Innholdsfortegnelse for 26-Aug-2020 i Country Life

IN 1320, Abbot Bernard de Linton composed the Declaration of Arbroath, named after the abbey where it was written. As Arbroath Abbey still stands, so does the Declaration live on. Like the American Declaration of Independence, the authors of which were inspired by Arbroath, it was devised to meet a specific set of circumstances, but has continued to echo down the years, long after the emergency had passed. The Abbot was addressing the Pope for Robert the Bruce, victor at Bannockburn, but still in excommunication over the murder, in a church, of a rival. ‘It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting,’ wrote Abbot Bernard in Latin, ‘but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’ Although…

White-tailed eagles A further seven white-tailed eagles have been released on the Isle of Wight, as part of a plan to reintroduce the species to the UK. Six eagles were set free last year, in the first wave of a five-year project to reintroduce 60 juveniles Relaxing SpareRoom, a website for renting, has unveiled an at-home guided-meditation video featuring dogs, which it claims is the first ever. The video, on YouTube, ‘combines the calming benefits of meditation with clips of cute dogs, to help bring a sense of calm during this chaotic time to pet-less renters'…

ON the A96 at Fochabers, near the River Spey, next to Baxters Highland Village, stands this stag, the first public memorial to The Highlanders, subsumed into the Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006. The stag (Hector, as he is known in the regiment) was unveiled by Brig Hughie Monro, the first commanding officer and the last colonel of the regiment, earlier this year, with servicemen in attendance. It was commissioned by regimental secretary Maj Maurice Gibson on behalf of The Highlanders’ Regimental Trustees and is based on the regiment’s cap badge of the stag, thistle, crown and motto. The stag’s sculptor, Jason Sweeney, describes how he sees the stag as the enduring symbol of Scotland and certainly The Highlanders. ‘It needed to be a close enough representation for The Highlanders…

ATTENTIONS are turning toward Christmas and for some, the end of this torrid year cannot come soon enough. ‘Christmas?’ I hear you question, aghast. Well, yes. If, like me, you’d been fortunate enough to sneak down into the kitchens at The Ritz London last week, you would have come across a joyous sight. Ten pairs of hands, hard at work, manually mixing a giant batch of Christmas pudding. All the cooks were wearing festive socks for the occasion. The recipe is a close-kept secret of the hotel’s talented chef, John Williams, who has been making it for decades—but I did spy 163 eggs (yes, really) making their way into the mixture. By the end of the laborious process, the floor was carpeted in a fine layer of currants, carrot and…

Making a meal of it Q Our grandson refuses to eat anything other than sliced salami. His parents are allowing him to survive on processed meat. I can’t believe it is good for his development—whatever happened to children being left at the table until they had eaten what was on their plate? C. R., Cambridgeshire A You live in Cambridgeshire—have you considered that his forebears subsisted entirely on eels? What might be equally bad for his development is undue pressure. (Anyway, he’ll find a way to checkmate you. Shifting the kitchen table the other day, I discovered great quantities of calcified sprouts, puttied into its undercarriage, in the place where our daughter once sat. She is now 30.) Collude. There are many nutritious peasant dishes you can make with…

Letter of the week If you build it IT was Groucho Marks who reminded us that ‘politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies’. This is happening in housing and planning. You’re right to say ‘not enough houses are being built and some are far from the quality that the nation has the right to expect’ (Leader, August 12). However, deregulating the planning system, as the Government proposes, is the wrong target and will have almost no impact. The Local Government Association has shown that more than a million homes granted permission in the past decade have not been built. Building too few houses suits the house-building industry, because it keeps prices up. The planning system should be strengthened…

I collect pomegranates from all over, and found this Oriental one, of metal with gold inlay, in a street market in France years ago. Above it is a real dried one, then the white one is porcelain, possibly French. The silvery ‘evil eye protector' I found on a remote Greek island and the red I got at a tourist stall in Turkey. Bottom left is Indian, lead, and was a present for my recent birthday This is a fan letter from Nancy Lancaster. A decorator can ask for no greater tribute This silver-gilt repoussé portrait of George I has his name and honours all written in kingly symbols (I particularly like the R being the Pelican in her Piety). This was given to me by Christopher Gibbs in the late…

THE cuckoo’s call has long since faded, skylarks swoop and rise in their vertical dance and the first hay has been neatly rolled. In the woods, lanky foxgloves have shed their purple outerwear and, throughout the land, gardeners are attempting to quench an ever-increasing thirst. However, within the flower press, time stands still. Unscrewing the tightly wound wing nuts with the trepidation of a ceramicist opening a kiln, I gently lift the layers of card and paper. The past season rests here: daisies, dandelions, wood anemone, primroses and bluebells sleep on the pages. Flower pressing is an ancient craft that involves flattening blooms and leaves to remove the moisture. The pressed matter can then be preserved on paper, behind glass, within resin and so on for the purposes of both…

On July 30, Thomas Del Mar at Olympia Auctions held its first post-lockdown live arms and armour sale, ‘which was met with great enthusiasm'. A remarkable mid-16th-century Augsburg 54-bore, self-spanning, wheel-lock breech-loading holster pistol (pictured) sold for £97,500, a record for any South German pistol. According to the catalogue, it could be ‘loaded at the breech with a removable cartridge that is complete with a pan, thus allowing the user to insert a pre-loaded and primed cartridge into the chamber. Furthermore, it can be used as a self-spanning wheel-lock or primed with a key'. This rather baffled me, so I asked Mr Del Mar for elucidation. Usually on a wheel-lock, the spindle of the wheel is spanned-wound or cocked-with a key. However, this innovatory pistol could also be self-spanned, using…

Spanish wine The Spanish government is offering its grape-growers subsidies to destroy their harvest, after a bumper year of production and a crash in demand as a result of Covid-19. The government has offered € 90 million to either destroy some of the grapes or turn them into brandy and industrial alcohol Waistlines In a small town in Switzerland, it briefly rained chocolate, after a malfunction at the nearby Lindt & Sprüngli factory. Residents found Olten was covered in a fine layer of chocolate powder, which had been spread by strong winds Antique shops An antique shop was raided by police because they erroneously believed it to be a cannabis farm, causing £2,000 worth of damage. Kent police apologised and offered to pay for the damage to Bracewell's Vintage &…

Quiz of the week 1) If you listed all the countries of the world in alphabetical order, which would come first? 2) In the Royal Navy, the abbreviation Cdre is used to denote what rank? 3) The mythical hippogriff is a combination of which two creatures? 4) Which is the UK's smallest city, by both population and urban area? 5) Common chimpanzees and which other apes share some 99% of their DNA with humans? Book of the week Antlers of Water, edited by Kathleen Jamie (Canongate, £20) You could fill a library with writing on Scotland's Nature and environment, but this volume, edited by a leading Scottish poet, distinguishes itself by being an anthology of new material that embraces the diversity of the genre today. Contributions in prose, poetry…

IT’S a broiling day in mid August when even the ducks on the pond look hot. Keith Weed, the newly appointed president of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), is out in the garden that surrounds his 15th-century timber-frame farmhouse in Surrey. ‘You’ll find him in the border,’ says his wife, Kate, an artist, who is accompanied by two border terriers, Biscuit and Bear, named—Mr Weed tells me later—by their children, two sons and a daughter, all of whom are now grown up. Sure enough, we discover the president crouched inside the suitably impressive herbaceous border between the cosmos and the crocosmia, obligingly clutching a vast bunch of freshly picked flowers for the COUNTRY LIFE photographer. He certainly has the right garden for the job and, photograph taken, is touchingly enthusiastic…

A quick straw-poll of eminent Scottish chefs reveals some intriguing divergences For Dean Banks, of Haar in St Andrews, porridge is ‘a heartwarming breakfast that provokes childhood memories in an instant'- he likes rolled oats cooked in a 50/50 blend of milk and water, sprinkled with sugar and with more cold milk poured over the top ‘so you can eat it quickly' At Gleneagles, executive chef Simon Attridge opts for ‘good-quality pinhead oats, stirred with a spurtle (not whisked) and seasoned with a bit of salt', whereas Dundee-born Jeremy Lee, of Quo Vadis, in London, soaks his oats overnight in water, then stirs them over a gentle heat with a wooden spoon and a pinch of sea salt. ‘The consistency should be that of cream,' he reveals, adding that ‘a…

COURT jewellers with a difference, the designers and craftsmen of Cleave create exceptional insignia, including orders, decorations and medals, as well as bespoke objets d’art. This sword was commissioned by the Kingdom of Qatar to commemorate the link between Qatar and the British armed forces. It was presented as the International Award at the Sovereign’s Parade at Sandhurst, given to the best International Officer Cadet to pass the Officer Training Commissioning Course. There are only four highly specialised craftsmen in the company’s West Sussex workshop, who take about 480 hours to craft a piece of this intricacy. The pommel of the scimitar (a sabre with a curved blade) bears a hand-finished head of a saker falcon and includes a cabochon-cut sapphire as its eye (020–7016 1499; www. cleave.com).…

• Choose a variety of shapes, textures and colours—as you would when selecting plants for the garden—and don’t overlook the importance of leaves • Keep dahlias, fuchsias and marigolds indoors in water for 12 hours before pressing, allowing them to lose surplus moisture • According to Joyce Fenton in Pressed Flower Craft , ‘the time to pick is when the flowers are free of moisture on their petals. The recommended time on a sunny summer’s day is coffee time, between 10am and 11am, when the sun has sufficiently dried the flowers, but not overheated them’ • If the worst happens and your press reveals mouldy or overcooked petals, you can always buy pre-pressed plants. It's better to purchase these from individual artists (contact the Pressed Flower Guild, www.pressedflowerguild. org.uk), rather…

Chatsworth in the Peak District, Derbyshire, where the gardens are undergoing the biggest transformation for nearly 200 years, is home to more than 20 sculptural works by the likes of Frink, Antony Gormley, Angela Conner, Allen Jones, Michael Craig-Martin and Barry Flanagan, plus a monumental new commission created as the centrepiece to the Arcadia. Designed by Laura Ellen Bacon and built by local dry-stone wallers, Natural Course comprises more than 100 tons of local stone and gives the impression of snaking slowly across the landscape to which it belongs. Visitors can enter a small way into the 32ft structure, which is situated among new paths and plantings between two glades (www.chatsworth.org). Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, near Penzance, Cornwall, features among its sub-tropical plantings sculptures and site-specific works by renowned artists, such…

HALF of a wood said to have inspired Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox will be ‘destroyed’ by digging for HS2, says the Woodland Trust. Dahl was known to be a regular visitor to Jones Hill Wood in Buckinghamshire, from which 1¾ acres of the 4½-acre site will be translocated from October 1, to make way for the new railway. Translocation involves moving woodland soils from one place to another in the hope that the woodland will re-grow, but the Woodland Trust says there is ‘little evidence of its success’ and points to Natural England guidance that says that an ‘ancient woodland ecosystem cannot be moved’. The wood is one of 20, adding up to about 50 acres, that will be trans-located due to HS2 this autumn. ‘When you consider ancient…

HISTORIC ENGLAND (HE) has announced that 20 parks, gardens and landscapes from the post-war period have been added to the National Heritage List for England. The spaces, which include Denmans Garden in West Sussex, Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex and York Gate Garden in Leeds, will be listed to ‘enhance understanding and protect them for the future’, according to HE. The new protections are a result of a three-year collaboration with The Gardens Trust, which saw suggestions of the best examples of landscapes from the end of the Second World War to the early 1990s being put forward by members of the public and landscape professionals. These ranged from memorials to the grounds of private houses, institutions and housing estates, as well as commercial and industrial spaces. ‘From Broadwater Park,…

IT was a relief to get back to Hampshire for a bit of peace and quiet. Hordes of foxes had been keeping us awake in Barnes for the past few nights with their shrieks and yelps, sending the local dog population into a frenzy. During the day, the ring-necked parakeets jarred the air with their chatter —although, I have to admit that, I am still amazed to see something so exotic streaking across the sky. Back in the Meon Valley, the woodpigeons’ soft cooing seemed particularly soothing. Most of the pictures for the COUNTRY LIFE gardening pages are taken at dawn or dusk. The professional photographers know there is a special light at these diurnal moments. A photograph is simply a painting of light, which is why we only use…

A cure for gout IF any of your readers wish to emulate the robust serenity of health enjoyed by their eighteenth century ancestors, this bill for a remedy employed largely in those days may be of interest. By orders of the famous Dr Mead, Pope drank asses’ milk. It seems to have been sold at places of health resort, such as Richmond and Margate, where celebrated ‘Donkey Hackneyman’ Bennett combined pleasure and medicine for his clients. 1) Afghanistan 2) Commodore 3) An eagle and a horse 4) St Davids 5) Bonobos Riddle me this: The grain…

Roasted almond Pedro Domecq, Manzanilla, Jerez, Spain. £11.95, Master of Malt, alc 15% This sherry is exclusive to the UK. From coastal Sanlúcar de Barrameda, it has textbook roasted-almond and fresh, salty aromas. The palate is refreshingly light, with lifted sea-breeze and apple notes, plus green-olive brine. Great with jamón. Good with game Domaine Jean Sipp, Pinot Gris Réserve, Alsace, France 2018. £16.95, Jeroboams, alc 13.5% Bursting with fresh, ripe pear on the nose and palate, this is soft and smooth, rich and round, but not too heavy, with delicate acidity, notes of bruised apple and an off-dry, honeyed sweetness. This is a wine for food-not for idly sipping, but for savouring its nuances with something delicious to eat, such as game. Spiced berry notes Cramele Recas, Sanziana…

THERE will be an end. Let us remind ourselves of that obvious truth as we struggle through this apparently interminable pandemic. Less obvious is that, amid the anxiety, coronavirus hasn’t been all bad, at least in its effect on towns and cities. In London, Trafalgar Square has been greatly enhanced by the absence of the Yoda-impersonators—or living statues—outside the National Gallery, some of whom, it’s said, may be unfortunate immigrants being exploited by gangs. There’s no need to stress the national importance of the square, but it took a virus to return it to civilised condition. Admittedly, there may be ambiguity over which authority is responsible for its northern fringe, as it used to be a road, but surely this could be resolved. Every historic town and city has seen,…

IN these unpredictable climes, indoor pursuits are always pretty vital, but with the possibility of lockdowns they are more of a focus than ever. The further north you go, the more essential they become; architects of grander country houses—particularly in the Victorian and Edwardian eras—have long recognised this and incorporated spaces dedicated to fun and games, classically as a billiards room. ‘Banquette seating helps to trick you into feeling that you’re in a West End club’ For years, these tended to be a male preserve, decorated with low lighting and glowering portraits of ancestors in heavy gilt frames. William Peppitt of Savills remembers selling a house that had a purpose-built billiards room with a small room off to one side that housed a single porcelain urinal. It was, he points…

In July, George III's Tourbillon watch (commissioned in 1808) sold at Sotheby's in London for an astonishing £1.6 million-three times the price it achieved 21 years ago (020–7355 1735; www.breguet.com) The Patrimony Moon Phase Retrograde Date watch, the latest addition to the Collection Excellence Platine, £65,000, Vacheron Constantin (020–7578 9500; www. vacheronconstantin.com) Master Ultra Thin Kingsman Knife watch. A collaboration with Kingsman prequel film The King’s Man. £26,900, Jaeger-LeCoultre at Mr Porter (0330 022 5705; www. mrporter.com) The [Re]Master01 is a reinterpretation of one of Audemars Piguet's iconic chronographs from the 1940s, limited to 500 pieces, £51,800 (020–7409 0782; www. audemarspiguet.com) Bathyscaphe Mokarran limited edition, helping to protect the great hammerhead shark, £12,490, Blancpain (020–7529 0910; www. blancpain.com)…

The summer pruning of trained apple trees is a luxury now reserved for the domestic gardener, because it takes time. Firstly remove any vigorous water-shoots altogether, then do the same with any new shoots growing in unwanted directions. Next, patiently work through the rest, which you wish to retain, but which you now encourage to produce fruit rather than mere leaves. At the end of each horizontal branch, shorten new growth by half. Then work along new sideshoot growth, heading each back to two or three leaves. This will induce these shoots to produce fruit buds next year.…

ST CARANTOC built one as instructed by a dove. Another was raised at the spot where St Walstan’s faithful oxen drawing his funeral bier stopped. They were built in places where people thought miracles had happened, or were blessed by spirits, or where holy water bubbled out of the earth, in wastes and on pagan shrines, by the sea and by rivers, in the hills and on the plain. They were constructed where people congregated, in villages and towns and, eventually, in the heart of industrial cities. Saints built them, sinners built them; improvers and committees; barons and crusaders; wool merchants and kings. In Christchurch, Dorset, the final timber was dropped into place by a stranger supposed to be the Lord himself. They were built for the people of Britain.…