Innholdsfortegnelse for 20-Sep-2023 i Country Life

Letter of the week Horses for courses I WOULD like to compliment you on your excellent Leader (August 30). I recall the great racehorse, Red Rum (above), who, having been the only horse ever to have won the Grand National three times, returned from retirement to lead the procession in a subsequent event and was clearly excited at the prospect of racing again. Fortunately, he was only there for the parade, given his age, but his countenance definitely suggested he was keen to take the field on. Racing has been criticised more than most over the years, but Red Rum proves your point that horses are happiest when busy and stimulated, even if the sporting event itself is challenging. Geoffrey Pelham-Lane, London The writer of the letter of…

1900 Unpublished Haymaking at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the birthplace of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The cart to the left is labelled ‘Edwin T. Rutter’, who is listed in Kelly’s Directory of 1919 as a resident of neighbouring Salmonby. The image may have been intended to celebrate Tennyson’s writing about the English countryside. 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 December 2019, selected historic contents from Spetchley Park, home of the Berkeley family for the past four centuries, were put up for auction. The quality of the objects on sale, including sculpture, furniture and paintings, ensured that the event garnered considerable publicity. Many of these things, the owners conceded, were beautiful and remarkable, but they had also become an encumbrance, turning their house into a museum. For them, the sale was the start of a bold and carefully planned initiative to revive the house as a modern family home. The remarkable results of this project can now be appreciated in the photographs that accompany this article. The magnificent Regency house and picturesque landscape at Spetchley Park after 1811, which were described last week, passed through the later 19th century…

EIGHTY years ago, a wartime bestseller set in the world of ‘the old, sturdy, independent type of farm labourer’ earned for its author Flora Thompson what she described without relish as ‘the bubble reputation’. Candleford Green (1943), as did its predecessors Lark Rise (1939) and Over to Candleford (1941)—published in a single volume as Lark Rise to Candleford since 1945—celebrated ‘an open-air life’ in which ‘there were no bought pleasures’ and ‘people were poorer but happier’. By 1943, Thompson was an old woman (she died four years later, in 1947, at the age of 70). Throughout her life, she had longed to write. ‘I cannot remember the time when I did not wish and mean to write,’ she informed readers. In three volumes, she gathered together memories of her childhood…

Small, but perfect The dinky Everhot 60, from £7,095, is ideal for those who want to enjoy a heat-storage range cooker in smaller confines—its 600mm (23½in) width fits neatly into a conventional cooker space and plugs into a 13-amp socket, with neither a flue nor reinforced floor required, keeping disruption to a minimum (01453 890018; www.everhot.co.uk) Electric dreams Blake & Bull takes original Aga range cookers and ‘remanufactures’ them with eco-electric systems, in 63 enamel colours and seven metal finishes. Shown here is a Heritage model in Deco enamel with Antique Brass trim, £10,768 (01225 541006; www.blakeandbull.co.uk) Natural colour Known for its durable, stain-, scratch- and heat-resistant quartz surfaces well suited to splashbacks and worktops, Caesarstone’s latest marble-inspired design is Taj Royale, from £400 per sq m, including installation (0800…

MANY of the hamlets and small villages that follow the River Windrush as it meanders through the western end of the Cotswolds lie in the dark shadow of steeply wooded slopes, until, eventually, the land rises to an escarpment that opens out offering fine views to the south. This is an area of estates and farms that date back to the early medieval period, a landscape marked out in honeyed stone walls and grazing sheep. It is here that, since 2012, the designer Graham Lloyd-Brunt has been helping the owners of what had once been a large working farm with many ancient outbuildings and barns to make a garden. When the owners moved here in 1999, the farm came with significantly less land than the 40 acres it now encompasses.…

Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor Don McCullin (Cornucopia, £95) DON MCCULLIN was born in a tough neighbourhood of London and in a tough time: he was himself a child of the Second World War, an evacuee, ‘where children played at war because war was all there was’, as he noted in his autobiography. His career as a war photographer began in the mid 1960s, when he covered the conflict in Cyprus, but even his first published photograph of a youth gang in Finsbury Park shimmers with latent violence. He went on to produce some of the most pitiless—and heartbreaking—records of war and its aftershocks, from Vietnam and Biafra to Northern Ireland. It may be that nobody would publish the sort of photographs Mr McCullin used to take: his…

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk Royal help for rural people SOME £250,000 has been made available by the Royal Countryside Fund (RCF) for rural community organisations, it has been announced. The grants, which can be up to £25,000, are part of the RCF’s Supporting Rural Communities programme and the organisation is ‘keen to hear from people whose community projects are responding to specific needs in their village or town’. Examples of needs are isolation, lack of access to services, training or employment, as well as projects that improve the ‘sustainability and resilience of countryside communities’. ‘We want to hear how your project is responding to demand from people in your area and how it will make a real difference to the lives of people living in your…

Giles Coren is a columnist, food writer and television and radio presenter All friends since childhood once shared each other’s youthful dreams, but really great friends share your nightmares as well. And I am incredibly lucky to have spent some tricky boarding-school years in the company of a friend with the genius to paint them. This was, I think, an oil sketch gone wrong when Jonny was working on a picture commissioned by the school, which he grabbed in haste for a present on his way to my 25th birthday party, itself more than half our lifetimes ago. Its clattering angles and collapsing lines convey perfectly the landscape of my teenage years, refracted through long memory. And my great comfort is knowing that it looked that way to Jonny, too…

THE Gloucestershire Old Spot (GOS) is currently the most popular native-breed pig, according to the British Pig Association, but all things are relative. There are about 1,600-plus registered sows in the country and nearly 300 boars, which means it is still categorised as ‘at risk’ by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust and work is ongoing to conserve bloodlines. The pork is certainly more high-profile than that of other native breeds; the GOS was the first breed to be awarded Traditional Speciality Guaranteed status under EU law (now under Defra) and it is often highlighted on the menus of gastro pubs. The GOS, which is renowned as a biddable, hardy animal suitable for first-time keepers, also has some celebrity owners in television farmers Adam Henson and Jimmy Doherty, as well as…

Find the best properties at countrylife.co.uk THE very best houses in the most popular Cotswolds villages—as ever —are being snapped up with off-market sales, particularly in the north of the region, going for up to 30% more than their guide prices. However, higher interest rates and a looming election have given buyers and sellers reasons to take a breath. ‘Although there were signs of the post-covid property boom continuing into the start of 2023, things have now cooled off significantly,’ says Harry Gladwin of The Buying Solution (01608 690783). ‘Right now, it feels as if we’re moving into what feels like a far more normal period within the property market. Sellers who are willing to be flexible and take a sensible approach to price are still achieving great results,…

TO describe the Herbarium at Kew Gardens as its beating heart could be seen as ironic—all the plant specimens it contains are as dead as the dodo—but its importance to science and the future of the world’s botanical riches cannot be underestimated. Seven million dried and pressed or pickled and preserved plants are cared for within its walls, which first gave it a home in 1852. The Herbarium’s website will tell you that: ‘In 1877, the need for greater space, due to botanical exploration of the British Empire, led to the first wing being added. Three further wings were added between 1903 and 1969, with further expansion into the quadrangle in 1989, and a modern wing with climate control was added in 2010.’ About 20,000 specimens are added to the…

I HAVE always harboured a fondness for wood avens; it is an old friend that accompanies me on many of my walks and has taken up residence in my garden. However, when I told a botanist friend that I intended to write its story, he said: ‘Why wood avens? It is the most boring plant in the country.’ I was not entirely surprised by this response. Wood avens is the Rich Tea biscuit of the plant world, common, a little dull perhaps, but comforting. It is no chocolate Hobnob. Frankly, it does itself no favours, with its untidy and lopsided leaves and plain, five-petalled yellow flowers that are both sparse and too small for a plant that can reach 2ft in height. Yet, as I told my friend, no living…

I AM astonished that Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror at the Almeida has polarised the critics. It is the most formally inventive play since Laura Wade’s The Watsons and shows a similar capacity to up-end expectations. In Miss Wade’s case, a stately Jane Austen adaptation led to anarchy. Miss Holcroft’s play starts with a wedding and prompts reflections on the nature of drama. I have no hesitation in saying it is much the best new play I have seen this year. In a way, the less said about it the better, as much of the pleasure it offers depends on surprise. However, it is now an open secret that Almeida spectators appear to be invited to a marriage ceremony—there is a bridal book, a wedding cake, even an order of…

THE fawn lifts her head, giving me a look of detached curiosity, her eyes like two glistening blackberries. No pain yet—that’s good. I will her to keep very still and say a silent prayer for her as I quietly line the bead up with the middle of her forehead and squeeze the trigger. She is gone before my brain has even registered the shot through my ear defenders, leaving only a bundle of rags by the side of the road—ones with faint white spots still discernible through a russet coat and bluebottles crawling over the wounds on her paralysed hind quarters where the car must have hit her. I imagine the scene at the bend where the roe deer often cross: the doe springing across the road between the trees…

WHETHER it’s the collection of pleasing, pale-stoned cottages grouped around the triangular village green at Little Barrington, the stone footbridges that span the River Eye in Lower Slaughter or the way the triple-turreted Broadway Tower rises from one of the highest points in the landscape, the Cotswolds is a many-splendoured place. Celebrated by great writers and poets, such as Hilaire Belloc, who rhapsodised of the Evenlode—‘A lonely river all alone/She lingers in the hills and holds/A hundred little towns of stone/Forgotten in the western wolds’—it is, without doubt, one of the most enchanting regions in Britain. Every time I have had the pleasure of visiting the area—covering some 800 square miles in five counties (Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire), which can be traced on a map from Chipping Campden…

THERE is a now infamous scene in the US cartoon The Simpsons where a distraught Lisa is informed by the family dentist that she needs to wear a set of braces to straighten her crooked teeth, a prospect about which she is none too happy. However, her dentist has a trick up his sleeve: The Big Book of British Smiles, a picture book of Beefeaters, guards, princes even, each with progressively grotesque smiles of gummy gaps and teeth that resemble boars’ tusks. The aversion therapy works and Lisa is immediately kitted out with the required apparatus. The British have been notorious for their perceived bad teeth for centuries, being singled out in this regard since the Elizabethan Age. In 1598, a visiting German to the Court of Elizabeth I caught…

Warwickshire, £2.95 million Once part of the Marquis of Hertford’s Ragley Hall estate, Luddington Manor was also once the home of the Hathaway family, relatives of Anne, wife of William Shakespeare. The historical excitement of Luddington Manor doesn’t end there, as the 16th-century home is listed Grade II and is considered as being of Special Architectural Interest; it also sits within a Conservation area. The property has seen a few improvements since it was first built: the front façade is Georgian, with Victorian additions, and the owners extensively refurbished the six-bedroom home in 2018. With 8,000sq ft of living space, there is plenty of room to entertain inside, but so, too, outside, with gardens and grounds extending to 6½ acres. The front garden is lawned and features mature specimen…

Fig and goat’s-cheese galette with thyme and honey Ingredients Serves 4 For the dough 200g plain flour A pinch of salt 115g cold butter 3–4tbspn ice water For the filling 8 fresh figs, sliced 100g goat’s cheese, crumbled 4tbspn runny honey Fresh thyme 1 egg, beaten 1tbspn caster sugar Method Add the flour and pinch of salt to a large bowl and rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the water, a tablespoon at a time, and bring the dough together in your hands. Place it on a piece of baking paper with a second one on top. Roll it out to a 30cm (12in) circle and refrigerate, still in the paper, for half an hour. Preheat your oven to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4. Peel back the…