Innholdsfortegnelse for 21-Aug-2019 i Country Life

THE Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) is hosting a fundraising evening at Helmingham Hall, Suffolk, home of the Tollemache family, which will include gin and tonics and a private tour of its magnificent gardens, followed by a light supper in the coach house. These tranquil grounds—realm of garden designer Xa Tollemache, who will give a talk at the event—feature a classic parterre flanked by hybrid musk roses, a walled kitchen garden with herbaceous borders and beds of vegetables. Sponsored by Knight Frank, the event will commence at 6pm on September 20; tickets £25. For further information, visit www.gwct.org.uk or contact GWCT Suffolk chairman Neil Graham (neilgraham2@hotmail.com).…

John McEwen comments on In the West of Ireland THE journey of a lifetime awaits along 2,500 km [1,553 miles] of coastal road on the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’: so the Irish publicity goes for today’s glorification of the coastal route from Cork to Donegal. This glorification is contemporary packaging of a romantic view of the west most indebted to Paul Henry. His landscape paintings of western Ireland, especially Achill Island off the coast of Co Mayo (in Ireland pronounced with the accent on the ‘o’, not the ‘a’) and Connemara, the western part of Galway—described by Oscar Wilde as a place of ‘savage beauty’—made him Ireland’s favourite painter in the 1920s and 1930s, a reputation that persists. A Connemara view reproduced as a 1925 British railway poster was still found…

VISITORS to the epilepsy ward of one British hospital may find themselves in for a surprise. Among regular attendees at the clinic is a Cardigan Welsh corgi called Bella. As an assistance dog, she combines the roles of faithful companion and early-warning device for her epileptic owner. Indeed, so acute is Bella’s sensitivity to her handler’s health that she’s able to give her a 30-minute warning of a seizure. To Bella’s breeder, Brenda Piears, the dog’s prowess is easily explained. ‘Cardigans have an ability to empathise,’ she divulges. ‘They’re quick learners and very intelligent.’ ‘Cardigans have an ability to empathise. They’re quick learners and very intelligent’ They are also, as anyone who has ever seen one will vouch, handsome little dogs, sturdily four square on their short legs, with a…

SHREWD investment in South African gold mines funded John Waddington’s restoration, in 1899–1901, of historic Waddington Old Hall on the banks of the Ribble, near Clitheroe, in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire and is today Lancashire. Further restored and embellished by successive owners, the hall is now for sale through the Harrogate office of Strutt & Parker (01423 594792) at a guide price of £4.25 million. Across the border in Wales, clever investment in silver and lead mines in the late 1700s allowed Edward Jeffreys of Shrewsbury to purchase a picturesque hillside overlooking the Dovey estuary and Cardigan Bay. There, in the early 1800s, his grandson, George Jeffreys, built romantic Glandyfi Castle in the dramatic Regency Gothic style favoured by John Nash. As has Waddington Old…

Blackberry-and-violet-mascarpone chocolate layer cake Serves 4 Ingredients 250g self-raising flour250g golden caster sugar100g cocoa powder2tspn baking powder1tspn salt3 eggs2 egg yolks280ml buttermilk225ml vegetable oil2tspn vanilla-bean paste250ml boiling instant coffee750g mascarpone600ml double cream500g blackberries75g caster sugar1tbspn violet syrup (but test for strength as different brands vary and the goal is ‘a hint of’ rather than anything more over-powering) Method Preheat your oven to 170°C/320°F/gas mark 3 and grease and line two 20cm (8in) loose-bottomed cake tins. Add the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt to a large bowl and mix all together using an electric beater on a slow speed. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and add the eggs, yolks, buttermilk, vegetable oil, vanilla-bean paste and a cup of instant coffee. Beat until…

AN Englishman’s home may be his castle, but custodians of the nation’s castles have long known that, in order to ensure their future, they need to welcome the public in. If you’ve a surplus of bedrooms, it doesn’t make financial sense to leave them standing empty when visitors go home at the end of the day. Now, with the advent of Airbnb and sites such as Expedia and Booking. com, it has never been easier to open up a historic house to paying guests. Earlier this year, The Prince of Wales— or The Duke of Rothesay, as he’s known in Scotland—unveiled a 10-bedroom B&B in a converted granary building at the Castle of Mey in Caithness. ‘It makes no sense to leave rooms empty when visitors go home at the…

THE old dovecote, mellow and stone, stands in the corner of the courtyard. The colombier—to use the Charentais nomenclature for such a structure—is sheltered from the north wind of winter by the woodshed and, across the lane, a storehouse, now with its roof succumbed, protects the doves’ home from the dusty, summer easterlies. On the storehouse wall, for all passers-by to see, ‘MON PLAISIR’ is scribed immaculately on a high corner block. Father Jacques, who built our house—along with the dovecote, the storehouse and a range of outbuildings—was a village curé unafraid of physical labour. Indeed, he seems to have loved working with his hands. A few days ago, our neighbour Monsieur Vallet, an 82-year-old truffle farmer, dropped by with a sheet of A4 paper; knowing we were interested…

Nature The Fens Francis Pryor (Head of Zeus, £25) VERY flat, Norfolk,’ drawls a character in Noël Coward’s Private Lives —a supercilious condemnation of another character and, by inference, all of eastern England. Francis Pryor proves that, although the Fens may be level, the area’s gentle undulations and Cubist planes hold stories as absorbing as anywhere. Mr Pryor is well-known as the excavator and interpreter of the massive prehistoric site at Flag Fen near Peterborough and from Time Team. In his childhood, the Fens was a tantalising grey-blue smudge on the horizons, then, when he was studying archaeology at Cambridge, an unknown and intriguing landscape conveniently close to town. He has come to know the Fens from the inside out and the surface down. For him, this is literally hands-on…

IT’S been suggested David Bowie wrote the lyrics to his hit single Life On Mars? on the Croydon Road Recreation Ground bandstand in Beckenham, south-east London. What’s not in doubt is that a frizzy-haired Bowie performed on it at the Woodstock-style Growth Summer Festival 50 years ago this month. The local boy, together with his landlady and sometime lover Mary Finnigan, organised the event, thought to be the first of its kind in Britain, soon after the release of Space Oddity. The festival was intended to raise money to establish a permanent base for his Beckenham Arts Lab project, which started life as a folk club in the nearby Three Tuns pub. Marking the anniversary, Historic England has announced the listing of the traditional iron bandstand at Grade II.…

Quiz of the week 1) What is the key ingredient in an Italian frittata? 2) Who was the first British woman to win two Olympic gold medals at the same Games? 3) What sort of creature is a miller’s thumb? 4) An anemometer is used to record the speed of what? 5) In which year were Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex; William, Duke of Normandy; Harald Hardrada, King of Norway; and Edgar Atheling all claimants to the English throne? Time to buy Raasay While We Wait, 2018 Release (70cl), £53, Isle of Raasay Distillery (01478 470178; www. raasaydistillery.com) Leather cylinder map document case, £149, Life of Riley (01799 551813; www.life ofrileyonline.co.uk) Large Lemur tote, £95, Sara Miller (www.saramiller.london) Five things you (probably) didn’t know about… North Coast 500 •…

1900 June 2, Not published A woman gathers water from the By Brook River in the picturesque Cotswold village of Castle Combe. Famed for its higgledy-piggledy cottages, the Wiltshire village regularly features on the silver screen, serving as a backdrop in the original Dr Dolittle film and Steven Spielberg’s epic War Horse , to name just a couple. The COUNTRY LIFE Picture Library contains 120 years’ worth of photography and articles from the world’s leading architectural and gardens experts. Many are available to licence or purchase in print form from £28 plus VAT. Please email enquiries to clpicturelibrary @ti-media.com…

GLANUSK is the Welsh seat of that noblest of trees, the oak. In spring and summer, the wilder parts of this glorious Powys estate are garlanded with coppery red and golden green as our native Quercus robur and Q. petraea burst into growth. Gracing its more frequented areas are specimens that celebrate royal visits, the oldest of which is an exotic Turkey oak (Q. cerris) planted by the Duke of Clarence in the 1880s. This tradition has flourished under Dame Shân Legge-Bourke, who inherited the estate from her father, the 3rd Baron Glanusk. It was crowned in 2012, when The Queen planted a fine example of Q. robur, Britain’s greatest tree and the tree that made Britain great. Now, a new oak has joined this royal company: Q. rubra Magic…

• The Kennel Club officially recognised Cardigan and Pembroke Welsh corgis ( above ) as separate breeds as recently as 1934, although both claim ancient origins. The Cardigan is usually considered to be the older breed, believed to have been brought to Wales more than 3,000 years ago by Celtic tribes • The distinctive marking of many Cardigan Welsh corgis’ backs is sometimes called a ‘fairy saddle’, from a legend that, long ago in Wales, fairies rode on Cardigans • So precious were corgis as herding and guard dogs that they were protected in early Welsh law, with harsh penalties for those who menaced, harmed or stole the dogs • In the 1988 film The Accidental Tourist, William Hurt’s dog, Edward (left), is a tricoloured Cardigan Welsh corgi whose real…

AS a man—among many, I suspect—who has always hankered after an Alfa Romeo, but never actually owned one, I fell rather heavily for the Giulia when I tested it last year. By the third corner, in fact—the first two had been so sublime, I didn’t need any more. Very few cars handle as sweetly as that Alfa. I was in the cooking version, too: the 200bhp Super. I could only imagine what the 280bhp Veloce was like or, better still, the fire-breathing Quadrifoglio. It being an Alfa, of course, love at the first corner was muted somewhat after seven days and several hundred more. Not by the corners, but by the indicator that didn’t self-cancel, an overly officious proximity sensor and an annoying rattle. However, these trivia weren’t the…

WHILE working at Christie’s and later for the dealer and TV presenter Paul Martin, Charlotte Hughes has developed a passion for antiques. Today, she weaves them into schemes that successfully blend the old and the new to create distinctive rooms with a timeless feel. When it came to reorganising her own house in Gloucestershire, the first project was to move the kitchen to the space previously occupied by the sitting room, a job that involved removing plasterboard partitions to take the room back to its bones. ‘The 1980s hadn’t been kind and lots of the original features had been stripped out. I needed to add them back,’ she explains. To distract the eye from steel joists across the ceiling, Charlotte added oak beams sourced from Timberpride in Tetbury (01666 504436;…

YOU’VE seen them, beekeepers with big white suits. Perhaps you’ve wondered whether this curious hobby is one that you could adopt. Happily, unlike other kinds of farming—yes, keeping bees is ‘a form of livestock management’, according to Defra—to be a successful beekeeper, you needn’t own acres of land. The ideal countryside property for bees, says Carol Peett, whose husband, Rayner, keeps bees at their Pembrokeshire long-house, is one ‘with a cottage garden, although it’s handy if there are nice fields around’. However, it can be done with a lot less space and a bit of lateral thinking. Ben Horne of Middleton Advisors (01235 436276) has been keeping bees ‘in a paddock on the edge of a village’ near Andover for the past four years. He’s currently got about 120,000…

THE national enthusiasm for growing our own fruit and vegetables, which waxes and wanes with the generations, is presently at a high pitch. The making of seedbeds, the ripening of onions and the relief when the first frost brings an end to the glut of runner beans are all part of a superior form of self-education, which reconnects us with the important things in life, such as fresh air and dirty fingernails. The unfailing wonder at producing things we can eat from packets of seed can often be the first step on the road to success on the show bench. All over Britain, the month of August ushers in fêtes, shows and feast days, a key ingredient of which is typically a horticultural show of some kind. Everybody crowds…

IN the 1990s, a new avenue, about half a mile long, was created at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire. It runs southwards in a straight line from the A151 to the forecourt of the castle, overlooked by Vanbrugh’s great north façade of the 1720s. This approach re-creates a predecessor of about 1700 that was lost in subsequent landscape changes. As it was first laid out, however, the new avenue had a rather prosaic entrance: it was closed at its entrance by nothing more than a metal five-bar gate. That’s now changed, with the erection, last year, of a new ironwork screen and gate commissioned by the Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust at the intersection of the avenue and the public road. The new screen and gate were designed by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan…

IN Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard famously auctioned off his wife and infant daughter to a passing sailor. In doing so, he continued a custom thought to have existed since the 17th century, when selling your wife was common practice in the absence of easily accessible divorce laws. This was quite often a mutual agreement: an 1824 account of such an instance records that ‘after several biddings she [the wife] was knocked down for 5s; but not liking the purchaser, she was put up again for 3s and a quart of ale’. Such bargains notwithstanding, in the excitement and frenzy of an auction, it’s quite possible to inadvertently buy a ‘pig in a poke’— an expression dating from at least the 13th century, when unscrupulous market traders…

TODAY’S children are losing touch with Nature at an alarming rate, finds a new study. Some 83% of five to 16 year olds cannot identify a bumblebee or an oak leaf. Stinging nettles may be a problem, should a countryside walk ever tempt, as 51% don’t know what they look like and 65% wouldn’t recognise a blue tit, either. The game of conkers must be dying out because 24% couldn’t pick out a horse-chestnut seed and only 23% know what a robin looks like. Foxes, however, they know (97%) and hedgehogs, too (93%). On the whole, a concerning 34% of 11–16 year olds are simply not interested in Nature, compared with 19% of those aged between five and 10. Some parents blame the prevalence of screen time; the…

AFTER a premiere earlier this summer, an unusual chamber opera is coming to the Garden Museum, London SE1, for one night only. A concert performance of Robert Hugill and Joanna Wyld’s’s composition, The Gardeners, will take place at the UK’s only museum for British gardens and gardening on September 9. Conducted by William Vann and set in a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery where ‘the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest’, the plot centres on a family of gardeners who look after the cemetery and uses Nature as a metaphor for renewal. A Classical Source review described the work as ‘drifts of melody, elusive tonality and a consistent moderato pace [that] suggest the layers of dream and reality’. Tickets £25; visit www.thegardeners.org…

PRESENTED by luxury watchmakers A. Lange & Söhne, the Concours of Elegance returns to Hampton Court Palace, Surrey, this year (September 6–8), with shopping, food, artwork and 1,000 of the world’s finest cars on display. COUNTRY LIFE readers can claim a two-for-one discount on tickets. For further information, visit www.countrylife.co.uk/concours-of-elegance…

ATTENDING to an animal’s every need usually wins its affection, but not in the case of the 800 mute swans at Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset. ‘They hate the staff,’ laughs swanherd Steve Groves, who’s been here for 30 years. ‘They ignore the visitors, but we get hissed at, pecked and stamped on regularly. I thought it was the uniform, but they’re the same when I’m off duty and they even recognise staff who come back as visitors after being away for a while. They’re pretty clever birds.’ There are only four swan owners in Britain: The Queen, the Vintners and Dyers Livery Companies and Ilchester estates, the family of Sir Giles Strange- ways who bought the Benedictine Abbots-bury Abbey in 1539 after the Dissolution. The monks kept the swans for…

HERE, in the heart of the English countryside, the world seems relatively sane and secure. The cows mooch about in the sunshine, undisturbed by the heavy moan of a combine harvesting on a distant hill. I can hear the gentle baa-ing from a flock of prize Suffolks in the field that runs down to the river. Still called Lesser Sheep Wash, it’s the same sound that drifted up the valley two, three, even 600 years ago. There is a consoling certainty about the scene. ‘This is a workaday world, not the artificial country retreat of a Marie Antoinette. The cows and sheep are destined for the butcher’ Yet, this is a workaday world, not the artificial country retreat of a Marie Antoinette. The cows and sheep are destined for the…

I’M in Greece and happy to have survived my first earthquake. A tremor went through my chair and the huge heavy table at which I was sitting trembled. I thought Will was doing his knee-jiggling thing, but he was standing several feet behind me. On realising that we’d all just felt the very earth shaking beneath us, I called out to the friend who was in the kitchen. She said she’d felt something, but then told me she’d been in the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, when, while she’d been sitting in a library reading The Times and feeling homesick, all the windows had shattered. ‘Will appears with a preying mantis on his finger. We are now actually the Durrells’ She picked her way over the glass and into…

EWENNY PRIORY, situated near the western fringe of the fertile Vale of Glamorgan, was founded in the 12th century as a dependency of St Peter’s Abbey at Gloucester (now the cathedral). Its surviving church—today, part monument and part parish church— is widely recognised as one of the finest architectural survivals of the Anglo-Norman era in the whole of Wales. What remains of the claustral buildings have been subsumed into a small country house, recast in its present form in the early 19th century. The site presents a delightful, but complex architectural ensemble. Archaeology suggests there was a Roman settlement at Ewenny and there is growing evidence for subsequent early Christian activity in the immediate vicinity. Of still greater note, a group of pre-Norman memorial stones discovered at the site (and…

A SHORT, frenzied life amid the feverish tangle of jungle canopy, then a trip of thousands of miles to a secluded workshop atop rolling Cheshire farmland. Here, the remains of startling, iridescent swatches of Nature are being carefully curated into exquisite objets d’art. This is Haute Art de Papillon—the creation of beautiful things from the wings of butterflies. ‘My whole family is a bit odd when it comes to butterflies,’ laughs Amos Hornstein as he picks me up at Crewe station to begin our drive into Cheshire’s greenery, finishing at the Khamama—the Cherokee word for butterfly—workshop on the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s estate between Chester and Nantwich. ‘Every single butterfly is sustainably farmed, so their shrinking habitat is protected’ Khamama is the brainchild of Amos and his brother Nathan, the sons…

DECORATION, to me is about making people look prettier and feel happier,’ wrote Nicky Haslam in Sheer Opulence. Like so many of his pronouncements, it’s spot on, from ‘We have a duty not to become stuffy’ to ‘Every room should include something ugly and something red’. Of course, it should. What’s true of good decoration in general is true of good furniture in particular. It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling euphoric in the sort of 20th-century furniture so beloved of Modernists that tends to be a triumph of ergonomics over aesthetics and succeeds in making an Old Sparky look positively inviting. Conversely, there’s furniture that makes you feel almost instantly relaxed, such as fathomlessly deep, down-filled library chairs. Then, of course, there’s rattan, the woven furniture that’s the subject…

IN 2013, an advertisement in COUNTRY LIFE set in motion the reinvention of Hadspen House, in Somerset, which had belonged to the Hobhouse family since 1785 and had, in the 1990s, become famous in garden circles for the colour-themed walled garden planted by Sandra and Nori Pope. South African businessman Koos Bekker and his wife, Karen Roos, saw in the advert the opportunity to buy somewhere that was already special and into which they could invest their own enthusiasms for English gardens and traditions. Here, they might also make something new, adventurous and lasting, perhaps in the spirit of Babylonstoren, their organic estate in the Drakenstein valley of the Cape winelands of South Africa. Hadspen House, set within 300 acres of parkland and pasture, struck Karen as one of the…

IN the spring of 1893, the group of French avant-garde artists styling themselves the Nabis—Hebrew for ‘prophets’ —acquired a Swiss member. Félix Vallotton had impressed these young disciples of Gauguin with his eye for elegant, expressive design. At that year’s Salon des Indépendants, he showed two paintings: The Waltz (1893), a dreamy vision of couples twirling on a skating rink spangled with confetti-coloured ice crystals, and Bathing on a Summer Evening (1892–93), an erotic tapestry of nudes in varying states of undress disporting themselves in and around a swimming pool. Although both pictures showed the influence of Japanese prints, they provoked very different reactions. ‘Vallotton has one astounding painting,’ Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec commented on The Waltz. ‘The other will probably be taken down by the police.’ There’s little risk today…