Innholdsfortegnelse for 28-Dec-2022 i Country Life

Letter of the week From head to toe TWO articles in the November 23 issue brought back memories of my 32 years in the Royal Navy. In ‘Strong flavours to savour’, Tom Parker Bowles mentioned ‘stewed babies’ heads’. I don’t know about stewed, but I do know about steamed babies’ heads. As a member of the Royal Navy in the 1960s/70s, I fondly remember them being served on board ship. Babies’ heads is naval slang for steamed steak and kidney puddings. They came in tall tins in which they steamed. When served, they were cut in half across the width to provide two ‘babies’ heads’. The ‘surgeon’ would then operate on his lunch! Secondly, ‘If the shoes fit’ reminded me of the shoemakers on board HMS Ark Royal…

1899 Published November 4 A smartly dressed man, probably a professional model, admires the forecourt gateway at Drayton House, Northamptonshire. The photograph was taken to illustrate an article in the ‘Country homes. Gardens old and new’ series, ancestor of the magazine’s distinctive house and garden coverage. Every week for the past 125 years, COUNTRY LIFE has documented and photographed many walks of life in Britain. More than 80,000 of the images are available for syndication or purchase in digital format. To view the archives, visit www. countrylifeimages.co.uk and email enquiries to licensing@futurenet.com…

1 Giant’s Causeway, Co Antrim Geology made the British countryside. It was the freakishly intricate composition of the geological map that created such diversity of natural features and building materials, which seem to vary every few miles, as well as natural wonders, such as the Giant’s Causeway in Co Antrim, Northern Ireland’s only World Heritage Site. The basalt stacks are the result of a volcanic eruption of 60–65 million years ago, after which lava that flowed into a valley crystallised as it cooled, forming hexagonal and other multi-faceted columns. Over aeons, the columns sank to different depths, giving the appearance of steps. The Causeway had been the stuff of legend for centuries when it entered written history in 1692, on being ‘discovered’ by William King, then Anglican Bishop of Derry.…

LIKE a well-trained gundog emerging from water, the country-house market shook itself down in late summer and early autumn before getting back to business and ending the year in a flurry of high-profile sales. Overseas buyers, returning expats and buyers looking to work either full- or part-time from the countryside all played a role in maintaining the market for landmark properties in 2022. The cathedral city of Guildford and its surrounding towns and villages within the Surrey Hills AONB have long been an early port of call for London buyers in search of a country retreat. After a month of hectic trading that saw every house sold in Guildford fetch more than the asking price, Tim Harriss of Knight Frank launched idyllic, Grade II-listed The Old Rectory at Hascombe,…

WE don’t know who first looked at a bush and thought: ‘That would make a good rabbit.’ But we do know it was a long, long time ago. The Romans certainly indulged in topiarisation, which they seem to have picked up from the Greeks, and it seems likely that the Ancient Egyptians were snipping away even before then. As the garden designer Isabel Bannerman says in her latest book, Husbandry (Pimpernel Press, £14.99), topiary is both timeless and contemporary. ‘It somehow “peoples” the place and commands a garden from it.’ Over the centuries, a love of topiary has come and gone, occasionally rising to excesses of enthusiasm before a reaction set in. In about AD100, Pliny the Younger described the garden of his country villa near Ostia in Italy as…

WHEN it came to the life of the late Queen, two things mattered more than most: service and horses. Therefore, any attempt to capture her momentous final year would require someone with the skills and knowledge to illustrate both. Step forward Freddy Paske, Royal Artist in Residence for the past year—one that began in celebration and ended in grief. ‘I’ve always been passionate about art, even from a very young age,’ Mr Paske tells me. ‘No surface was safe.’ Born into a military family, his love of drawing was only matched by his commitment to joining the army, again also from a young age. ‘My father was in the army, as were many generations before him,’ he adds. ‘I came from this military background and I really took it to…

Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland, is a lifelong conservationist First, I must admit that I walked past this painting for 40 years without appreciating its true quality. It shares a room with works by Canaletto, van Dyck and Lely, but now, those works pale in comparison. It beckons to one, urging involvement in an unfolding drama, an argument or debate between important cultural figures, in which the artist is, perhaps, the arbitrator. This is no standard portrait of great men, but a complex and emotional work, completed amid civil war, with subtle clues to the nature of the debate: a sculpted head of Apollo in the lower left corner and a drawing of Venus in Lanier’s right hand. For me, Dobson outshines contemporaries such as van Dyck in exposing…

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Starlight Night’ MIDNIGHT, in the midnight of the year. We were late back from the carol service and the inevitable post-event mince pies, but I could not go to bed. There were animals to be checked, which was no chore really: who would not want to be out and about under a black velvet sky strewn with diamonds and a snowball moon? In my ears, of course, hummed the words of Nahum Tate’s While shepherds watched their flocks by night. In Christtime,…

The death of the sitting room When was the last time you were entertained by someone in their sitting room? Or did you enjoy a preprandial snifter propping up their kitchen island? Or leaning against their Everhot? Or warming your toes by the stove in the intimacy of their snug? The inexorable rise of the all-singing, all-dancing multi-functional kitchen has already done for the dining room and it seems that the sitting room will soon be redundant, too. Jute mats Before the wall-to-wall seagrass and sisal revolution (about 1986)—and the subsequent rush-matting renaissance—jute mats offered a simple and inexpensive way to add a rustic look to floors. Today, they provide a textured look that is very much in keeping with the spirit of the times. Robertson jute rug, £450, from…

ON Wednesday, November 26, 1947, the aesthete, conservationist and writer James, or ‘Jim’, Lees-Milne arrived in Yorkshire by train for a visit to Harewood House. As he noted in his diary, he was met at Leeds station by a ‘nice, old-fashioned chauffeur, not in livery’, driving ‘a brand new small Daimler limousine with a large silver owl on the bonnet’. Lees-Milne was visiting on behalf of the National Trust, following the death of the house’s former owner, Henry Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood, six months earlier. Jim had joined the Trust in 1936 at a crucial moment in its history. The charity had been founded by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter in 1895 and, in the mid 1930s, enjoyed a membership of a few thousand and a…

THERE is something wonderfully provoking and also exciting, in the careless hither-and-thither flight of a snipe,’ mused Lord Walsingham and Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey in the Shooting Moor and Marsh edition of The Badminton Library, instigated by the 8th Duke of Beaufort. Writing in 1887, the duo noted that the best snipe shooting ‘is to be had in large wet grass fields and comparatively dry bogs, where, though the water splashes at every step, it rarely reaches the ankle’ and lamented that these small, stocky waders—which weigh only 3–4oz—are ‘very erratic in their movements, suddenly reaching, and as quickly leaving, their most favourite haunts’. In doing so, they sum up why so many sportsmen have long sought to pursue Gallinago gallinago, collectively known as a ‘wisp’, often with little success: ‘The…

The Inuit Way: A Journey across Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago E. A. S. Cooper (Bradt Travel Guides, £9.99) THIS epic follows Edward Cooper on an exciting adventure as he sets sail for the fair north to live among the indigenous peoples of Northern Canada and Greenland. Learning their ways, he comes to debunk many of the misconceptions about what life is like in this wondrous and frozen land. The Hill of Devi: An Englishman at the Court of a Maratha Maharaja in 1921 E. M. Forster (Eland, 12.99) IF spearfishing and the Northern Lights are not for you, Eland has other offerings, chiefly this collection of memoirs, letters and other personal writings by early-20th-century novelist E. M. Forster, describing his visits, as the Maharaja’s private secretary,…