Innholdsfortegnelse for 22-Jan-2020 i Country Life

Quiz of the week 1) Which mythical figure was asked to slay the Nemean lion, clean the Augean stables and steal golden apples from the Hesperides? 2) Who was British Prime Minister at the outbreak of the Second World War? 3) There is only one tile worth five points in the game of Scrabble—what is it? 4) Who wrote the novels The Shining and The Stand? 5) Where on a horse would you find the poll? Riddle me this Forwards I am heavy, backwards I am not. What am I? Time to buy Shot Gun Cartridge Lamp, from £70, The Little Lamp Company (www.thelittlelamp company.co.uk) Black Labrador & Pheasant Bone China Pint Mug, £18.50, Gabriella Shaw Ceramics (01730 821101; www.gabriella shawceramics.com) Pistachio & Sea Salt Brownie (box of eight),…

WHAT with Dry January and Veganuary, the northern hemisphere’s coldest month isn’t getting any more cheerful. It seems to have become a general excuse for the celebration of finger wagging, marked in California as ‘Dried Plum Digestive Month’, in Tennessee as ‘Be Kind to Food Servers Month’ and across the US as ‘Hot Tea Month’. All this is rather a pity, as the Romans had it right when they made January the first month of the year and named it after Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions. Much better to see January as a hopeful start to the year than a miserably puritan nanny-fest. ‘The Romans had it right when they named January after Janus, the god of beginnings’ Janus is a particularly fitting god for January 2020 because…

Songbirds are defined as ‘perching birds’, because their specially adapted feet (with three toes facing forward and one back) allow them to grip on to branches and ledges, in gardens, parks, woodland and farmland. As their name suggests, these passerines also emit beautiful and highly complicated songs that are best heard during the dawn chorus. According to the latest figures from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), the following 10 species on the red list of Birds of Conservation Concern suffered some of the most rapid declines from 1967 to 2016. Turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) -98% One of the reasons why this dainty dove (right) with its pale-pink breast and gentle, purring call is now increasingly rare is thought to be the lack of seed and grain available to it…

I REMEMBER Woodston… If God has designed a ‘typical English setting’, it’s surely Woodston Farm in Worcestershire. The land to the front of the farm is flat, running down to the sparkling River Teme and beyond to woods; behind and to the sides, it’s gently hilly (300ft), suitable for slow, fat sheep. There are still some limes, or linden, on the rising land that gives the surrounding parish of Lindridge its name. Once, Woodston boasted some of the finest hop yards in England, watered from the Teme. The hops have gone; the hop kilns remain, but are converted into apartments. Well, farmers were told to diversify. But half arable, half livestock, Woodston remains the quintessential English mixed farm. The farm of your memory, your imagination. ‘Woodston is the farm…

LET’S learn to smile again. Proper, uninhibited, tooth-displaying 1920s smiles, like the ones we see in any footage of the period, always set to the backdrop of jaunty jazz-piano music. Those people on the streets in hats, drinking cocktails in nightclubs or jumping off an omnibus to go shopping in Piccadilly—they were always smiling. What happened to our smiles in the early 2000s? Pouting Victoria Beckham must take partial responsibility for spreading the belief that smiling in public is deeply uncool. Daniel Craig didn’t help, either. Let’s scrap that deadpan trend and let our smiles—infinitely orthodontically improved since the crooked smiles of 100 years ago—shine out into the world. ‘Let’s try to re-create that spontaneity and optimism, but without the shallowness’ Having re-learned to smile in the first few weeks…

Near Gatwick Barelands, Bells Yew Green, East Sussex (right) Idyllic Grade II-listed farmhouse with eight bedrooms, stables, a pond, a swimming pool and fields. £2.5 million through Savills (01892 333793) Near Heathrow Ash Farm, Winkfield, Windsor, Berkshire Modern, yet rustic five-bedroom detached house with stables, barn, one-bedroom cottage and 9½ acres. £5.5 million through Strutt & Parker (01344 636961) Near Leeds Bradford Highlands, Burley in Wharfedale, West Yorkshire (left) Six-bedroom house with nearly two acres of gardens and a decked balcony, a moment’s walk from the railway station with connections to Leeds. £1.395 million through Dacre, Son & Hartley (01943 600655) Near Bristol Parkhouse House, Chewton Keynsham, Somerset Grade II-listed, six-bedroom farmhouse dating to 1737, with stables, on the edge of the Chew Valley. £925,000 through Bowerhouse (01225 616714) Near…

Until February 15, Messums’s London gallery in Cork Street, W1, is showing ‘Images of the North’, etchings and aquatints by Norman Ackroyd, together with ‘Doncaster Heads: Portraits of a Mining Community’ by Laurence Edwards. Modelled in wax and cast in bronze, the powerful heads ( above ) were for a 2018 commission to commemorate Doncaster miners and their history. Sculpted from life in two-hour sittings, the 40 heads ‘are as much a product of the conversations and relationship between Laurence and his sitters as pure observation. The final work will be installed in the summer of 2020 and set within small niches in a section of local rock’.…

THE little tern, pied avocet, ruff and migratory red knot are among thousands of seabirds to benefit from new protections announced by Defra last week —they will be further expanded upon in a mammoth Seabird Conservation Strategy in December. Activities, including fishing, will be restricted in places such as the Solent and one new Special Protection Area (SPA) created across 344 square miles of the Dorset coast, a vital foraging site for both common and little tern. Further north, the Teeside and Cleveland Coast SPA will be extended to 47 square miles, ensuring a safe haven for more than 35,000 birds. ‘Many of Britain’s sea and shorebird populations are globally important,’ explains Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, which carried out the research. The new protections ‘will ensure species…

FOOD is at its highest point on the news agenda since the Second World War, thanks to climate change, Brexit, the spread of food banks and a vocal vegan lobby. Henry Dimbleby, who has been given the daunting task of producing the Government’s National Food Strategy, describes his brief as ‘intentionally broad—you might think insanely broad’. Mr Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon chain of food outlets, will publish an interim report in March about how to create a system that provides good-quality, affordable food, restores the environment, maintains the countryside, provides employment and ‘stops making us sick’. At the end of the year, evidence will be debated by a Citizen’s Assembly and the Government will produce a white paper. The enormity of the job is laid bare by Denise Bentley…

Letter of the week Walking the tightrope THE ambitious tree-planting targets are an exciting prospect for our landscape, wildlife and carbon sequestration—but how right to urge caution (Leader, January 8). Poor management can cause unintended consequence on some scale, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere, as we are seeing in the devastating Australian bush fires. Last July, a study from the University of California concluded that, there, grasslands store more carbon than forests, as they are impacted less by droughts and wildfires. The fires during our 2018 drought reminded us that the UK isn’t immune to this problem. As always, a balance has to be struck. James Hall, by email The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne…

SCHACK, schack, schak!’ ‘Si-si-sisi-suu!’ ‘Tett-ett-ett!’ Such imperious calls—here those of the fieldfare, yellowhammer and meadow pipit—are among the vital signs that there’s life on Earth. Garden, woodland and farmland birds, members of the passerine family, are the natural environment’s canaries in the mine, but their melodies are being heard less and less frequently. It’s a silence that speaks volumes about the deteriorating state of British biodiversity. SongBird Survival (SBS), a small, but valiant charity started by landowners in 2001 with the strapline ‘Saving songbirds with science’, is trying, through research, education and practical measures, to halt the decline of this country’s songbirds, which stands at about 56% since 1970. ‘My 10-year-old daughter said: “Daddy, you’ve got to save songbirds” and my eldest daughter is very keen on conservation, so that…

Clementine and almond cake with clementine crème diplomate Serves 8 Ingredients For the cake 400g unsalted butter, room temperature600g caster sugar8 eggs1tbspn vanilla-bean paste300g ground almonds200g self-raising flour2 clementines, zest of For the clementine syrup 3 clementines, juice of100ml water50g caster sugar For the crème diplomate 3tbspn custard powder2 eggs4tbspn caster sugar500ml whole milk3 clementines, zest of1 clementine, juice of3tbspn lemon curd400ml double cream, whipped50g toasted flaked almonds1 clementine Method In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar with an electric whisk until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs and vanilla, continue to beat, then add the almonds, self-raising flour and clementine zest. If the mixture looks a little thick, add a splash of milk. Divide the mixture between two 8in loose-bottomed tins and bake for about 45–50…

WHAT could be better for a motoring swan song than the snow white and seraphic chariot I chauffeured for my wife’s birthday from the flatlands of East Anglia to its spiritual homeland, the rounded slopes of Derbyshire? What a car! Of the 48 I’ve reviewed for COUNTRY LIFE , the Rolls-Royce Cullinan is the most audacious, outrageous, stupendous and luxurious by far. All those ous-es and more besides can be yours for a mere quarter of a million English pounds, making it the most expensiveous car I have driven, too. Journeying in a Rolls to the Dales did have something of the shipping coals to Newcastle about it, or diamonds to Gauteng, where the 3,000-carat rock the car is named after was mined, but it felt like the right…

SAM GIBSON, who heads up Scottish agent Galbraith’s new North of England office, based at Hexham (01434 405975), has hit the ground running with the launch onto the market of the ‘wildly romantic’, Grade I-listed Coupland Castle, near Wooler, Northumberland, which is for sale jointly with Strutt & Parker (01670 898711) at a guide price of £1.9 million. Unseen from any public road, it stands in 25 acres of gardens, paddocks and woodland traversed by the River Glen and adjoining the extensive Lanton estate—an idyllic setting presided over by the rolling Cheviot Hills to the south. The sale follows the death, in October last year, of antique dealer and restorer Robin Jell, who bought the rambling historic building in 1979 and restored it over the years. He filled its many…

‘It is the last of the famous English gardens of the Riviera that has been in the same family since before 1914’ CLOS DU PEYRONNET is renowned as the best English garden on the French Riviera. It surrounds a handsome Belle Epoque villa at the eastern end of the town of Menton, in the upmarket district of Garavan. The Italian frontier and the three-star Mirazur— named last year as Best Restaurant by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants website—are no more than 500 yards away. The property has been owned and developed by super-plantsman William Waterfield and his family for more than a century and, over the past 50 years, has acquired near-legendary fame among garden-lovers all over the world. The homage of a COUNTRY LIFE article is long overdue. The…

FOR the best place from which to explore the rugged, mountainous coastline and crystal-clear Adriatic waters of Budva, head to the island of Sveti Stefan (above). Leased from the Montenegrin government for about 40 years, this rocky outcrop topped with a medieval village is now run by the exclusive Aman hotel group. Back in the day, Sophia Loren used to stay here and her converted cottage is the only one with its own pool—but who needs a pool when you can call a speedboat from room service? Two minutes after your request, you’ll be picked up from the island’s jetty and whisked across, Bond style, to a private beach where Novak Djokovic held his wedding in 2014. There’s much more than merely beaches, too: Budvalying on the fault lines between…

JOHN JOSEPH MERLIN (1735–1803) was not only a goldsmith, jeweller, watchmaker, harpsichord and musical instrument maker and general mechanic, but an adept self-publicist and the inventor of ‘a Machine which enables a blind Person to play at Cards’ and an early form of in-line roller skates. His father was a blacksmith and he was born at Huy in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, where he demonstrated the skates (while playing a violin) shortly before arriving in London in 1760 in the suite of the Spanish ambassador. They failed in their principal mission—to buy John Harrison’s chronometer—but Merlin helped build a large barrel organ for the Princess of Wales. He then worked for James Cox creating elaborate clocks and automata, principally for the Oriental market, and was responsible for the silver-swan…

WATCHING deer is one of the great free pleasures of this country, but there’s growing acknowledgement that numbers are out of control, to the detriment of the environment—tree-planting targets are pointless without deer management. In a radical move, Scottish Environment Link (LINK), a coalition of 18 groups including the John Muir Trust, Scottish Badgers and Ramblers Scotland, wants to encourage local communities to join in deer stalking and benefit from the venison. In the more populated West Country, hunting plays a major part in managing a healthy herd. LINK’s paper proposes a statutory regulation to ensure deer densities are reduced to ‘sustainable levels’ and ‘community access to hunting and venison’ be opened up, as in Norway. This would mean increased employment for stalkers and potentially doubled revenue from a nutritious…

IN 2017, the evocative Fortress of Königstein from the North (above), about 1756, by Bellotto (Canaletto’s nephew) was saved for the nation; now, the National Gallery, supported by the Art Fund, is launching a touring exhibition of this and five other paintings of castles and fortresses, both real and imaginary. Starting at the National Museum Cardiff (January 28–May 10), ‘Imagine a Castle: Paintings from the National Gallery, London’ will then travel to Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens (July 25–November 15) and Norwich Castle Museum (November 28–March 7, 2021), complemented at each by local collections; at Sunderland, 14th-century Hylton Castle, which features in a painting, will simultaneously open to the public after a £4.4 million makeover.…

HILARY MCGRADY, director-general of the National Trust, has announced three initiatives to celebrate the institution’s 125th anniversary ( COUNTRY LIFE , January 1). ‘Climate crisis and catastrophic decline of species are the issues of the moment,’ she said in a press conference at the Barbican, London EC1. ‘We need to connect more people to Nature as a starting point.’ Heading the list, therefore, is the Trust’s ambition to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2030. This target includes agricultural emissions, but not the carbon footprint of visitors (it’s no coincidence that 2020 is also the 125th anniversary of the first petrol car in Britain; Athena, page 36). The second initiative is to plant 20 million trees in the next 10 years. This will create 18,000 further hectares (44,479…

1920 Not published An elderly gentleman pauses to observe one of the many magnificent table tombs in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Painswick, Gloucestershire. 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 license or purchase in print form from £28 plus VAT. Please email enquiries to clpicturelibrary @ti-media.com…

‘Hine employed a Tudor-Jacobean vocabulary to create an aura of antiquity’ DERBYSHIRE contains an array of some of the largest and most important country houses in Britain. In addition to such masterpieces as Haddon, Hardwick, Chats-worth and Kedleston, however, are middling houses of great interest that are still lived in and well-maintained, but comparatively unknown. Ogston Hall falls into this latter category. It is an intriguing building that has developed over many centuries, although its dominating character today is Victorian. The hall enjoys a romantic site adjoining a beautifully landscaped reservoir formed in 1958, in the manner of the grandest of Capability Brown lakes. Its hilly shores are dotted with woods and old stone farmhouses, which still belong to the estate. The drive runs along the water side and brings…

WHO are the men of today? Are they golfers, politicians, explorers? Newspaper editors, perhaps, or huntsmen? This is who they were in the late 19th century and many were immortalised—or rather, caricatured—and published on the pages of Society magazine Vanity Fair. There have been at least five separate magazines called Vanity Fair, but this iteration, the second, was first published by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868, its aim to expose the vanities of human existence. Today, it’s best known for its caricatures with clever captions—in 1870, Lord Halifax’s read ‘he fell off his horse into a peerage’. The first, of Benjamin Disraeli, was published in 1869, drawn by Carlo Pellegrini, known as Ape. Gladstone was next, before various men (and a few women) of distinction followed. By the time the…

WITH its Grade I-listed status, there was very little elbow room available to make any major alterations to this house in Oxfordshire. Now, following a full programme of restoration, this bedroom is one of several guest rooms used to host shooting weekends. ‘My client knew what she liked: she wanted the design to work with the original features in the room without the end result being too busy or stuffy,’ explains interior designer Henriette von Stockhausen. The first step was to install a fourposter bed, a common feature in Henriette’s schemes for large bedrooms as they have the cosseting effect of creating a ‘room within a room’. This example is one of her own designs, clad in antique mirror panels. The top is covered in a simple silk by Pierre…

PICNICKING on the banks of the Thames in Runnymede, four miles from Windsor, you see them before you hear them: the aeroplanes. Welcome to flight-path land, a collection of regions of the UK in which people voluntarily subject themselves to living directly under soaring engines, to hearing that familiar rumbling, day in, day out. Some hate it, others barely notice. One of the latter group, Amelia Daniel, who works for Strutt & Parker and lives in Fulham, west London, says it’s not so bad. Moving there, ‘we were aware that we’d probably end up hearing all the planes coming into Heathrow. Two years later, I don’t notice it at all’. Still, she adds, it isn’t ideal. ‘It’s saddening that there is so much airborne traffic that you just become…

WHEN I was young and living in London, training for a respectable career, I used to attend the RHS’s fortnightly shows at Westminster. All through the year, I took careful notes of the plants and flowers I saw and hoped one day to grow in my own garden. There was no better education for a budding plant lover. Nurserymen brought a remarkable choice of beautiful plants to tempt garden owners and competitions for amateurs displayed the widest imaginable range of plants, including camellias, rhododendrons, alpines, daffodils and many others I could only gaze upon and note in my list of ‘wants’. ‘I confess to a sentimental longing for the cosy days of the past’ One autumn, I scrutinised the vast range of apples on show, trying to narrow them…

IRISH hospitality lives up to its reputation at Adare Manor. A 19th-century calendar house, built by Lady Caroline Wyndham and her husband, the 2nd Earl of Dunraven, its construction offered a lifeline during the devastating Potato Famine. In 2015, Adare was bought by local horse-racing legend J. P. McManus and, after only 22 months of work, reopened as the most luxurious of hotels—the new wing, which features a ballroom where weddings can be celebrated without disturbing other guests, blends seamlessly into the old part. Mr McManus’s dream is to host the Ryder Cup and, thanks to a superb golf course designed by Tom Fazio, that wish will be fulfilled in 2026—a podium of sculpted grass steps is already in place. Noble trees overlook the smooth swards, including the oldest cedar…