Innholdsfortegnelse for 2-Aug-2023 i Country Life

Letter of the week Falcon respite IT was lovely to see the hobby highlighted last week (Notebook, July 19). My husband found this beautiful female hobby (pictured) on the riverbank when fishing near Monmouth a few years ago. She was exhausted after flying thousands of miles from Africa and was half the weight she should have been. He brought her home in his fishing bag and we took her to the International Centre for Birds of Prey at Newent (sadly now closed). Having never had one there before, they were delighted to look after her. They fed her every couple of hours night and day and nurtured her back to health. We collected her from them four weeks later and released her in the same spot that my…

1960 Unpublished A girl stands in a sea of tarmac next to the memorial cross erected to the memory of the Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Reginald Palgrave (d.1904), and his wife, Grace, at the junction of Church Hill and High Street, Swanage, Dorset. The couple regularly holidayed here and the cross is erected on the base of what was once a water pump. 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…

A GENERATION ago, it was said that London had few great private houses in comparison to Paris because so many, such as Devonshire House, had been demolished between the wars or consigned to institutional use. But, in recent years, a growing number of large mansions around the capital have been turned back into family homes. A splendid example is No 15, Kensington Palace Gardens, which had been used as a diplomatic residence from 1949 and was then left empty. In 2006, it was purchased by the current owners. Now, it has not only been sumptuously revived inside and out, but equipped with all the rooms that are today expected of a house of this standing—many of which would have been unimaginable to its Victorian owner, the lace-manufacturer and philanthropist George…

SCULLING his sea kayak in calm waters off the west coast of the Highlands, near Achiltibuie, Andrew Brownlow spotted a shoal of fish riffling the surface. Sea birds appeared as if from nowhere and began to swoop and feed. He paddled on slowly and watched the scene unfold, enjoying the spectacle as he scrutinised it with the professional eye of a veterinary specialist in the marine environment. Suddenly, 30ft away, the ocean waters boiled up. The black fins of three orcas broke the surface and something delivered a hefty thump to the stern of the kayak. He turned to see a frightened young grey seal had hauled its 130lb weight onto the fragile deck. As Dr Brownlow strove to trim the craft under its unsteady cargo, it dawned on the…

IT’S hard to think of many things that have been in continuous production for as long as Spode Blue Italian. The company was founded in 1770 by Josiah Spode I, a technical genius who not only developed a transformative means of decorating earthenware, but also an innovative new formula for fine bone china. What his son Josiah Spode II lacked in technical genius, he more than compensated for with his marketing prowess (he was also a flautist); in 1816, he launched Blue Italian, appealing to a prevailing taste for both the classical and Oriental. More than two centuries later, it still sells all over the world. Fun, rather than formality, looks set to be on the menu Sadly, the fortunes of the potteries haven’t been quite so rosy, thanks…

Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands Annie Worsley (William Collins, £16.99) THE author was raised in Widnes, birthplace of the British chemical industry. Her mother died young of lung cancer exacerbated by the town’s toxic air pollution. Spurred by that misfortune, Annie Worsley, a physical geographer and academic, investigated urban pollution and its effects on human health. A spell of doctoral research in the New Guinea Highlands into human impacts upon landscapes led to a passionate love for wild places and finally to a coastal croft on the Gairloch estate in the Highlands. The pollution of Widnes has bred in her a ‘Pavlovian rush to meet a gale, an embedded reflex, as vital to me as wind is endemic in Wester Ross’. The…

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk The past is the future IT’S time to ‘put the past at the heart’ of the nation’s future, urges The Heritage Alliance (HA), which has set out a five-point manifesto ahead of the next general election. The HA, a coalition of some 200 heritage organisations, such as the National Trust, Historic Houses and the Heritage Railway Association, has emphasised to all political parties the importance of the nation’s heritage industry to both the economy and net-zero goals. The group notes that ‘heritage is a £36 billion industry, our most popular cultural export and our favourite national pastime’ and that heritage is at the ‘heart of communities from urban centres to the countryside’. Although acknowledging the support for the heritage sector during the…

THE flocks of sheep of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex —especially those grazing near Stonehenge as Tess Durbeyfield awaits her grim fate—were probably Wiltshire Horns, a robust breed that speaks of ancient, primitive, treeless landscapes. The sheep are unusual in that they don’t require shearing; the Wiltshire Horn automatically sheds its own fleece in spring, which makes the breed far lower maintenance (no shearing or dagging) than others. However, their lack of fleece, less significant in modern times with the plummeting returns on wool, also meant that the breed nearly died out during the 19th century, when wool was an economic staple. When the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) was formed 50 years ago, the Wiltshire Horn was considered a genuinely rare breed in need of protection, but it progressed through the…

Find the best properties at countrylife.co.uk LOCATED on high ground overlooking the Thames between Marlow and Maidenhead, east Berkshire, Grade II-listed The Mount in Spring Lane, Cookham Dean, is an imposing, mainly late-Victorian country house set in 3½ acres of gardens and grounds. It is probably best known for its association with the author Kenneth Grahame, whose boyhood memories of life there reputedly inspired his children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. It is now on the market, for the first time in 54 years, at a guide price of £4 million through Savills in Windsor (01753 834600). In 1864, following his wife’s untimely death, Grahame’s father moved to France and their son, aged four, was sent to live with his grandmother at The Mount, where he remained for…

Shop of the month F&M Food & Drink Studio, 181, Piccadilly, W1 TWO glass jugs of house gin (one dry, one pink) the size of beehives anchor one corner of the newly reopened third floor of Fortnum & Mason. A distiller pours free cups for passers-by, topped with Double Dutch tonic or ginger ale. Steps away, there’s a cookbook shop, where, in addition to the latest Mary Berry, you can buy an early edition of English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David (£55) and take it to a cushioned window seat overlooking Duke Street. By the lifts, an antique wooden polyphon with finials plucks out King Charles’ March. The third floor of Fortnum’s used to be the menswear section, until this past spring, when it was reborn as a…

IF you were to cook up the dream head gardener, it would be Chris Brown. Trained at Kew, he has a global eye for a plant, sharpened by botanising trips to Bhutan and South Africa. His creativity won him the first Employee of the Year Award during his four-year stint at the matchless Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. He combines sustainable, ecological planting practices with spectacular plantsmanship. In 2019, Mr Brown became head gardener at Highlands, East Sussex, working closely with the owner to bring ‘maximum biodiversity, wildlife and beauty’. Listening to the two of them discuss their latest car-boot-filled foray to Nick Macer’s nursery Pan Global Plants, you feel the crackle of shared energy that powers this garden. You also feel a little envious. Highlands is a relatively new…

THE British are quietly proud of their lawns. Visitors from sunburnt nations are routinely astonished at the rectangles of green turf in front of so many homes, wondering how such a feat can be possible. In other places, these sights are usually accompanied by a sign on the gate informing the onlooker that stored rainwater has been used, to forestall vocal criticism of wastefulness. For once, however, the much-maligned British weather comes in handy. Our lawns are green because of our relatively mild climate and the pattern of rainfall, distributed throughout the year, rather than in one big annual campaign. Only Ireland is reliably greener, for obvious reasons. Our lawns are soft to walk across—and surprisingly damp to sit on, as every picnicker knows—only becoming hard in dry summer spells,…

AM I the only one to feel a little challenged by the pervasive use of the word ‘porn’ on social-media sites or in book titles? ‘Porn’ seems to have become a generic, catch-all suffix for something that aims to tantalise or to stimulate, generally in an aesthetically pleasing way, hence food porn, property porn, bicycle porn, chocolate porn. Add the word porn and supposedly the most prosaic of subject matters will become instantly desirable. When a friend gave me a book called Cabin Porn, there was a moment’s hesitation as my imagination fluttered briefly over the possible contents. No need to worry, of course, as the book was as tasteful as could be, presenting an assortment of exquisite rural escapes the world over, plus advice on how to build…

DAWN will arrive tomorrow, stealing the dark, dissolving the night, setting the morning in motion. Some sunrises ride in on a blaze of fire. Others loom softly out of the gloom, teasing shapes into the contours of the land. Others are soggy or snowclad. But, from Teignmouth to Timbuktu, all dawns bring life and fresh light and a sense of renewal. This is why, for so many of us, daybreak takes on so much meaning. ‘There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope,’ wrote the late moral philosopher Sir Bernard Williams. Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised ‘the golden exhalations of the dawn’, A. E. Housman believed ‘the hope of man… flowers among the morning dews’ and Virginia Woolf felt that ‘the words we seek hang…

THE makeover that the fashion designer-turned-interior designer has given one of the most secluded suites at La Residencia in Deià, Mallorca, demonstrates that luxury Mediterranean design doesn’t need to be limited to white walls, Modernism and expanses of marble. Against a backdrop of terracotta, patterned tiles and golden Marés stone that is unique to the Balearics, the designer’s kaleidoscopic palette of colours and bold botanical patterns inject an exotic note, with blue and white florals on the walls, a star wallpaper in the beamed ceiling and a riotous mix of cushions on the bed. ‘I was keen to create joyful moments out of things such as opening cupboard doors to stow suitcases,’ he says. ‘There are unexpected details, including hand-painted cupboard doors and wallpaper inside drawers.’ One of the many…

HE was made for triumph, acclamation and a life as gilded as the garlands that frame the Royal Alcove he designed in Buckingham Palace’s Throne Room. Instead, John Nash—the man who turned the drudgery of mere Buckingham House into the splendour of a palace, the man who gave the country its triumphal Marble Arch, the man that had London ‘eclipse [Napoleon’s] Paris’—was nearly obliterated by his political affiliations, a penchant for overspending and a difficult personality that made him the Marmite of his times. A ‘wild, irregular youth’ by his own admission, Nash had a disastrous start to adult life. In 1775, at 23, he had married Jane Elizabeth Kerr, the daughter of a Surrey surgeon, who soon revealed herself to be as liberal with her graces as she was…

A FIG eaten straight from the hand of the grower in a market on the Greek island of Santorini ruined me for figs for 20 years. So juicy and luscious was that fruit, and the 11 that followed it on that balmy evening, that all others I bought in this country—picked ahead of the glorious ripeness that figs are born to—felt like leather on the tongue. A decade ago, that changed. I had the great fortune of photographing Chris Achilleos’s allotment (do Google it), tucked behind a vast roundabout in Tottenham, north London. It was in this unlikely spot, in the most incredible allotment I’ve ever seen, that I ate the most remarkable fig I’ve ever eaten. Somehow, Santorini’s finest had been trumped by these urban delights. I sat on…

IN 1967, when an undergraduate, I went to a pre-London performance of a play by Peter Ustinov called Halfway up the Tree at the New Theatre, Oxford. It concerned Maj-Gen Sir Mallalieu Fitzbuttress (played by Robert Morley), who, in retirement, decided to drop out and live in a garden treehouse to escape his family. The other characters spent the first half venting variations on the line ‘Mallalieu’s mad!’ As a pretentious youth, I had recently had visiting cards printed, so I folded one in half and passed it over the shoulder of the playwright, who happened to be sitting in front of me. ‘Good Lord! A duel!’ exclaimed Ustinov, who, as a Russo-German aristocrat, knew the form, before making peace in the bar with Champagne. He was born Peter…

Chamomile and honey apple choux buns Ingredients 3 tart apples, such as Granny Smith, or cooking apples 5tbspn runny honey 600ml double cream A handful fresh chamomile flowers 50g icing sugar For the choux 220ml water 85g butter 105g plain flour A pinch of salt 1tspn caster sugar 3 eggs Icing sugar to dust Method • Peel and chop the apples and add them to a saucepan with the honey. Simmer gently until softened and set aside to cool. Refrigerate until ready to use. • Heat the double cream and chamomile flowers until near boiling, remove from the heat and leave to steep for half an hour. Taste to see if the flavour is strong enough and leave longer if necessary. Once the flavour is right, strain to remove…