Innholdsfortegnelse for February 28, 2024 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk BRITISH farmers must be taking heart from their Continental counterparts, who appear to have scored a striking victory against a too-prescriptive EU diktat to take up to 7% of their landholdings out of production. The Green Deal, which included reducing fertiliser and pesticide use and increasing organic production, all by specific percentages—things that need to happen, of course, but perhaps more incrementally—has been dropped. It was bound to be unpopular against a backdrop of new international trade deals to import cheap food from outside Europe. Les agriculteurs français revolted with ferocity, forming about 80 tractor blockades on motorways and thus messing up other economic areas. Unsurprisingly, it’s been suggested that British farmers might copy them and,…

Venetian splendour THANK you for the excellent piece about John Singer Sargent (‘More than a pretty face’, February 14). It was a bit of a tease to mention his wonderful Venice watercolours without illustrating one. Here’s my favourite, Scuola di San Rocco; the way he turns some splodges of colour into believable water and a building is breathtaking. I’m afraid that I don’t know who owns this painting, but showing your readers one of his works might put them out of their misery. Tony Garrett, by email Faith is a true comfort IN response to Simon Jenkins, we have just launched a campaign to raise at least £350,000 to revitalise our Victorian Christ Church in Henton, Somerset (Letters, February 7). Obtaining a Faculty from the Diocesan Advisory Committee was delayed…

‘This is a glorious study of rage, strength, powerlessness and guile that makes me smile, because it encapsulates two great fables. Aesop’s moral: kindness trumps might. The painting hangs at Chequers, the prime-ministerial residence, where I first saw it as a journalist in the John Major era and on later visits. Your first thought: where’s the mouse? Churchill would ask the same question. (Answer: bottom left, barely visible.) Near the end of his final term, as his biographer Andrew Roberts notes, Churchill could stand it no more. He summoned his paintbox and carried on where Rubens left off by touching up the mouse. “If that is not courage,” Lord Mountbatten noted, “I do not know what is!” The Chequers trustees, it is said, were appalled and had Churchill’s handiwork erased.…

IF you are lucky to live in a place overlooking fields where rooks visit, you will know one of the most endearing qualities possessed by this glorious member of the crow family. I can summarise it best by describing a recent vision when our Derbyshire home was assailed by a powerful winter torrent. Suddenly, the horizon went black. The trees shuddered violently. The road in front was converted to an instant river and, across the far fields, it looked as if the whole landscape were shrouded in a grey sheet like electric static on a screen. Through binoculars, however, I could still see the rooks feeding, regardless of any downpour. On they plodded across the pasture, pausing to probe for worms, as if it were nothing more than a sunlit…

Put ’em up Every Wills marquee—designed and made in North Yorkshire—is the culmination of hundreds of hours of deeply dedicated work by a team of craftspeople. The tentmaker’s art is an old one, with an oral tradition of inherited skills passed down through generations, and the company’s primary aim is simple; to handmake the most beautiful tents in the world. Named after their son, Will (involved from the start), Wills was founded in 2010 by husband-and-wife team Chris and Lynsey Brawn, who will work with you and your ideas to create a magical place for celebration (01423 339915; www.wills-marquees.co.uk). In the frame I have featured British sustainable eyewear company Monc a few times recently, but wanted to tell you more. Founder Freddie Elborne’s background is in engineering, and the company…

MORE years ago than I like to think, when I was wondering where on earth to begin with making something of our London back garden, a 60ft by 40ft rectangle of moss rimmed with a scrappy strip of inert soil pretending to be a flowerbed, the writer and gardener Ursula Buchan gave me some advice I have always remembered. Making a garden, particularly a flowerbed, is one of the most difficult things you can do, she told me, and if someone offers to help you, say yes. At the time, the designer Mary Keen had very kindly offered her help and she brilliantly transformed the garden by suggesting I made two huge planting beds that would run along either side of a central limestone path. (York-stone was out of our…

Seabirds bouncing back AFTER two years of closure due to the outbreak of avian flu in 2022, the Farne Islands off Northumberland will reopen to visiting boats on March 25. Also known for its grey seal pups (more than 2,000 are born every autumn), the National Nature Reserve archipelago, cared for by the National Trust, is home to an extraordinary gathering of some 200,000 seabirds of 23 species, including about 43,000 pairs of puffin. Sadly, over the past two years, almost 10,000 bird carcasses have been collected by the ranger team, but as the number of disease-hit birds was down 39% in 2023, there is hope that the colony is developing immunity. For the time being, only Inner Farne—where terns dive-bomb beside the medieval St Cuthbert’s Chapel and a Victorian…

THE rain it raineth every day’—Feste’s song rang in my ears as, yet again, only the 4x4s could get through from home to the village and we had to reroute our London visitors away from the flooded main road. Worse still was the sight of water pouring off the fields and the lakes forming across them. The grassland was already waterlogged and a neighbour’s horses were gathered uncomfortably close together on the one piece of his pasture that wasn’t entirely under water. All over the county, the tree-planting campaign spearheaded by volunteers from the Woodland Trust looks doomed, the saplings under water in places where flooding has previously never occurred. Harvesting has been well-nigh impossible on the waterlogged fields and it’s no wonder that potato prices have gone up more…

SET off for a walk around the country lanes and I wager £5 that you can’t make it home without spotting at least one labrador and tripping over a cocker spaniel or two (please note that I will not be honouring this bet). Take a turn around town and you will do well not to encounter a French bulldog; it is almost impossible to avoid crossing paths with a poodle-cross of some description. A nation enchanted by dogs and the prospect of welcoming one (or 101) into our homes for the past century—before this, pet ownership was an unaffordable luxury for most, unless the animals were working dogs—we are also creatures of habit. It would appear that the more we are exposed to a particular breed, be it by family,…

SITUATED in one of north Cornwall’s most desirable locations—between the restaurants of Padstow and the watersports of Harlyn—Atlanta in Trevone has been in Jess Alken-Theasby’s family for generations. Two beaches, one sandy, the other rocky, lie seconds from the house, which was built on a clifftop in 1899. Mrs Alken-Theasby’s great-grandfather was the artist J. H. C. Millar, a favourite of George V, who painted the views that can be enjoyed from almost all aspects of the Victorian main house and a further four apartments. ‘The exception is this building,’ explains Mrs Alken-Theasby. ‘It only has a glimpse of the sea, so we knew we had to do something different with the interiors.’ When her great-uncle bought the guest house in the 1950s, the building was used as a shelter…

TODAY sees the launch onto the market—for the first time in 101 years—of the historic 1,763-acre Glemham Hall estate. On the outskirts of Little Glemham, it is seven miles from Aldeburgh on Suffolk’s magical heritage coast, eight miles from Woodbridge and 14 miles from the county town of Ipswich. Tim Fagan of Strutt & Parker (01473 220449) quotes a guide price of £19 million for the estate with its Grade I-listed mansion house set in some 200 acres of formal gardens and parkland with frontage to the River Alde, in-hand and let farms, a farmhouse and cottages, which is offered either as a whole or in its constituent parts. Although the Glemham family of east Suffolk were already established as landowners in the area from the early 15th century, they…

Braised beef short rib with celeriac-and-Parmesan mash Method ▸ Heat a heavy-based casserole dish and add a splash of olive oil. Brown the beef all over for a few minutes and then simply add in all the remaining ingredients. Stir them together, pop on a lid and cook in the oven for 2–2½ hours, stirring halfway through. ▸ Make the mash by peeling the celeriacs and cutting them into even-sized pieces. Steam or boil until soft and then add to a processor with the butter, milk and Parmesan. Process until smooth. Taste for seasoning and set aside until ready to serve. ▸ Remove the ribs from the casserole dish, cover to keep them warm, and then strain the liquid into a saucepan to reduce and thicken, discarding the herbs and…

AN Address from Britannia to the celebrated Angelica, printed in the Public Advertiser on January 20, 1767, acclaimed a 20-something Swiss-born painter, who would shortly sign the petition to George III that precipitated the foundation of the Royal Academy (RA). ‘What wonderful effects from light and shade!’ rhapsodised the poetaster: ‘Such colouring was ne’er since Rubens shown.’ The artist in question, known to her British admirers as ‘Miss Angel’ and to art scholars as Angelica Kauffman, was a young woman acknowledged in her lifetime as a leading portraitist and history painter. In Britain, her champions included Joshua Reynolds and Robert Adam, for whom she contributed to decorative schemes at Harewood House, West Yorkshire, Osterley Park in Middlesex and the Adelphi in London. Within months of her arrival in the capital,…

ANGLERS will have noticed that St Mungo, patron saint of salmon, is asleep on the job. He has slipped into the ranks of saints ‘who from their labours rest’. Unlike hard-grafting St Anthony, whom my wife keeps busy in search of lost mobiles and car keys (with a 90% retrieval rate), Mungo has been lollygagging by the rivers of paradise. Meanwhile, his ward, the Atlantic salmon, has been red-listed as an endangered species. A bit of saintly sock pulling up is needed. On a dank and misty February Saturday, I joined a line of 4x4s crawling along the north side of the River Beauly to mark the opening of the fishing season. The track was flooded in places after heavy rainfall and a big river ran, barely contained by the…

ALTHOUGH most people will have heard of Knebworth House, in Hertfordshire, the garden village that was developed on the estate in the Edwardian period, with Sir Edwin Lutyens as its consulting architect, is less familiar. This is surprising, given the attention that has been given to garden cities and garden suburbs in general, not least because, around the year 2000, the creation of new garden villages was promoted as a solution to the planning dilemma of where to build more homes in the crowded South of England. The Department for Communities and Local Government has more recently re-asserted the point in its publication Locally-Led Garden Villages, Towns and Cities (March 2016). Furthermore, bucolic Knebworth Garden Village was important in Lutyens’s career, as a stepping stone—unlikely as it might seem—on the…

FOUR years ago, the pandemic encouraged many of us to re-evaluate the role that our homes play in our lives. For some, it precipitated a desire to create spaces that reflect our own personalities, rather than chasing passing trends, kickstarting one of the most exciting periods in interior design since the post-war period, with a new spirit of confidence and a desire to create individual homes with a sense of permanence that suit our needs. In this thought-provoking discussion at London Design Week, two eloquent advocates for a distinctive personal style will reflect on the concept of home and the people, places and objects that have shaped their unique approaches. Kathryn Ireland, the British interior designer based in California, US, whose client list includes Steve Martin and David Mamet, will…

The gardens of Pembury Hall, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent The home of Mr and Mrs Paul Hilgers AFTER living abroad for several years in Sydney and Amsterdam, Mr and Mrs Paul Hilgers were looking for somewhere to settle and bring up their young family when they discovered exactly the place they were looking for in a quiet rural valley within easy distance of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. In 2019, they moved into Pembury Hall, which had been built in 1803 and was home for 170 years to the Woodgate family, three members of which were vicars of the 14th-century old parish church of St Peter’s a few minutes’ walk away. Push open the gate at the far end of the main lawn and a rutted track leads through a dappled…

IS it the salt? The reason that seaside memories are so perfectly kept? My very first memories are absolutely brine-preserved. I was a toddler sent to stay with my Great Uncle Willi and Great Aunt Kath, who were sheep farmers on the Gower, Wales, their land sloping down to the sea. Although I realise that the following infant incidents have become recall-polished in the way broken glass is smoothed by sea tide on the sea shore, the grit in them is true… Standing looking at the cresting waves, thinking that the surf looked like lamb’s fleece. (Too sophisticated a simile for a three-year-old; perhaps an image placed in my head by the Great Aunt.) Then taking the bright-red Massey 35 tractor and its wood-sided trailer down to the beach to…

Young Elizabeth: Princess. Prisoner. Queen Nicola Tallis (Michael O’Mara Books, £25) HERE we are, barely two months into a new year, and it’s apparently time for yet another 16th-century blockbuster. Clearly, there is no end to our appetite for books on the Tudors. This time, Nicola Tallis offers us an ‘immensely detailed biography’, but it is one with a difference. Her subject is not Elizabeth the Queen, but Elizabeth the child, the teenager and the determined young woman. It was a contemporary of Elizabeth, Jane Dormer (d.1612), who noted: ‘To write all that might be said of her would fill many volumes.’ Well, generations of authors have certainly been trying to do just that. Here, the author covers the years 1533–58, telling us that it was David Starkey who last…