Innholdsfortegnelse for 12-Jul-2023 i Country Life

Letter of the week Burning issue THE accumulation of vegetation caused by a reduction in livestock numbers, often compulsory, and, in places, an outright ban on burning have resulted in moorland areas becoming tinderboxes, as has been shown by the devastating wildfires that have occurred throughout the country in recent years (Agromenes, June 21). Once heather becomes large and woody, it burns much hotter and is well-nigh impossible to control once it ignites. There have been areas where mechanical cutting has been trialled, but let us not forget that the type of terrain involved makes it difficult for machinery to be used, let alone the fossil-fuel use. Adding to the spread of any conflagration is the continuing practice of planting conifers. Our native woodlands do not burn. David…

1922 March 4 Published A stand for 14,000 spectators rises around centre court at Wimbledon in time for the 1922 championships, leading COUNTRY LIFE to draw analogies between Capt C. Stanley Peach’s design and the slightly smaller Albert Hall. This view from the Royal Box shows the court laid with fresh turf. The next-door courts were divided by paths and yew hedges. 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…

PROUDLY proclaimed on the cornice of the long loggia that extends across the exterior of Figure Court, the river frontage of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, is an inscription in large letters that succinctly records the purpose and history of the building. The Latin text, which is divided into two sections by the central portico, begins: ‘For the succour and relief of veterans broken by age and war founded by Charles II.’ The inscription continues: ‘Enlarged by James II and completed by William and Mary King and Queen A.D. 1692.’ There, in a nutshell, is the foundation story of this splendid institution, spread across three reigns, with a statement of its intended beneficiaries. Charles II (r. 1660–85) was witness to the fighting of the Civil Wars at first hand. He was…

OF all English poets in the core canon of our national verse, John Clare is perhaps the one with the most extraordinary life story. He was one of only two children to survive in a poor Northamptonshire family of rural labourers. That he became a poet at all is astonishing, given that his formal education ended by the time he was 12 years old. Yet the appearance of his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820 brought huge, if brief success—only to be followed by decades of mental illness and the near-complete eclipse of his reputation. Even the years of celebrity, when he mingled with the literary lions of his age, contained the seeds of subsequent decline. He may have been fêted as ‘the princely Clare’ by fellow…

DURING the pandemic, interior designer Sarah Southwell and her family left south London and moved to rural Somerset. They bought a Grade II-listed manor house near Langport that was structurally in good shape (‘it has good bones,’ as she puts it). Nevertheless, the house needed a lot of work and lacked mod cons, including central heating. The project involved a root-and-branch refurbishment that included stripping back the interior, rewiring and reinstating character, a process that encompassed replastering it in traditional lime plaster. The kitchen floor that had previously been covered in brown carpet tiles was laid with pine boards sourced from a reclamation yard in Glastonbury. Mrs Southwell chose cabinets from the British Standard Stowupland collection (020–7870 7688; www.britishstandardcupboards.co.uk) and worked with one of its designers on planning the layout.…

Bedfordshire, £3.5 million A long-held belief here at COUNTRY LIFE is that having two mills is better than one. Those of a similar belief should look no further than Edlesborough Mill, a seven-bedroom red-brick home near Dunstable that offers the best efforts of the wind, as well as the water. Originally a working mill using water from the River Ouzel, which flows through the grounds, the property is now a substantial family home with more than 23 acres of land and outstanding views of the mill ponds, the Ouzel and the Chiltern Hills beyond. Inside, it comes with lashings of period charm, such as exposed beams and fireplaces. A particular highlight is the exceptional first-floor drawing room, which retains the original working components of the mill. Standing to the…

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk Rule ‘chaos’ puts shoots at risk MORE than 200 English shoots are fearing for their futures after a ‘chaotic’ decision to change licensing laws was implemented in a bid to combat avian flu. The new rules, which came into force on June 1, mean that shoots wishing to release pheasants (above) or red-legged partridges on a protected area, or within 1,500ft of its boundary, would have to apply for an individual licence that would be assessed by Defra on a case-by-case basis. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) believes that the new licensing rules would affect more than 200 shoots. As well as the shoots themselves, gamekeepers are also fearful for their livelihoods, with many likely to be made redundant…

THE appealing British Saddleback is surely a prince among pigs, defined by its neat and distinctive black-and-white colouring, the broad white band encompassing the shoulders and front legs. The fashion for pigs with markings declined sharply after the Second World War—white ones were considered more commercial —and, in 1967, it was decided to amalgamate the similar looking Essex and Wessex belted pigs in order to preserve the breed. This was a controversial idea at the time—in 1949, the two breeds had accounted for 25% of all licensed boars, with the Wessex, from the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, being particularly successful and Britain’s second most popular pig in the 1940s—but both are considered extinct now. The Saddleback, categorised by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust as ‘at risk’, is the subject…

SOME gardens have the ability to surprise; few have the ability to shock. The terraces above Cornwall’s Minack Theatre most certainly do. Carved out of a cliff at Porthcurno on the southern tip of Penwith—or, more accurately, artfully crafted with concrete at a time when building regulations were in their infancy—this outdoor playhouse-without-a-roof owes its existence to Rowena Cade, who owned the land and decided in 1932 that the cliff at the end of her garden would make a perfect theatre. Since then, between March and October, it has hosted hundreds of disparate productions, from Shakespeare to Coward, musicals to operas, Fisherman’s Friends to French farce and, in recent times, has become celebrated for its gardens every bit as much as for its theatrical accomplishments. Cade did have planted terraces…

A DAM GILCHRIST is working hard to keep the joy of bespoke alive. ‘A carpet made to any size, any colour and any design of your choice can make a room sing,’ says the founder of Veedon Fleece. ‘There’s no need to conform to standard sizes and styles—with a bespoke design, you can get the best out of every room.’ Mr Gilchrist has long lectured at design schools in the UK and US, educating interior-design students in carpet-making history and design. Addressing his concern that original design may be a dying art, he began sponsoring an annual carpet competition at the Inchbald School of Design in London. Students are invited to submit a bespoke design, with the winning entries sent off to be handmade at Veedon Fleece’s workshop in Kathmandu,…

THE best gardening is experimental, as well as ephemeral. Designer Sarah Price’s garden, tucked into the shadow of Sugar Loaf mountain in Abergavenny, has these qualities in profusion. Ms Price moved to The Chain, a large Victorian house divided into flats by her grandparents, in 2013. Her walled garden is a sheltered, triangular slice leading east from the house, its high walls in the same greyish-pink stone. This part has been gardened productively, with vegetables, fruit and flowers, since the 1870s; the original greenhouse stretches down the north side, the deep staging crammed with cucumbers and grapevines clambering on the pink, lime-washed walls. At the furthest corner, a tunnel dips under the lane that borders the east wall, emerging into a wilder grassy orchard. The River Cibi rushes along the…

LITTLE in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s early days suggested his works would one day grace the walls of most museum and country-house collections in the UK. Yet the son of a Devon clergyman—he was born in Plympton, Devon, on July 16, 1723—shrugged off his modest beginnings as a painter in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport) to become the greatest portrait artist England has ever seen. A founder and the first president of the new Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, he was knighted by George III in 1769, lived and worked in a magnificent house in Leicester Fields (now Square) attended by servants in livery and was eventually appointed Principal Painter to the King in 1784. Reynolds’s extraordinary rise to fame was testament to his unique skills. These were a rare combination…

THERE’S something fascinating about ‘ends’. Staying near Cape Wrath last year, I had a (sadly unfulfilled) desire to stand on the north-west tip of Scotland and both John O’Groats and Land’s End were early ticks on my life’s bucket list (although The Lizard is really a much nicer ‘end’ to Cornwall). I’ve visited Spurn Head on the Humber Estuary, North Foreland in Kent and St David’s Head in Pembrokeshire, but, in spite of repeated visits to North Wales, I have never been to the very end of the Llŷn Peninsula. Time to put that right. I start at Porthor, full of happy memories from my time at the National Trust. A perfect white crescent of sand on the north coast of the Llŷn, the sand ‘whistles’ when you scuff…

THE Percy family’s ownership of land in Northumberland began with the purchase, by Lord Henry Percy, of the Barony of Alnwick and Alnwick Castle from the Crown in November 1309. Other lands soon followed, including the Baronies of Warkworth and Rothbury and the manors of Newburn and Corbridge, which were granted to Henry Percy, second Lord of Alnwick, by Edward III, on the death without male issue of their previous owner, John Clavering, in 1332. Even before the purchase of Alnwick Castle and Barony, the Percy family already owned substantial land interests and was listed in Domesday as owning 118 manors in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Essex and Hampshire. Today, the Percy family portfolio of some 100,000 acres of farming, forestry and tourism interests throughout Northumberland and the Scottish Borders is…

EVERYONE should plant an arboretum. It doesn’t have to be a big one, but you should do it all the same. Start by planting a tree. Just one. Then plant some more. Different ones. After a while, you will discover that your single tree has turned into a copse, a woodland, an arboretum—a fascinating, personal collection of trees. Your very own terrestrial biome. Trees are by far the most rewarding of garden plants. Easy maintenance is written into their very being. They are top-of-the-canopy plants. Some of them even exude chemicals that inhibit the development of rival plants. That makes them apex predators. The technical term is allelopathic. Walnut trees are a good example, but so are the tree of heaven, Ailanthus altissima, and the Canadian sugar maple, Acer saccharum:…

BY the beginning of the 18th century, Norwich had overtaken York as England’s second city in terms of wealth and population, so it seems rather strange that its assay office closed in 1702. It had first marked silver in the 1560s, just after York, where the office survived until 1858, and examples by Norwich smiths are rare. It is no surprise that their work should have been among the collecting enthusiasms of the mustard-making Colman family. A sale at Sworders of Stansted Mountfitchet last month included a small number of lots from the collection of Sir Timothy Colman, KG (1929–2021), who had been Lord-Lieutenant of Norfolk. His grandfather, incidentally, was the Colman who formed a superb collection of Norwich School drawings and paintings, which he presented to the city’s…

Schubert: a musical wayfarer Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Yale, £30) THE fruit of many years of research, this biography was written during the pandemic and the author draws a poignant parallel between the experience of those with covid, isolated from loved ones, and Schubert, alone in Vienna’s General Hospital, undergoing painful—and useless —treatment for the syphilis he probably knew to be incurable. Revealingly, Lorraine Byrne Bodley writes in her prologue of the challenge presented by writing an ‘intellectual biography which is accessible to an educated reader’. It is harder to write for general readers about a composer than a literary figure, when text quotations can be read by all, but fewer people are able to read music. This book bristles with footnotes and is crammed with music examples. Where…