Innholdsfortegnelse for 6-Sep-2023 i Country Life

THE man who has just boasted of killing your father stands proudly before you. Furious, grief-stricken, vengeful, you search for an insult worthy of his depravity. You muster all your destructive rage, only to find that what comes out of your mouth is—‘hedgehog’. When Shakespeare’s Lady Anne denounces Richard III as a spiny creature, modern audiences have every reason to feel perplexed. After all, aren’t hedgehogs the nation’s favourite wild animal? Not for Shakespeare, clearly. The insult in Richard III isn’t some momentary aberration: the Bard has form when it comes to hedgehog abuse. The fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream protect Titania from snakes and ‘thorny hedgehogs’ and Macbeth’s witches invoke the prickly animal as their familiar. Aristotle took exception to seals, calling them an “imperfect quadruped” Prospero, the…

I HAD my first driving lesson from Sir Stirling Moss at the Festival of Speed: brake into a corner and accelerate through, treat a fast car like a fast horse. I was 11 and we were at Goodwood House, where the then Earl of March had brought the roar of engines back to his West Sussex estate after a break of 27 years. It was his grandfather, the 9th Duke of Richmond, who had founded the grand tradition of motor-sport at Goodwood, when RAF Westhampnett, the estate’s Battle of Britain base, was being decommissioned and Sqd Ldr Tony Gaze suggested that the 2.4-mile perimeter road would make rather a good racetrack. The Duke, a distinguished racing driver, leapt at the idea and, on September 18, 1948, the austerity of post-war…

THE terrible demise of the Crooked House pub at Himley in the Black Country—distressingly alight, fire-hollowed walls, flattened dune of bricks and all in fewer than 48 hours—is a reminder of the vulnerability of all kinds of old buildings. They are at risk of wear and tear, abandonment, unsuitable development and, sometimes, even ruthless intent. What was once a plain Georgian farmhouse was made famous by its chance location. Situated partly on top of coal deposits owned by the Earl of Dudley, the peculiar skewing of its structure was the result of the seams underneath being mined in the 19th century. Many have called for a compulsory brick-for-brick reinstatement of this architectural one-off and all its imperfections, much like the rebuilding of Charrington Brewery’s 1920s Carlton Tavern in Kilburn, London,…

PEEKING from the plane trees that line the South Bank, the National Theatre looks like an angular cliff line, its twin fly-towers lording it over the ziggurat of terraces that wrap the building. Dwarfed by a proliferation of glass-and-steel high-rises, it looks almost fragile and it’s hard to believe this project once drew the ire of The King. In a late-1980s documentary, the then Prince Charles said the National Theatre was ‘a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London’. For others, however, the theatre —now listed Grade II*—was testament to the architectural genius of the man who designed it, Sir Denys Lasdun (1914–2001). The scion of a Russian-Jewish family, Lasdun embraced architecture at the dawn of the 1930s. In his formative years, the Modern…

LATE summer into autumn is the season of hob-cleaning in this house. At least once a week—sometimes three times—I place aubergines directly on the hob, right in the heart of the flames, turning them every few minutes with tongs, until their skins are charred and the flesh is soft as custard. Cutting them open to drain in a colander, then scooping out the insides and pureéing them into a smoky baba ganoush, produces one of the essential dishes of summer. You may wonder why I grow aubergines when those in the shops are perfectly fine, especially as they don’t produce the most reliable of harvests, sunlovers as they are. For me, it’s about small, crucial margins of excellence. Choose the right varieties and your aubergines will be finer flavoured and…

A COOL breeze rises off the Plaine Morte glacier as I traverse a ridge-line upwards towards Mont Bonvin, at an elevation of almost 9,900ft. The strong sun hugs the mountain and the sprawling resort of Crans-Montana far below, as I revel in the thought of my reward—an entrée of untouched snow followed by saucisson and a cool glass of Petite Arvine. We reach the crux, don our skis and take stock of Mont Bonvin’s steep north face and the Col des Outannes. My guide, Benoit Python, turns toward me; his weathered cheeks bunch high as he breaks into a wide smile. ‘Let’s have some fun,’ he whispers. And with that, we drop down into a flurry of deep powder. In the early 1890s, Louis Antille and Michel Zufferey happened upon…

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk Smoke-clouding the issue AN ‘undue focus’ on grouse shooting is derailing debate around the management of heather moorlands, according to a new report published last week. The Future Landscapes Forum (FLF), a group of academics specialising in peat and heather-moorland management, noted that the focus on grouse shooting has led to ‘highly reductive arguments against controlled burning being presented as scientific consensus by influential individuals and organisations’. FLF members added that the current debate on moorland management, including peatlands, is not properly informed or evidence-based, ‘leading to dangerous policy decisions that ignore the positive social and ecological effects of controlled burning’. Heather moorland and peatland have long been a battleground for environmentalists and conservationists, with discussions around best practices, especially when it…

1920s Unpublished Improbable calm at the junction of Stall Street and Bath Street in Bath, Somerset. This scene remains recognisable, but has undergone important changes since, with the loss of the drinking fountain and the rebuilding of the Royal Baths. Note the thick paint added to what are, today, façades of golden Bath stone. 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…

IN January 1923, Chips Channon, a young American socialite—later a Conservative MP—stayed at Arundel Castle. ‘An enormous party of over fifty here, mostly young, in celebration of Lady Rachel Howard’s “coming out”,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Arundel is so feudal and medieval (although much restored) that one expects beefeaters to bring in one’s tea. There are moats, battlements and portcullis… Somehow it has more atmosphere than Windsor, if less comfortable… A ball this evening in the great barons’ hall to which all the county came… we were over seventy at dinner and assembled in the… Gothic library-gallery and processed in state into the dining room. The castle itself is quite bare of interesting furniture and tapestry and only a few mediocre pictures.’ His account offers a fascinating vignette of…

A BROWNISH streaky flutter catches the corner of your eye. It could be a scrap of dusty litter or a hank of dead grass, but you register it as a living creature because, wherever you are, these drab and drifting things, materialising in motion at the edge of your vision, have almost always turned out to be a small bird of one uncertain kind or another. These are the ‘little brown jobs’ (LBJ) of the British avifauna—meadow pipits, house sparrows, dunnocks, skylarks, corn buntings. The term is widely used, but I’d like to ask what it is about these birds that has kept them always, as it were, to the edge of our birdwatching and that, worse still, has determined they merit only to be dumped together, as unnecessary material,…

IT was the American wit Dorothy Parker who described the writers and artists of the Bloomsbury Group as a circle who ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’. Virginia Woolf, her sister, Vanessa Bell, and their friends Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant were among the best-known members of the set, whose influence in the years between the World Wars came to dominate intellectual life in Britain. Their individual reputations have risen and fallen over the years. Woolf is perhaps more admired than in her lifetime, Strachey less, but, as a phenomenon, Bloomsbury—with its friendships, quarrels and complicated love lives—has become a biographical industry. A walk through the streets and squares of WC1 is punctuated by English Heritage blue plaques. At the heart of Bloomsbury itself is the British…

Method Preheat your oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4 and grease and line a 20cm (8in) loose-bottomed cake tin. Pour the melted butter into the bottom of the prepared tin and spread evenly. Scatter over the sugar and then arrange the plum slices in a single layer in a circle. Set aside while you make the batter. Cream the softened butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at time, beating between each addition. Add the vanilla, spices and salt, then mix again. Add half the flour, mix, the milk, mix and, finally, the remaining flour. Mix until smooth, being careful not to over mix. Gently spoon the batter over the plums and spread it evenly. Bake in the preheated oven for about…

Hold your breath Freediving is going mainstream, due, in part, to documentaries such as Netflix’s The Deepest Breath and behind-the-scenes footage of the Avatar: The Way of Water cast filming underwater. The sport is one of the world’s fastest growing (there was a 12% increase in Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) Freediver Certifications worldwide between 2021 and 2022, according to the PADI), and there’s no better time to give it a go than on holiday. Private free-diving lessons can be organised on request at Gili Lankanfushi in the Maldives (www.gililankanfushi.net); Cookson Adventures can arrange entire holidays around the activity, in the Bahamas or even on your own private island (www.cooksonadventures.com). Fresh tracks The renowned Ikon Pass is available to purchase for the 2023/24 ski season. Perfect for keen skiers…

FOR one reason or another, over the past week or so, I have begun to think about weddings—a subject, I suspect, which may consume much of my bandwidth over the coming months. On sharing the news of my daughter’s recent engagement at a dinner with friends, one guest sitting at the table told me how her daughter had tied the knot in Cartagena. There were no Colombian connections, she explained, other than a deep-rooted passion for Latin America and a particular love of the Basilica Santa Catalina de Alejandria. Multiple guests had dug deep into their pockets to fly out, and they had partied, apparently non stop, for four days. Another guest then interjected with something of a plea, or so it felt, that we should resist all temptation…

THIS year, I braved the British summer and holidayed at home in the Lake District. I’ve always felt it’s the perfect place for a family holiday and so it proved. From boating on Windermere to scrambling up the crags of the Langdale Pikes, lakeside fish and chips or simply drinks in the beer garden—soggy or sunny, there really is something there for everyone. Taking my kids to the Lakes provided a special rush of nostalgia, because I went there every summer as a child. My mum adored it, she thrived in the open air and rugged beauty, the freedom and sense of community. That spirit also remains in good health. A friend’s dog—Chilli, a retriever cross—disappeared on a walk from Grasmere, but the whole community came out to search until,…

Levison Wood is an explorer, author and photographer. His most recent book, Escape from Kabul, is out now Afghanistan has long held a dear place in my heart. I first visited in 2004 as a young backpacker and have returned many times since, both in my career in the army and as a journalist. This painting depicts Dr William Brydon, initially thought to be the only army survivor of the 1842 retreat from Kabul in the First Anglo-Afghan War. My new book, about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 and the allied evacuation mission, seems eerily reminiscent. The despair in Thompson’s image is a stark reminder of the futility of war and its huge human cost–a most poignant message given current world affairs Charlotte Mullins comments on Remnants…

IN 2010, Jane Cooper’s knitting group chose the Boreray as ‘sheep of the week’, realising that knitters had a part to play in promoting sheep breeds. She was taken with the wool—versatile, fine in parts and varied in colour—and enchanted by the appealing little animals with their curly horns and attractively shaded fleeces, which the Vikings used to turn into sail material. Three years later, Mrs Cooper moved from urban Newcastle to Orkney, where she undertook a project to trace the origins of the Orkney group of Boreray, which had not been registered due to its remoteness. Mrs Cooper now owns 54 Boreray and has written a delightful book, The Lost Flock (Chelsea Green, £20), out this month. The Boreray, like the Soay and North Ronaldsay (Native breed, July 5),…

Find the best properties at countrylife.co.uk IN the late 1960s, the author John le Carré (born David Cornwell, but forbidden from writing under his own name when employed by MI5 and MI6) was staying with an old friend, the Cornish artist John Miller, at his house in West Penwith in Cornwall’s far west, on a sparsely populated peninsula ringed by high cliffs and surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic Ocean. One day, when walking along the cliffs at Tregiffian, near the village of St Buryan, le Carré passed three derelict fisherman’s cottages and a barn overlooking the coast between St Loy and Lamorna. Armed with the proceeds of The Spy Who Came in From The Cold (1963), the second of his bestselling espionage novels set against the backdrop…

Shop of the month Daunt Books, 83–84, Marylebone High Street, W1 LONG before James Daunt took over the lease in 1990, the site of Daunt Books in Marylebone was in the book business. As a Victorian shop, the wares were mainly theological, expanding to maps and travel writing by the early 20th century. It was an earlier bookseller, Francis Edwards, who built the famous double-height Edwardian gallery in 1910, creating one of the first purpose-built bookshops in the world. The front windows, anchored by slabs of pink granite and spindly boiserie, were filled by two more independent bookshops before Mr Daunt arrived. In 1999, Daunt Books took over No 84 next door and other branches in London and Oxford began to appear. A publishing arm opened in 2010, Daunt Books…

THERE has been a garden at West Lavington Manor in Wiltshire for at least 400 years. John Aubrey visited it late in the 17th century. He particularly remembered that ‘through the length of it there runneth a fine cleare trowt stream; walled with brick on each side, to hinder the earth from mouldring down.’ That stream still flows through the garden, channelled between its old brick walls. Aubrey also recalled that the garden had originally been laid out in the 1630s by Sir John Danvers, ‘who first taught us the way of Italian gardens’. Danvers, he wrote, ‘had well travelled France and Italy and made good observations… He had a very fine fancy, which lay chiefly for gardens and architecture.’ Danvers’s Italianate garden has, of course, long since disappeared. In…

TEN minutes’ walk from Sloane Square Underground station, verdant respite awaits. Founded in 1673, the Chelsea Physic Garden feels like a secluded sanctuary in the middle of Zone 1, a serene enclave hidden within London’s chaos. Now bounded by, yet discreetly hidden from, the thoroughfares of Royal Hospital Road and Chelsea Embankment, it is the country’s second oldest Botanic Garden—Oxford pips it to the post by 52 years. The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London leased the plot from Charles Cheyne (of Walk fame), 1st Viscount Newhaven and owner of Chelsea Manor, then part of Middlesex. The location was chosen not only for its fertile, south-facing land, but because it was directly on the north bank of the Thames, giving the Apothecaries—forerunners to today’s pharmacists—a place to moor the barge…

IT was the best of times, it was the worst of times. What the Dickens was I doing at a health spa? What seemed improbable at best became inexorable when I married Rachel last year. In contrast to me, Mrs Hedges has an exemplary lifestyle—my children joke that she will live to be 150—and is a connoisseur of all things mindful, body and spirit. I think taking her fishing for our honeymoon may have influenced the reason that I found myself at Chiva-Som in Thailand, where she had been five years ago. The last time I had been to Thailand was 28 years before that and much of Bangkok has changed out of all recognition. There is a newish airport, ever more skyscrapers and giant flyovers that criss-cross the metropolis.…

IT is so long since I read Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour by the great Robert Surtees that I had to scrabble a bit to place the references to ‘Lucy Glitters’ and ‘the Nonsuch Hunt’ on the artist’s label on the reverse of a Munnings in Christie’s London sale of European 19th- and 20th-century paintings early this summer. It was the 44in by 70in Who’s the Lady? (Fig 3), which was sold, together with two oil studies, for £226,800. Mr Sponge, Surtees’s scoundrelly antihero, was a horse coper and always on the hunt for a well-dowered bride, but, eventually, he fell for the beautiful and ‘tolerably virtuous’ showgirl Lucy Glitters. In a slight change of direction for both, they set up ‘a splendid establishment in Jermyn Street, St James’s, now…