Innholdsfortegnelse for 2-May-18 i Country Life

HAVE you ever wondered how they put the letters in a stick of rock? Coronation World rock factory in Blackpool has been making the seaside speciality for 91 years and runs factory tours for visitors who wish to see the process first-hand. ‘It takes about five years to train our staff,’ says Jan Atkinson, whose husband, Ian, bought the business in 1990. Rock making is a hands-on process. ‘People who work with rock need to get used to the feel of it,’ explains Mrs Atkinson. ‘The product has to be kept warm and malleable.’ It’s no surprise that they develop asbestos fingers, as mothers and chefs do. The makers work at large tables, mixing colouring and flavouring into the molten sugar by hand. Letters are made in long, 3D strips…

‘I met John Pickup in 1979. I was on my first visit to Australia, touring country towns for the South Australian Arts Council before visiting the major cities. I was petrified. John was in the audience when I played Broken Hill and afterwards he sent me a beautiful oil painting of me on stage with a little boy from the audience. We visited his studio and he gave me a print of The Boundary Rider. I love it for its solitude and for the toughness of the man. Venomous snakes abound, his horse may stumble, bushfires may engulf them. Still he canters on, down the endless line of the fence John McEwen comments on The Boundary Rider JOHN PICKUP had a long career as a broadcaster for the Australian Broadcasting…

ANY important English country house that can trace its history from the late 11th century to the present day will have known periods of triumph, disaster and mischief of one sort or another. It is certainly true of grand, Grade II-listed Avening Court at Avening, three miles north of Tetbury, which stands at the head of an enchanted valley in fashionable south Gloucestershire and is now for sale through Savills (020–7016 3825) at a guide price of £11 million. After the Norman Conquest, the Avening estate was taken over by the Crown and, following the death of William’s queen, Matilda, in 1083, was granted to the Abbaye Aux Dames in Caen. The original manor house was a nunnery built by the Abbess of Caen, who held it, along with…

‘ Rose Maréchal Niel spangles the glass ceiling with pale-gold rosettes ’ SUSAN ASHTON belongs to a family of diverse, often specialist, gardeners. One of her forebears, Mr John Warner, employed James Pulham (Jnr) to introduce innovative rock work both in the gardens and the orchid houses at Woodlands, Hoddesdon. His son, Robert Warner (1815–1896), specialised in orchids and was author of the splendid tome Select Orchidaceous Plants (1862). His display of orchids at the Horticultural Society’s London Show (the forerunner to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show) won him the Wardian case that now has pride of place in Susan’s glasshouse. In turn, Susan’s father, antique dealer Roger Warner, grew and bred auriculas, and his wife, Ruth, a botanist, moved from her native South Africa to take up a John…

‘This book is by turns joyous and depressing, hectoring and conciliatory’ Environment Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm Isabella Tree (Picador, £20) DID you know that beneath the woodland floor, there is an intricate communications system, a sort of fungal MI5, that can act like an emergency intravenous drip? That the survival of a single bluebell hinges upon some 10 of these tiny filaments that alert other plants to a sick individual and see off pests? Charlie and Isabella Burrell knew that their farm, on West Sussex clay, was failing before their eyes, but their ‘epiphany’ came when, in 1999, a tree expert pointed out that the relentless ploughing, harrowing, drilling and spraying that had enabled their historic Knepp Castle estate to contribute so vitally to the…

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THE National Trust’s West Yorkshire property Nostell Priory is marking the 300th anniversary of the birth of furniture maker Thomas Chippendale with the exhibition ‘Interior Worlds: Thomas Chippendale at Nostell’ (May 2–October 28; www.nationaltrust.org.uk/nostell). According to the Chippendale Society, the property has one of the finest collections of his furniture in the country. After the Palladian architect James Paine built the house on the site of a medieval priory for the Winn family in the 1740s, Robert Adam was brought in to fashion the interiors in a neo-Classical style and the Yorkshire-born Chippendale was commissioned to create more than 100 items of furniture, wallpaper and textiles. An online exhibition of Chippendale furniture at Nostell and other Trust properties is to be launched on the Trust’s website on June 5,…

AS spring finally arrives and the elm tree’s distinctive bunches of green seed clumps appear, the Conservation Foundation has set up a new interactive map to help the public understand the state of Britain’s elm population. Dutch elm disease has killed more than 60 million elms in the past century, and the charity would like people to join in the search for remaining healthy trees, identifying as-yet-unrecognised specimens in both town and countryside. It is the belief of the Conservation Foundation that there are more mature elms still in existence than we might think. Photographs and sightings can be logged at www.conservationfoundation.co.uk/elms/map and will be checked by experts; the project is supported by the Tanner Trust, the Berkeley Reafforestation Trust and others. ‘Our Foundation grew out of an elm project…

CHICKENS are the UK’s fourth most common pet, says the British Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT), with half a million of them now kept in the UK. Apart from the British public’s deepening love affair with brunch (for which many, many eggs are required), the trust believes it has played a large part in the rise in popularity of domestic fowl through re-homing more than 50,000 chickens destined for slaughter each year. ‘Every year, the number of people re-homing our gorgeous ex-battery hens increases and it’s no wonder. We’re always telling people what wonderful pets chickens make, and people are listening!’ says Jane Howorth, founder of the BHWT. ‘“Ex-bats” are friendly, inquisitive creatures who just want the chance to live out their retirement in a safe and friendly back garden. Also,…

THE more common a wild plant or animal, the easier it is to recognise, but it’s more likely we will fail to notice detail and find meaning. Find a tree covered in thick ivy, growing to a decent height, look closely and you will see two plants before your eyes. Ivy has two stages of life—young ivy is most familiar to us, bearing dark leaves with many lobes and points, and is found carpeting the woodland floor. At about 10 years old, it changes dramatically—the mature leaf is lighter in colour and has only one point. Like most plants, ivy doesn’t reproduce until mature, so if you see flowers or fruits, you will notice this in the leaves around them. Young ivy hugs trees and grows away from the light—it…

Letter of the week Back to Nature MY husband and I grew up in a large village in North Yorkshire, which was protected on the outskirts by working farms and forests. We now live on the south coast in one of the boxlike homes on the edge of a town like many others. I worry because our daughter is due to be born and I’m beginning to feel trapped by the claustrophobic closeness, the considerable concrete and the cultivated hierarchical culture of this place that we are about to bring her into. I’m more and more aware of ‘bigger pictures’ and my longing for simpler things. I read your magazine and want to leave this postcode-aristocracy and raise my girl in forests and fields with Nature, beauty and…

POSH and Becks, also known as Victoria and David Beckham, are moving in; novelist Jilly Cooper and musician Julian Lloyd-Webber both made it home years ago. Blur guitarist Alex James has embraced cheese-making there and the Bamfords have created a glorious farm shop as part of their immaculately restored rural empire at Daylesford. Before them, The Princess Royal settled at Gatcombe Park, Minchinhampton, The Prince of Wales alighted on Highgrove, outside Tetbury, and local rumour has it that Prince Harry and his bride may be joining them somewhere in the vicinity. They have all been drawn by a glorious landscape of unspoilt villages, well-tended woodlands, rolling pastures that brought the area its wool-based wealth all those centuries ago and houses that look as if they’re made of creamy fudge. This…

DUCk END HOUSE lies close to Chipping Norton and the Rollrights, in a landscape on the Oxfordshire end of the Cotswolds that has an ancient and poetic atmosphere. There is plenty of evidence for that antiquity —the nearby Rollright Stones are part of a series of megalithic monuments dating back to the early Neolithic era (about 3,800 bc – 3,500 bc ) and the name of the nearby village of Hook Norton is thought to derive from the farmland of the Hoccanere tribe. Also, many ancient stone-built farmsteads and manors can be found in surprisingly remote-feeling parishes, hidden away by the distinct local topography and trees. There were three manorial titles at Domesday in this area and the prosaically named ‘Duck End’ formed one of these manors, as suggested by…

‘Do try elderflowers battered and deep fried’ TO be in the countryside in May, when spring allows summer to float across its mind, is a pleasure that never wears off. It’s that time of year when a day of sunshine still feels like a blessing rather than an expectation and it’s exactly when the elder springs into flower. If you’ve yet to risk clambering in hedgerows and copses intent on picking the soft-cream florets, let me encourage you. Nothing carries the perfume of a changing season quite like elderflower. Its joyous, heady, muscat aroma is at its most intense in full sun, so cut or twist the flower heads from the plant within an hour or two of when you intend to use them—for cordial or ‘champagne’ —to capture…

‘It’s Adrienne Warren whose name should be set down in pillars of lasting fire’ YOU wouldn’t expect a play about Glyndebourne from David Hare—he’s usually associated with scathing critiques of contemporary society—but, in The Moderate Soprano, now at the Duke of York’s, he’s written a beautiful, touching play that not only explores the foundation of the Sussex opera house in 1934, but also provides that rarest of things in modern theatre: a celebration of married love. His basic point is that a quintessentially English institution owes its initial success to European emigré talent. It was John Christie, a former Eton schoolmaster and benign eccentric, who had the vision to create an opera house in rural East Sussex: it was his wife, the soprano Audrey Mildmay, who had the practical…

BRITAIN is among world leaders in dealing with its tangible cultural heritage—the things you can see, such as historical buildings, books, works of art and breathtaking landscapes. However, it lags behind in how it treats its skills and traditions, its celebrations and rituals, its accents and dialects, yet this is an equally rich, colourful and diverse heritage—our Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). The UK is one of only 18 countries in the UN’s 193 sovereign states not yet signed up to the UNESCO 2003 Convention on ICH. Most other countries recognise the value of being part of this Convention in that it provides a focus for the inherited knowledge and practices that make them who they are, surveying what they have and what can be used to their advantage for national…

THE RSPCA is facing a ‘horse crisis’. Last year, the charity rescued almost 1,000 horses in England and Wales, the highest number for four years, and prosecution cases involving horses have risen by 25% since 2015. In some instances, horses are dumped on dirt tracks, together with household rubbish, by owners who presumably wish to avoid paying veterinary fees, in others, they are sold online for as little as £25—‘less than kittens’, points out RSPCA chief inspector Sam Garvey—or occasionally on a ‘buy the mare, get the foal for free’ basis. ‘We’ve gone out to calls and not been able to see the horse until we’ve literally rifled through the rubbish,’ the chief inspector adds. In one heartbreaking case, a mare was tied to a post and left as she…

BASC is urging its members and other guns to record sightings of curlews, which are ‘on the brink of collapse’. Now listed globally as ‘near-threatened’, numbers of UK breeding curlew plummeted 46% between 1994 and 2010, stretching to more than 50% in Wales and Scotland. ‘Breeding success, or lack of it, is the most pressing challenge the bird faces,’ explains Ian Danby, BASC’s head of biodiversity projects. ‘This is connected to a number of factors including predation, afforestation, changes in land management and climate change.’ Curlews, with their long legs, large, brown bodies, evocative call and downward-curving bills, are usually seen in winter on estuaries and in the spring and summer on upland moorland. The association is running several other wader projects throughout the UK, including the new Curlew Cymru…

Quiz of the week 1) In Rugby Union, what position does number 15 play? 2) Dendrochronology is a method of dating using what? 3) Which is the only active London Underground station with six consecutive consonants in its name? 4) What is a deemster? 5) Budapest is bisected by which river? The nature of things Parsley NUMEROUS parsley relatives are at large in the countryside. Among the best loved is cow parsley, or Queen Anne’s lace, erupting now, with airy flowers held aloft on wiry stems. Its aromatic relative, ‘true’ or garden parsley (Petroselinum crispum, literally, ‘curled rock celery’), might also be chanced upon, and the scent of its crushed leaves is easily recognised. Originally hailing from Mediterranean lands, it has long settled itself in the English countryside here…

COUNTRY roads will never be noisier than they are today, but the predicted end of the internal-combustion engine will mean a steady and appreciable reduction in sound levels in the countryside. The era of the electric car is well and truly underway, with more models and ever-increasing range. There is, of course, much more to be done, not least because the automobile industry is loath to lose the easy profits of the long-established diesel and petrol engines. It takes courage to launch entirely into the new world of electric traction, but at least car manufacturers know where they have to go: the direction of travel is no longer in dispute. It’s more difficult for the oil companies. The profits that made Rockefeller the richest man in the world have inexorably…

‘Perhaps today’s beards will soon look as dated as Donny Osmond hair’ I FEEL fortunate to have found my life mate in the brief era between 1910 and 1990 when it was unfashionable for men to have beards, because I like a clean-shaven man, as I like a pruned rose garden: Nature teeming, but kept at bay. Today’s 20-something English rose has to feel or kiss her way through tundras of scratchy facial hair. Beards are everywhere: not the bushy W. G. Grace kind, but the ‘urban’ seven-day growth, sported by everyone from footballers to classical musicians. I fear we’ve reached a tipping-point when less than half of the male population shaves first thing in the morning as a matter of course. Why this eruption? Is it that it’s…

‘That’s what has come to us, the modest flower that awakens to proclaim a countryside greeting with the sun’ TO our Anglo-Saxon forebears, it was dæges eage: the day’s eye. By the 14th century, according to Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem The Legend of Good Women, it was ‘the daisie... the eye of the day’. And that’s what has come to us down the centuries, the modest, wild, carpet flower that awakens to proclaim a countryside greeting as the sun returns. Why else should we declare ourselves ‘fresh as a daisy’ after a sound night’s sleep? Botanists are somewhat troubled by the daisy name, which embraces numerous leggy and colourful varieties cultivated to grace herbaceous borders across the world, gathered under the group name Asteraceae. However, the resilient and prolific version the…

‘The currency of the Cotswolds is much stronger than any other area ’ IN these days of flexible working, country-house buyers are more motivated by finding the right house, rather than being locked into a specific location. However, one area where the old adage of ‘location, location, location’ still holds firm is the Cots-wolds. In this respect, according to Lindsay Cuthill of Savills, the area is out of step with the rest of the country. ‘The currency of the Cotswolds is much stronger than any other identifiable area,’ he believes. ‘The whole region can be split into key marketplaces, depending on the type of buyer.’ Price The A40, which runs through the Cotswolds AONB, from Witney at its eastern edge to Cheltenham to the west, marks something of a dividing…

IN 1914, the American painter Marsden Hartley set to work on a 4ft by 4ft canvas, divided vertically by an arrow. Above this was a teepee and above this again, the wings of a totem pole. All these were highly stylised. Looked at in a certain way, the teepee, wings and arrow were not these things at all, but simply patterns, like the dots and chevrons of the rest of the picture. They were, in other words, abstract, or tending that way. Hartley did not want their symbolism lost, however. To make sure it wasn’t, he called the series, of which his new painting was part, ‘Amerika’. Yes, that is Amerika rather than America, Painting No. 50 having been made not in Hartley’s native state of Maine, but in Berlin.…