heroine in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, is a man who ‘never took up any book but the Baronetage’ as there he found ‘occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one’. How Sir Walter might have choked on his toast and marmalade to read recent reports of the England youth football teams’ success. On the squad that won the under-20s World Cup last June, there were four players with double-barrelled names. Last October, the squad that won the under-17s World Cup also boasted four men of double-barrelled moniker. For the Sir Walters of this world, it all used to be so straightforward. One could safely assume that a double-barrelled name indicated a ducal family (Innes-Kerr), landed gentry (Fox-Pitt) or a Tory grandee (Rees-Mogg).…

SET in a delectable position overlooking the estuary of the Lynher River, Ince is architecturally one of the most unusual and interesting country houses in Cornwall. It belongs to a group of Jacobean houses that seem to draw their inspiration from the great towers or keeps of medieval castles, a number of which—including Corfe, Dorset, and Dover, Kent—underwent elaborate internal reordering in this period ( Country Life, May 30, 2012). A considerably earlier and more local inspiration may have been Mount Edgcumbe (completed 1553), a few miles away on the Tamar estuary, with its centralised plan and quartet of slim, castellated corner towers. Although much smaller, Ince also consists of a rectangular core with four corner towers and, as first built, everything was battlemented. The doors and windows of the…

I WILL always remember my mother’s face when her father (always Big Bompa, to me and my brother), having recently remarried after the early death of my grandmother, answered her question of ‘So, Daddy, what are you, Mary and June (her stepmother and stepdaughter, respectively) having for your Christmas lunch together this year?’, as follows. ‘Oh, well, darling,’ he whispered, blushing a little. ‘Mary does enjoy a roast pheasant or two, at this time of year, as she’s always thought that turkey can be a little dry.’ ‘Oh, how lovely,’ trilled Mum, clearly not thinking lovely thoughts at all. This would have been in the early 1960s or thereabouts. A brace of pheasants, then, would have cost a pretty penny or two and would have been seen as gracing…

1 The end of the trend The faintest hint of modishness will be a complete no-no, whether it’s a choice of paint colour, pattern or style of kitchen. No more chucking out the chintz on a whim, describing major decorating decisions as a ‘moment’ (Scandi/ Mid Century/Industrial chic and so on) and no reaching for a paint chart on an annual basis. It won’t just be good for our finances, it’ll do wonders for our sanity. 2 There’ll be a tapestry revival On a less serious note, we will rediscover the joys of antique tapestry, but, in light of the above, this obviously won’t be a trend, but a renewed appreciation, not seen since the 17th century. Tapestries add a wonderful mix of pattern and texture to a room.…

Imagine you have a cli ent who wi shes to sell the ir country estatein Oxfordshire. You know there are potenti al buyers ri ght across the globe. The questionis, how do you locate them? Havi ng some 700 offi ces and associ ates i n over 60 countries certainly helps, not to mention more than 30,000 employees worldwide, but how can you be certain of reachi ng every one of those potenti al i nvestors, regardless of where they are? if you’re Savi lls, you set up a uni que one-stop servi ce to act as a trusted advi sor and si ngle poi nt of contact for your global ultra-hi gh-net-worth cli ents. You carefully select experts from across the company, i ncludi ng your top speci ali…

BRITISH farmers are to be given extra time to adjust to post-Brexit changes in the subsidy system, Michael Gove announced at the Oxford Farming Conference last week. The Defra Secretary revealed that there are plans for the current levels of farm support (about £3 billion a year) to be maintained up to 2024—two years beyond the life of this Parliament—in order to avoid an economic ‘cliff edge’ as tariff-free trade deals with the EU 27 are negotiated. ‘By definition, we cannot yet know the final outcome of a trade negotiation that is about to get under way,’ commented Mr Gove, ‘but we are confident of building a new economic partnership with the EU that guarantees tariff-free access for agri-food goods across each other’s borders. ‘We have a deficit in…

THE National Trust’s annual wildlife and weather review calls 2017 a ‘freak year’ that threw all our traditional seasons into chaos. It was one of the hottest on record, causing spring flowers to bloom in autumn, daffodils in February and dog roses as early as April, not to mention the ‘peculiar’ invasion of Portuguese men o’ war (washed up after Storm Ophelia in October) and unprecedented flocks of the elusive, mythical hawfinch. Species that appear to benefit from the effects of climate change are the little tern, the rare willow emerald damselfly, heather colletes bee and purple emperor butterfly, spotted on June 11 in Surrey in its earliest appearance in 120 years. Apples, berries, acorns and rare fungi also had a bumper year. Off the coast, success stories include squid,…

Home, sweet home WITH reference to the closing time of museums (Athena, November 22 and Letters, December 27), it may be helpful to remember that many of the staff are actually volunteers who have been on their feet for hours and are quite looking forward to home time. I suggest that visitors check opening hours and leave plenty of time to see all they wish to before being swept out. I am a room guide at a property in East Sussex and very much enjoy welcoming visitors, but I do feel that even if the house closed at 9pm, there would still be people wishing to enter at 8.55pm. Mary Rylands, East Sussex Always be prepared RECENTLY, at the AGM of our local British Legion Club, I timidly expressed…

‘ How can a man be so famous and leave so little trace of his work on the ground? SO well-known was Humphry Repton in 1814 that he made a cameo appearance in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, published that year, as the adviser of choice to improve the grounds of bumptious but clueless landowners such as Mr Rushworth: “‘I must try to do something with it,’ said Mr Rushworth, ‘but I do not know what.’ ‘Your best friend upon such an occasion’, said Miss Bertram calmly, ‘would be Mr. Repton, I imagine.”’ Even Repton’s day rate was widely known: Austen gives it, correctly, as five guineas a day. Repton, then as now, was one of the great names of British garden history. He was the leading garden-maker in England for…

HOW many of us, savouring a paella in a Mediterranean harbourside bar, have given a thought to the provenance of those delicious little sautéed rings, the gleaming white hoops of wild protein that adorn the arborio and define the tempura-coated tapas? It’s calamari—or squid—of course, that’s devoured by the ton from Cádiz to Crete, but it shouldn’t be confused with the local octopus plied by fishermen in the markets. Sometimes, however, what we’re actually eating is cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis), the European squid’s short-lived, but abundant and flavoursome cousin. Many remain unaware that such a creature exists (unless they have budgerigars), let alone that it makes for such delectable dishes, yet not only is it consumed in huge volumes, it’s grown here in the UK. Landed to our south-western ports and…

DATA collated by Lucian Cook of Savills Residential Research suggests that some 7,732,000 households in England owned their property outright in 2015–16, an increase of 9.7% over the previous five years. According to Mr Cook, ‘the increase was almost exclusively driven by debt-free owner-occupiers over the age of 65, whose number had increased by 684,000 over the same period’. Using figures based on Savills’ valuation of the UK’s housing stock, which suggests that 5.9 million owner-occupiers over the age of 65 hold more than £1.5 trillion of housing equity—43% of the total held by all owner-occupier households—‘freeing this housing wealth up and passing it down a generation is key to a better-functioning housing market,’ Mr Cook concludes. It’s a message that already resonates at the top end of the…

IT is a testament to the unmatched skills of the artist-jeweller Carl Fabergé and his St Petersburg workshop that, 100 years after the House of Fabergé was closed and all its property confiscated by the Bolsheviks, the name lives on as the paradigm of luxury and artistic perfection. A star of this exhibition, the Basket of Flowers Egg (1901), represents the gifts for which the firm is still most famous—the imperial Easter eggs commissioned annually by the Tsar, each of which contained a themed ‘surprise’. Thrilling to behold for the sheer ingenuity and intricacy of their design, these most expensive of all Fabergé’s products celebrated the finest techniques of metalwork and enamelling in an age when present-giving reached the limits of extravagance. As the curator Ian Collins writes in his…

CHEERFULNESS kept creeping in,’ remarked Douglas Percy Bliss and that is one of the reasons why his friend and fellow artist Eric Ravilious is so warmly regarded. Despite the general absence of humans in much of his work—he was not good at them and, when they do appear, they may seem slightly surreal—the manmade nature of his subject matter, not just machinery or domestic interiors, but even the Downs with their chalk figures, gives his watercolours humanity and spirituality. Ravilious (1903–42) is sometimes said to have been overlooked, but if that is at all true, it was only by an art establishment in thrall to the cult of the contemporary. He has always been popular with a wider public that knew him for his ‘Submarine Dream’ series of lithographs or…

WHETHER you wish to become a luthier, bell founder (above) cordwainer, portrait painter, watchmaker or armourer, the deadline is looming for would-be scholars to apply to the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST), the country’s leading crafts charity. Founded in 1990, the Trust promotes excellence in British craftsmanship in people of all ages, across more than 130 different skills, by funding education and training. Applicants have until February 9 to apply for a scholarship worth up to £18,000—24 will be awarded. For further information, visit www.qest.org.uk. Another date to remember is March 6, when QEST will hold its annual gala dinner at the V&A, hosted by the Earl of Snowdon and sponsored by Penhaligon’s. There will be a live auction, Moët & Chandon Champagne and a memorable dinner in the Raphael…

DIG out your binoculars—it’s birdwatching season. Two initiatives, the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch (January 27–29) and the GWCT’s Big Farmland Bird Count (February 9–18), encourage the public to note down any species spotted in their area. This data proves invaluable to the survival of many birds. Visit www.rspb.org.uk and www.gwct.org.uk for further information and to sign up. Last year, almost half a million people contacted the RSPB—its survey is the world’s largest. They found that the house sparrow remained top of the rankings, with the starling and blackbird rounding off the top three. Also of note in 2017 was ‘an explosion’ of waxwings and robins, at their highest numbers since 1986. However, starlings and greenfinches (above) have declined by 79% and 59% respectively since 1979. The BTO’s 20th annual BirdTrends…

Quiz of the week 1) Which singer and actor has the epitaph ‘The best is yet to come' on his gravestone? 2) How many points is the green ball worth in snooker? 3) Once mined extensively there, the word copper is derived from the name of which Greek island? 4) Hyacinthoides is the scientific name for which spring-flowering plant? 5) The Duke of York had a 22-year career in which sector of the military? The nature of things Goldeneye STOCKY and compact, but swift in flight, goldeneye ducks come to our shores to see out the winter. You can easily recognise the white-bodied male by his dark head, which can appear black, but closer inspection reveals very-dark-green, iridescent plumage, interrupted by an oval blob of white, between the bill…

THOUGHTS of the First World War, a century ago, are never far away. One of the great war artists, Stanley Spencer, was made famous by the remarkable and poignant murals in Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire. They draw on his time as a medical orderly, which gave him a horrifying exposure to injury and death, and speak of the prosaic realities of life on the frontline, as well as the bravery of his compatriots. However, it’s Spencer’s attachment to Cookham, the Berkshire village where he was born, lived and died, that speaks most vividly to me about the artist’s inspiration. ‘ Spencer captured an England he loved that is now largely gone’ ‘A village in heaven’ is how Spencer described the then remote rural community on the Thames. He…

Which is the best way to combine a variety of patterns? Decorating your home should reflect your personal taste, so, if you love mixing patterns and scale, then go for it. It's often easier to start by limiting your colour palette to just three colours, one of which should be a neutral. A mix of patterns can be sensational, particularly if they impact on one another-for example, a very formal tailored stripe can make a blowsy floral feel more graphic. A check used with a floral adds a note of homely cosiness. It's always a good idea to experiment on a mood board first. We offer this service in our store and online and it's a great way to work out the looks you love. When planning a colour scheme,…

Hampshire, £995,000 A six-bedroom family house in the Test Valley for less than £1 million? Pull the other one, you might say, if you weren't already pulling on your waders to take advantage of some of the finest trout fishing in the country nearby. Pretty, Grade II-listed Brook Farm House is in the hamlet of Brook, on the banks of the River Test. Surrounded by rolling chalk hills, the house has 17th-century origins, but has been sympathetically modernised. There's a spacious kitchen, leading to a sitting room with a log burner. The master bedroom has a dressing room and en-suite shower and there are five further bedrooms. Strutt & Parker (01962 869999) Wiltshire, £995,000 This dreamy house is Grade I listed, thanks to its handsome medieval open hall, thought…

Biography Prairie Fires Caroline Fraser (Fleet, £20) The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder Marta McDowell (Timber Press, £20) BY jingo, as Pa would say, how I admired Laura Ingalls Wilder! A child of the 1970s, I devoured her autobiographical stories of growing up on America’s frontier and was glued to their then fresh, and ever memorable, television adaptations, sharing each pleasure and pain with plucky Laura Ingalls —just my age!—and her indomitable family. How fortunate she was to start life in a little log house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, to trundle in a cosy covered wagon to a resourceful future on the Kansas prairie, to settle by the shores of Silver Lake, Dakota Territory. I delighted in her half-righteous and wholly delicious scorn for odious Nellie Oleson, grieved…