Innholdsfortegnelse for 11-Jan-2023 i Country Life

Letter of the week Learn the lesson JOHN GOODALL’S fine series on England’s country houses concluded with the moving attempt to save Harewood House by taking it into National Trust ownership in 1947 (The English home, 1939–2022, December 28, 2022). At the time, such houses were considered beyond purposeful use, hopelessly expensive and past saving. A few became schools and hotels, but 600 had been demolished in the half century to 1970, rising to a rate of one a week. The conservation movement in earnest was born. The same issue of COUNTRY LIFE recorded sales of English country houses in 2022, those lucky to survive the grim 20th century. The prices fetched by the 15 houses featured varied from £8 million to £17 million, all to private buyers.…

1900 Unpublished It’s not known when or where this photograph was taken. It was rejected for publication, however, because the figure in the foreground is out of focus. The composition —almost certainly posed—is striking, with the angler’s attention focused out of sight beneath the quay and the line of ships and coastline carrying the eye into the distance. 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…

THE middle decades of the 20th century were a time of much curiosity about the appearance of Britain, its countryside and townscapes, its landforms and archaeology, as well as contrasts between the regions. This interest, partly sparked by the growth of car ownership and transport improvements that, ironically, hastened the destruction of much of what was interesting about these things, was met by a rash of books by distinguished writers. Among the latter was Geoffrey Grigson (1905–85). Primarily a poet, and the founder of the influential 1930s poetry periodical New Verse, which championed W. H. Auden and turned down John Betjeman, Grigson was also a sharp topographical observer. In The Shell Country Alphabet, he aimed to ‘illustrate or explain things we come across in the countryside, chiefly things due to…

IN an age of satnav and increasingly automated cars, little thought is given to the roads on which we travel. But whether you’re popping to the shops or disappearing for the weekend, you’re doubtless journeying down a path that has existed for centuries. Some, including defiantly straight incisions through the countryside, were left by the Romans; others are evidence of another tribe that has since vanished from our landscape. The drovers were responsible for carving an extraordinary network through Britain, dating from at least the 12th century. This impressive group of farmers came from the uplands of Wales, as well as Cumbria and Scotland, from where they drove their livestock to distant markets. Their routes are now sections of the A5 in Snowdonia and the A44 through Powys and the…

Find the best properties at countrylife.co.uk ONE of few large Scottish estates seen on the open market in 2022, the illustrious, 1,528-acre Careston residential and farming estate near Brechin, Angus, reflected the changing face of the Scottish land market. Its sale saw the Category A-listed castle with 345 acres of land acquired by a European buyer, the bulk of the remaining farmland being purchased by expanding commercial farmers or those with rollover funds burning holes in their pockets. Launched onto the market by Savills in autumn 2021 at a guide price of £11.3 million for the whole—or in eight lots—the sale of the Careston estate marked the end of an era for the Adamson family, whose home it had been for 150 years. Described by the writer Ochterlony in…

ONE of the pleasures of growing some of your own food is getting beyond the supermarket shelves and inviting a new world of flavour into the kitchen. Every year, I grow two things that are new to me, a tradition that, over time, has introduced me to kai lan, Babington’s leek, yacon, Egyptian walking onion, parsley root and so many more. Happily, there are an increasing number of nurseries stocking more of these unfamiliar vegetables. Here, I’ve selected a handful of my favourite unusual treats and I hope that, once you’ve tried them, you might be moved to keep going. Romanesco I’ve given up on growing cauliflower: get everything right with it and it can still blow the day you turn your back. Romanesco—a cauliflower, a broccoli or its own…

Hoofprints on the Land Ilse Köhler-Rollefson (Chelsea Green, £16.99) SOME common sense at last. The climate-change debate has generated billions of printed words about the future of food and farming, most of them profoundly mistaken. Ilse Köhler-Rollefson emerges as a voice worth listening to in this fascinating book about traditional herding culture. As a German vet-turned-archaeologist and anthropologist who has spent decades as a camel dairy farmer in Rajasthan, she brings academic rigour, as well as practical farming experience to the debate and turns many of the preconceptions of the prevailing Western narrative upside down. This isn’t a dry academic textbook, even if it should be required reading across multi-disciplinary university courses, as it has beautifully observed anecdotes about Raika camel herders in India and other traditional…

A bridge too far for rare gulls KITTIWAKE nests have been removed from a bridge in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, after concerns that the birds’ excrement was damaging the structure. Birdwatchers have said that the decision to remove the nests from the Grade II-listed Spa Bridge could leave hundreds of the gulls homeless, as they often return to the same place and build their nests on top of previous ones. The council has also added bird-deterrent gel to the bridge, which gives off a UV light that the kittiwakes see as a flame and, therefore, avoid. North Yorkshire County Council has said that it has consulted with Natural England, which agreed that the plan would not harm the birds’ habitat. The black-legged kittiwake—a small type of gull—is on the conservation…

CLOISTERED in the walled garden at Leuchie near North Berwick, the home of the Dalrymple family is one of an interesting clutch of Mid-Century Modern designs that were integrated into the garden structures of a historic house. The group, which includes Trevor Dannatt’s Pitcorthie in Fife of 1968, the walled garden houses at Hurley, Berkshire (Walter Goddard, 1956) and in Henley-on-Thames (Francis Pollen,1959), and Pollen’s 1976 Lake House on The Grange estate in Hampshire, drew inspiration from vernacular sources, mixing natural and manufactured materials in unpretentious, carefully crafted designs. Leuchie Walled Garden and its Georgian predecessor (Leuchie House, today a respite home) were described by Mark Girouard in two articles published the year after the Modern house was built (COUNTRY LIFE, October 12 and 26, 1961). Six decades later, the…

The sun was sunk, and after him the star Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring Twilight upon the earth, short arbiter ’twixt day and night, and now from end to end Night’s hemisphere had veil’d the horizon round Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, Book IX IT is getting dimpsy. The sun is disappearing down below the horizon, the visible world shrinking, quietening, settling. Through the bare trees of the wood seeps a slow tide of silt. The valley fills softly with grey sand, an egg-timer inverted. A world slowly, beautifully drowning into darkness. Twilight: the hour of monotone between day and night, between the known and the unknown. Twilight: when everything solid melts into insubstantiality, when the walk along the lane is to tread on air in a vaporous, floating world.…

SALES of stoves are off the scale,’ says Paul Chesney, who founded Chesneys, the fireplace and stove specialist, almost 40 years ago. ‘We can’t make enough to keep up.’ He believes that demand is driven by his customers’ desire to be both more self-sufficient and also to have more control of their costs. According to the Stove Industry Alliance (SIA), seasoned logs are now the least expensive domestic heating fuel, costing 74% less per kWh than electric and 21% less than gas. The Nottingham Energy Partnership has also found that using a modern Ecodesign wood-burning stove costs 29% less to run than an air-source heat pump. Leaps and bounds in stove technology are also fuelling demand, but how clean are they, given the concerns about particulate levels? ‘The current generation…

ASSEMBLED as a gentry hall house on an upland spot near Briercliffe in Lancashire, Extwistle Hall is a striking model of the sturdy sandstone-built houses that appeared in the north of England in the 16th century. Its mullions—some with ogee moulding—large hall window and arched fireplace were typical of the manner of building styles of the period, with a cross wing, charmingly irregular roofline and a smattering of ball finials—a handsome home, surely, in this exposed moorland setting. It is empty and in ruins, picked at by vandals and frequently saturated by rain, now that the slate has been stolen and most of the windows punched out. Extwistle Hall, vacant for the past 20 years, is one of numerous stricken dwellings that should be put to good use, but which…

THE Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that for everything there is a season—a time to be born and a time to die. Gardeners know that there is a time to sow and a time to reap. January is the time to be gloomy. The days may be getting longer, but the frosts are getting harder. Snow disfigures everything it touches. Sixty years ago, we had 14ft snowdrifts along our mile-long drive in Northumberland and there were still unmelted piles of snow at Winchester when I returned to school after the Easter holidays. Don’t be fooled by climate change —bad winters are certainly not a thing of the past. Another one may be lurking just around the corner. But one learns from them. I made a big mistake 40 years…

JOHN CONSTABLE’S huge landscapes (the ‘six-footers’) conjure up a long-gone rural England in his portrayal of pastoral landscapes, mills and streams. He painted what he knew and loved, so much of his early work was of the River Stour, near East Bergholt and Flatford Mill (owned by his father, a successful corn merchant), where he grew up. He wasn’t at the time, however, a conventional artist. Many now see him as responsible for a revolution in landscape painting, which had fallen out of fashion, reviving interest in a fast-disappearing rural way of life as the enclosures marched through England and long-standing traditions were lost. He painted the countryside as he saw it, capturing a level of detail and intricacy that was unusual, but not immediately popular —neither Flatford Mill (1817)…

THE gentle-faced Herdwick sheep with its slate-grey coat is as much a part of Lake District life and economics as Arthur Ransome, John Peel and fell-running and was championed by Wordsworth as being pivotal in the preservation of traditional farming. Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, a founder of the National Trust, was instrumental in influencing Beatrix Potter to farm the sheep; she died before she could take up her role as president of the breed society (founded in 1916), but her will stipulated that Herdwick sheep should remain on her land. More recently, the breed’s cause has been promoted by the farmer and writer James Rebanks and by The King, who became patron of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association in 2018. ‘Herdwyck’ is an ancient word for pasture and the animal has…

AMID a hoard of silver coins discovered in the Wiltshire village of Sevington was a two-pronged silver fork identified by archaeologists as Saxon, pre-dating the Norman Conquest by at least two centuries. Its burial alongside valuable coins points to its status for its first owner. In the 9th century, a fork was a rarity in English life, evidence perhaps of overseas trading links. Sources suggest forks were used in this period by Persian nobles, a habit that subsequently spread across the Byzantine Empire, including to the Byzantine princess who, in 1004, married the Doge of Venice and earned round condemnation for her use of a two-pronged gold fork to spear chunks of food cut up for her by attendant eunuchs. St Peter Damian explained her subsequent death from the plague…

Glorious green Featuring 12 gas burners of different sizes, two griddles and two large ovens, the Fiorentina 180 range cooker in Light Green, £40,666, is crafted in Florence by Officine Gullo (020–7036 1632; www.officinegullo.com) Popping pink Add a lively pop of colour with the 150i electric range cooker in Fandango Pink, £12,600, with roasting, baking, slow-cooking and plate-warming ovens, cast-iron hot and simmer plates and a three-zone induction hob, from Everhot (01453 890018; www.everhot.co.uk) Sunny side up The impressive Lacanche Vezelay 2,205mm-wide (7ft) range cooker in Provencal Yellow, from £14,560, has two large main ovens and two simmer ovens, plus a hob configuration of your choice, from Quince & Cook (01738 231600; www.quinceandcook.co.uk) Warm colour Blake & Bull specialises in reconditioning AGA range cookers and converting them to electricity, such…

WHEN does spring send out its advance party, advising us the days will soon be warmer and brighter again? Is it when the mistle thrush in the bare poplars casts his tuneful phrases across woodland and water, as we break into the New Year? Or when the scillas and daffodils push tentatively out of the earth? For Susanna Bott, chatelaine of Benington Lordship, the promise of spring arrives with the downy clouds of February snowdrops that cover the ground around the remains of a Norman castle and its next-door church, close to her early-18th-century home. ‘On a sunny day in February, the scent of honey wafting from the massed wild snowdrops and the sight of the big, sleepy bumblebees that land on them, weighing the flowers down, is a key…