Innholdsfortegnelse for 11-Oct-2023 i Country Life

Letter of the week Nature or nurture? BRIAN POUND speculates on the anti-mosquito properties of Marmite (Letters, September 27). During his four years as a student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US, my son brought home a total of 25 young American friends to visit us in the UK. The ultimate test of the ‘special transatlantic relationship’ was their tolerance of Marmite. Only one—his closest friend—could tolerate it. In considering whether this phenomenon is genetic or environmental, I have to take into account that both my American granddaughters gratifyingly enjoy Marmite soldiers. Perhaps the love of Marmite is a dominant gene? Kate Lloyd, Surrey The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne Wear them well WOOL is…

1913 March 29, Published The early-18th-century boundary wall of Aspley House, Bedfordshire, with courses of bricks picturesquely echoing the fall of land. Fallen leaves on the muddy road surface and the blurred foliage of the trees suggest a blustery autumn day. The wall and its gate, facing onto Church Road, Aspley Guise, still survives. 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…

ST BARTHOLOMEW’S HOSPITAL—or Barts, as it is familiarly known —celebrates its 900th anniversary as a living and working institution this year. No other major hospital in Britain —or perhaps in Europe—can claim such extraordinary longevity. Over that immense period, the hospital has changed beyond recognition in physical and institutional terms, but the site and the fabric of its buildings as they appear today embody an extraordinary story. They have touched the lives of untold numbers of Londoners at critical moments of need. As we heard last week, the hospital shares its foundation anniversary with the neighbouring church of St Bartholomew-the-Great. The church was likewise begun in 1123 by one Rahere as the priory church of a community of Augustinian canons. Rahere governed both the priory and hospital, but, at his…

AUTUMN is in the air and with it comes a sense of nostalgic, childhood anticipation for the conker season. Even now, many of us have an inexplicable appreciation for a shiny new conker—a beautiful, deep-brown and pleasingly round orb that’s a seasonal treat for the senses. Alas, it’s perhaps old—rather than young—boys and girls who tend to get excited these days, as this fine old playground game has fallen foul of excessive health-and-safety precautions. If I cast my mind back to the carefree days of my own childhood, you were more likely to hurt yourself or one of your friends by collecting conkers than by playing the game itself. We village lads knew all the best ‘conkering’ spots, the trees that yielded the biggest, glossiest beauties. The danger came when…

SOMETIMES,’ says Nels Crosthwaite Eyre, ‘interior design feels like pulling rabbits out of hats.’ Rabbit pulling is something she does with consummate skill, particularly when turning a blank canvas into one that is rich in pattern, colour and soul. As a result, she is, increasingly, the country-house decorator of choice for a new generation leaving London with too little furniture to fill more square footage than they are used to. Miss Crosthwaite Eyre began her career when, having worked for a jewellery company, she found herself at a loose end in 2010 and took a position with the late, great Robert Kime. A friend told her that the designer was opening a new showroom in Bloomsbury and, despite having never considered interiors as a career path, she went along and…

IT’S hard to know whether the current popularity of cottages derives from their quirky authenticity or from the exponential rise in values of larger country houses that has put the latter beyond reach of all but the super rich. Whatever the answer, the reinvention of the cottage is one of the most intriguing chapters in British domestic architecture since the emergence of the chill hand of minimalism in the 1990s and the Spitalfields renaissance the decade before that kickstarted renewed interest in Georgian townhouses. The manifestations are interesting, too; from the new Cotswolds aesthetic that is all open fires and flagstones to a new demand for barley-twist lamps, Toby jugs and brass bedsteads among which our great- grandparents would have felt at home. Recently, however, there’s been a stylistic…

CLIFF HOUSE, the home of lawyer David McGeough and his partner, Briony Wilkinson, commands an enviable view of the sparkling waters of Killiney Bay. This rocky flank of south Co Dublin was once a threadbare landscape of gorse and scrubby trees overlying the granite hills that fall down to the sea. In the middle of the 19th century, a number of elegant houses sprang up on the steep slopes: some, including Cliff House (then Green Hill), were designed by the well-known Irish architects Deane & Woodward. Other buildings devised by the neo-Gothic-loving duo were the Kildare Street Club and Trinity College Museum in Dublin and the Oxford University Museum. Green Hill was completed in 1862 for Joseph and Fanny Robinson, renowned members of the Dublin music scene: he was a…

Land lost will stay lost THE CLA has called for a change in the rules surrounding compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), after it was revealed that land bought up for the cancelled northern leg of HS2 will be sold on the open market. The CLA has highlighted the difference between CPOs undertaken by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and those made by HS2. If your home or land is purchased by the MoD, rules dictate it must be offered to you at the current market price, before being put on the open market, but land and properties bought by HS2 are not subject to the same rules. ‘Many farmers and landowners on the HS2 route have experienced poor treatment at the hands of HS2, including delayed payments and poor contractor…

VISITORS to the New Forest at this time of year are advised to be cautious: the annual drifts, in which the semi-feral ponies that graze the forest and help create wildlife habitat are rounded up for inspection (above), are taking place this month. Herds of galloping ponies, cars and interested spectators do not mix, so the verderers are asking the public to stay out of the way. Commoning rights date back to William the Conqueror, who made the New Forest his private hunting reserve and prevented locals from enclosing land for agriculture by law; in return, he granted them commoners’ right to graze their animals, a practice that still happens on open land all over England. As with the ponies that graze Dartmoor and other wild areas, not all conform…

How sweet and pleasant grows the wayThrough summertime againWhile landrails call from day to dayAmid the grass and grain.‘The Landrail’ by John Clare (1793–1864) WHEN the 19th-century poet John Clare wrote these lines, the rasping rattle of the corncrake (Crex crex) could be heard in every county in the land. The call was so loud and insistent that many country people complained it kept them awake; however, this is not an issue ever voiced now. By the late 1930s, field after field had fallen silent after intensive farming practices destroyed the long grass in which the corncrakes nested. Although some populations have maintained a claw hold in the Western Isles of Scotland—and there are a handful of reintroduced birds in East Anglia—numbers are still diminishing and the corncrake is now…

SEVERAL years ago, I went in search of a home in the Cotswolds to be closer to my daughter’s school. Having stopped to buy a sandwich at a local shop, I spotted a For Sale sign next to a dilapidated two-up, two-down shrouded in undergrowth. My reaction was impulsive; within 10 minutes, I’d made an offer and set about creating my first super cottage, which comprised a small, but carefully considered series of spaces that can grow and stretch when needed. It’s a house that doesn’t cost a fortune to run, but it is filled with quality things, so that it feels luxurious and cosy. After it gained significant publicity thanks to its resemblance to the house that features in the film The Holiday, I sold it and set about…

SEPTEMBER saw the launch onto the market, through Savills National Farms and Estates (020–7016 3780), of the captivating, 483-acre Markwick residential and farming estate, which sits between the villages of Dunsfold and Hambledon, five miles south of Godalming and nine miles south of the cathedral city of Guildford, within the affluent Surrey Hills AONB. For sale at a guide price of £8.4 million for the whole, or in three lots, the estate, which enjoys spectacular far-reaching views over rural south Surrey towards the South Downs National Park, was developed over a period of 60-odd years by the late, somewhat eccentric Peter John Rampton, whose family owned the successful catalogue sales company Freemans and lived in Hambledon village. In the mid 1960s, Rampton bought Burgate farm, which adjoined his parents’…

I GARDEN on chalk. Sometimes, I wish I didn’t. It’s not only rhododendrons, camellias and magnolias that are a complete no-no. Time and again, I find a lily or an iris, a primula or a gentian that cannot be grown in my garden. It’s not fair, because there are thousands of forbidden plants that I can never cultivate, but only a handful of goody-goody plants that actually prefer chalk. At best, one might say that chalk gardens are different; at worst, people say they are boring. That’s not fair, either. But there’s nothing boring about the wildflowers of our chalk downlands (‘Jewels of the downs’, July 19). They are infinitely more variable and beautiful than the heaths and heathers that grow on acid soils. Our chalk-downland flora is rich with…

The Power of Art: A World History in Fifteen Cities Caroline Campbell (Bridge Street Press, £30) CAROLINE CAMPBELL, art historian and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, is unapologetic about her faith in great art, but she is a champion of the transformative power of minor art, too. Running through this book, an ambitious history of the world, is the stuff of everyday lives through the millennia—pottery and coins, bricks and manuscripts, cloth and furniture. Art, she says, ‘gains its power from its ability to fuel and drive our emotions’ and ‘a bowl or plate you cherish’ can do that every bit as much as a Rembrandt or a Bernini. To tell her story, she looks at 15 cities at 15 different periods that encapsulate 15 traits.…

AUTUMN has arrived in Snowdonia (now Eryri, of course) with a blast. Gales and torrential rain make the summer a distant memory, but the mountains stand proud and, when the sun shines, they are as enticing as ever. I fancy that I know these peaks well; in my years of regular visiting, I’ve climbed all the high ones, including all those over 3,000ft. However, I have missed one central peak, and on this visit I am determined to climb it. Each morning when we’re there, my dawn habit is to walk around both lakes for which Llanberis is famous: the deep, chilly Llyn Padarn and the much-modified (because it’s part of the pump storage scheme at Dinorwig) Llyn Peris. It’s an eight-mile circuit and takes me on a high…

On the right lines Made by hand in the UK, the Coco 2½-seater sofa with box-edge cushions in Stripe Petunia, £5,250, is designed to offer ‘a large dollop of comfort,’ says designer Sophie Conran (020-3084 2200; www.sophieconran.com) A passion for pattern Artist Ellen Merchant’s eye for pattern, detail and colour is amply evident in her joyous collection of block-printed lampshades for Pooky. They cost from £32 for a 16cm (6in) empire shade (020–7351 3003; www.pooky.com) Heavy metal Ideal for an elegant desk, the Dido table lamp is shown here in polished unlacquered brass and costs £1,350 from Hector Finch (020–7731 8886; www.hectorfinch.com) Statement choice Painted in a rich red, this fitted furniture makes eye-catching and eminently practical use of an otherwise unused alcove. Neville Johnson home-office prices start from £3,600…

WHEN Caroline Reeves, a farm secretary in the North Wessex Downs, went freelance, she faced a problem. ‘I couldn’t work with young children running around, we had poor broadband and it wasn’t a house I could take clients back to,’ she says. ‘I’ve always lived rurally and for any co-working spaces, you had to go to a big town. I didn’t work in towns, I was a country girl. That’s what I knew and that’s what I wanted to create for others.’ Today, Miss Reeves’s company, the Rural Business Hub, provides two co-working spaces in Hampshire: The Old Post Office, near Andover, and Gander Down Barns on a working farm east of Winchester. Around the UK, 30–40% of us now work remotely at least once a week, a trend…

IT was an otherwise ordinary day in 1962 when, following a tip-off from a local newspaper article, botanical illustrator and writer Miles Hadfield found himself beside a main road, peering through delicate, iron-grilled clairvoyé set into an old brick wall. Stone pineapples topped the supporting columns. It was, he later noted, ‘an unusual lay-by’. Entering and passing through the rampant willow herb, he could see ‘distorted yews’ and ‘a gem of a pavilion’. Together with Gilbert Harrison of the National Trust, Hadfield had just broken into the derelict gardens of Westbury Court in Gloucestershire. The Victorian house had been demolished, as were so many others in the 1950s, but the garden was a rare surviving example of the Dutch style dating from about 1700. Thanks to the two men’s illicit…