Innholdsfortegnelse for 23-Aug-2023 i Country Life

1960 About Unpublished One in a series of photographs taken in Bruges, Belgium, that was presumably intended for a spiked travel feature. Most show conventional street scenes, but these carefully posed men in tartan, one named ‘Frederick’ on the negative frame, come as a surprise and a mystery. 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…

DUNVEGAN answers the popular ideal of a Scottish castle. It commands a natural harbour inlet at the head of Loch Dunvegan and the rugged outcrop of basalt from which the walls rise is washed on three sides by the tide. The castle has been a possession of the MacLeods of Harris and Dunvegan for nearly eight centuries, a determined connection through many vicissitudes of fortune that echoes their blunt motto: ‘hold fast’. Now, after more than a decade of repair and ambitious restoration undertaken by the present and 30th chief of the clan, the immediate future of this exceptional building is being secured. As their name suggests, the MacLeods claim descent from a certain Leòd, who established what amounted almost to a petty kingdom in Skye and its surrounds in…

A LETTER from a Scottish correspondent, published in London in the Morning Chronicle in the New Year of 1819, recorded a legend nurtured over many centuries. ‘From time immemorial,’ suggested the writer, ‘it has been believed among us here, that unseen hands brought Jacob’s pillow from Bethel and dropped it on the site where the palace of Scoon now stands.’ The Old Testament ‘pillow’ in question was a block of pale-red sandstone: the Stone of Scone. Few geological specimens in the British Isles exude more powerful symbolism than the Stone of Scone; few have attracted a richer palimpsest of legend and lore. ‘As long as fate plays fair, where this Stone lies the Scots shall reign,’ the Aberdeenshire chronicler John of Fordun asserted in the second half of the 14th…

WHEN the new owners moved to this Georgian manor house, they decided work was required to bring the interiors back to a design that was more sympathetic to its architecture. One of the first projects they tackled was the kitchen and they approached Tracey Hyde, a senior designer at Plain English, for help. ‘Previously, the house had quite a masculine look, which was out of keeping with the rest of the property,’ explains Mrs Hyde. ‘We reconfigured the layout and designed the cabinetry—and that led to a larger project involving most of the “back of house” rooms.’ When it came to the layout, the most pressing problem was a lack of storage The property is reached down a single-track lane and surrounded by open countryside. The new owners have four…

THE best gardens are those that add up to more than the sum of their parts and this is especially so at Backhouse Rossie in Fife, home to Caroline and Andrew Thomson since 2005. On one level, visitors can wander happily through the 10 acres of walled garden and woodlands; dig a little deeper, however, and you find art, science, history and horticulture are represented here in happy coalescence. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of such thoughtfulness is the wide path that crosses the 1½-acre walled garden from east to west. It represents the double helix of DNA, using granite setts recycled from the streets of Edinburgh (an hour to the south), after they were removed during works on the city’s new tram system. The background is filled in with…

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk Following an article in COUNTRY LIFE back in 2019 that said fewer than 4% of UK farmers were under the age of 35, Valerie Mather resolved to understand better the world of farming through the lens of her camera. Her subsequent book, Yorkshire Born and Bred: Farming Life, won her associateship of the Royal Photographic Society and led the National Trust to invite her to spend a year with upland farmers in Bransdale, North Yorkshire. The results are on display at the Trust’s Nunnington Hall as ‘Fields, Folds and Farming Life’, from September 9–December 17. Inspired by the work of James Ravilious (son of Eric), who kept a vital photographic record of rural England in the 1970s, Miss Mather observed and documented…

REMARKABLY for a remote sea-bound settlement, the Shetland Islands, Britain’s northernmost community, has no fewer than five breeds of native domestic animals: a cow, sheep, pony, goose and duck. The most widely exported and ubiquitous by far is the Shetland pony, immortalised by Norman Thelwell’s comic and character-forming creation, Kipper, and the first riding pony for generations of horsemen and women since Victorian times. Long before Queen Victoria put a pair of Shetland ponies between the shafts of a phaeton, however, the diminutive, but incredibly strong pony with the big, intelligent personality—Britain’s smallest native equine—was worked by crofters to transport peat and seaweed; in the 19th century, they pulled coal through the low mine tunnels of mainland Britain. Some of the mining ponies came from colliery owner the Marquess of…

IN a life of overwhelming choices, sometimes the appeal of the familiar, the comforting, endures—like the relief of sitting down with a good friend over a cup of tea after the enforced excitement of a week of cocktail parties. Sometimes, the simplest pleasures are the most precious ones. Step forward, the oatcake. For centuries, the oatcake was part of the staple diet of not only the Scottish Highlands, but also of the Pennines and Lake District, essentially regions where the climate was too wet and cold successfully to grow any cereals other than oats. Hunger, thrift and necessity produced the oatcakes that we continue to enjoy today as a quick snack, as something to go with lunch or dinner or to serve —all gussied up—as an hors d’oeuvre. Oatcakes are…

Find the best properties at countrylife.co.uk EVELYN CHANNING of Savills (07807 999412) seeks ‘offers over £25 million’ for the 28,500-acre Dunbeath estate in Caithness, the remote coastal county on Scotland’s north-eastern corner, fringed to the north and east by dramatic sea cliffs and long sandy beaches and to the south and west by the more rugged and mountainous county of Sutherland. Caithness is a land of vast moorland, river valleys of gentle rolling farmland, and blanket peat-land known as the Flow Country, the largest expanse of blanket bog in Europe. The principal house on the Dunbeath estate is the magnificently picturesque, Category A-listed Dunbeath Castle, a massive white building set high on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea on the east coast of Caithness, 21 miles south of the…

ANYONE venturing into my office might presume that my desk is a disorganised mess. However, like most people with a cluttered desk, I know exactly where to find every last magazine, letter, invoice and newspaper cutting. It is the same with the garden tool shed: I know where every tool is, even the hand trowel that has, in fact, been left in the garden. I can put my hand immediately on a hose connector, ball of string or wire stretcher that lives in a crate, jumbled with dozens of other odds and sods that will be needed at some point during the season. To call the place a tool shed is a misnomer: it is the broken chair, old bicycle, log basket and bric-a-brac shed, with a bit of space…

LUCY PREBBLE’S The Effect was a big hit at the National nine years ago. It is back there now in a strong revival by Jamie Lloyd in a radically reconfigured Lyttelton. Seeing it a second time, I was struck by its intellectual power and its relation to other plays that question modern medical practice. As do Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange and Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse, which Mr Lloyd once directed, it asks how much faith we should place in doctors and institutions that treat patients as human guinea pigs. Miss Prebble’s set-up is clear. Tristan, who hails from Hackney ‘before it fell’, and Connie, a psychology student from Canada, agree to take part in a four-week trial of an anti-depressant drug. In their isolation, they find a mild flirtation turning into…

THE young, epitomised by Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and other campaigns, have been kicking capitalism hard in the backside and have brought about a sea change in attitudes to global warming. However, I wish they would give a modicum of credit to the world leaders and their governments who are at last moving in the right direction, albeit far too slowly. Nonetheless, I detect a global momentum growing, which may do enough in time to stop the imminent temperature rises that will make life on earth intolerable. The campaigns stem from the growing concern—perhaps terror would be a better word—about climate change, but I believe that the solutions being proposed will also help to prevent local and global wars. Most of those are the result of poverty…

OFTEN, the veil that separates past from present in the Highlands is barely visible. Old quarrels from distant ages, still burnished, shine brightly through its gossamer thinness. A mere 300 or so intervening years, therefore, are as nothing to the 1,000 participants who attend an occasion such as the annual memorial service for the Battle of Culloden. It is the Highlands’ own Remembrance Day, an event that no other battlefield in Britain can host. This April, at the cairn on Drumossie Moor, the clans mustered again to lay their wreaths in memory of their dead and of a way of life that perished with them on April 16, 1746. For the last pitched battle on British soil, between Prince Charles Edward Stuart and William, Duke of Cumberland, marked not only…

CIVILISATION, in the opinion of the author William Faulkner, began with distillation. A whisky connoisseur might add that it flowered with maturation. For, without ageing in the right environment, whisky remains a raw, brutal firewater, quite bereft of any refinement. That would have been of less concern to the famously boozed-up Faulkner, who held that there was no such thing as a bad whisky—it was only that some whiskies were better than others. Nobody knows who discovered the alchemy of leaving the water of life—uisge beatha in the Gaelic—in a wooden barrel to acquire patina some centuries ago. It must have been a man of rare patience back in those thirsty days. Or, perhaps, it was the legendary Highland smuggler who forgot where he had hidden his hogshead, retrieving it…

Argyll and Bute, £1.5 million Occupying a sheltered position looking south-east over the mouth of Loch Melfort, the 19th-century Torsa Farmhouse is a pleasant three-bedroom home, set over two floors under a slate roof. Arranged in a traditional layout, the property has mostly been used as a holiday let in recent years, but is now on the market for the first time in 85 years. Perhaps of more interest might be the gardens and grounds, which are, in fact, the entire 270 acres of the Island of Torsa. As well as the farmhouse, the property boasts further traditional stone farm buildings with significant potential for conversion, plus the ruins of Casteal nan Con (the Dogs’ Castle) located to the north-east of the island. The place is humming with wildlife,…

THE 1930s ushered in the Golden Age of swimming in style. Swallow divers had captivated the Paris Olympics in 1924 and Olympians Johnny Weissmuller and Eleanor Holm thrilled in Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the New York World Fair in 1939. Here, London County Council leader Herbert Morrison declared the capital would be a ‘City of Lidos’. The first elasticated swimming costume was launched in 1934. It was a time, as Catherine Horwood wrote in her article Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions: Women and Bathing 1900–1939, when opposition to the display of female flesh was overcome by an understanding of the value of sunlight: tanning began in German health spas and, later, on the French Riviera. I have swum in wild seas and freezing oceans—from the Arctic Circle to, most recently,…