Innholdsfortegnelse for May 8, 2024 i Country Life

Russell House, Broadway, Worcestershire The home of Andrew Dakin and Malcolm Rogers AS do many Cotswold villages, composed of picturesque stone houses, cottages and inns erected between the 15th and 18th centuries, Broadway owed its wealth to the medieval wool trade and later to its position as an important coaching stop on the main road between London and Worcester. With the Industrial Revolution, cotton textiles, coal, iron and engineering overtook wool as Britain’s major business and exports. Bypassed by industry, Broadway lost its other mainstay when the opening of the Worcester railway in 1852 rapidly eclipsed horse transport and the coach trade. Economic decline preserved buildings and landscape, in the same way that it did in Tuscany and Umbria. As Florence and central Italy attracted Anglo-American artists and aesthetes in…

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthornhedge. ’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass ‘Silent Noon’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti FROM the beginning of May, every country road and lane is lined with the familiar froth of cow parsley. Fuelled by increasing nitrogen levels in the verges, the exuberance of the plant is unstoppable—mile after mile of it bobs and sways to passing traffic like a never-ending Mexican wave. Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), which is also known by the more decorative Queen Anne’s lace, is the first in a succession of roadside umbellifers that adorns the countryside from spring to late summer. It belongs to one of the largest plant families in the world with more than 3,700 species, some 100 of which may be found in the UK. The Umbelliferae or…

The pioneering professional SHEILA WILLCOX was not the first female winner—that was Margaret Hough in 1954—but she was ahead of her time in her rigid methodology (which still holds good today) and professional attitude to what was then an amateur sport; she certainly gave no quarter to rivals. In 1959, she beat David Somerset (later the 11th Duke of Beaufort and Badminton’s host), who worked full time as an art dealer. This was despite his children, including the present Duke, jumping up and down beside the showjumping ring excitedly yelling at her: ‘Go on, knock one down!’ Willcox’s hattrick of wins (1957–59) remains a record, so difficult is it to produce a horse for this famously challenging competition, let alone win it. However, she had a tetchy relationship with team…

WHEN the invading Roman army arrived in the Cotswolds some 2,000 years ago, they found a region of gentle hills, valleys and streams and a climate of chilly winters and springs. They brought hardy sheep to raise for wool to keep themselves warm and, when they left, the flocks passed into the hands of local landowners: first the Church and then local families. In the Middle Ages, sheep grazed the hills and valleys of the Cotswolds, fleeces from a million Cotswold longwool sheep were traded and fortunes were made. Rich merchants created a landscape dotted with the lofty spires of wool churches and market-places surrounded by grand townhouses. The coming of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1700s saw the emergence of Stroud and its surrounding valleys in the south-western…

I WON my first prize for gardening when I was nine years old at prep school. My grand-mother was delighted—it was she who had sent me the seeds of godetia, eschscholtzia and Virginia stock that secured my victory. Gardening continued to absorb me through the years of school, university and devilling in London. Yes, I know it—some people are boring right from their earliest youth. Any young man who is keen on gardening and knowledgeable about plants quickly attracts a fan club of elderly ladies. Such, at least, was my experience in the 1970s. It did not end when I got married. As soon as the announcement of our engagement appeared in The Times nearly 50 years ago, the letters of congratulation in those pre-digital days all had the same…

SAVOURY jelly. For some, a wobbling vision of edible hell, the very essence of fleshy malaise. For others, a tremulous delight, as delicate as it is pellucid, invalid food made majestic. But whatever your view, these jellies remain a resolutely adult affair. I still remember the dread of the Sunday night prep-school pork pie, a mean mini monolith, made all the worse by that thin layer of gloop stuck between gristly flesh and greasy pastry. It was not so much dislike as a visceral, textural terror, made all the worse by that hateful contrast to its sweet alter ego—the malevolently meaty Mr Hyde to a joyously fruity Dr Jekyll. ‘Out, vile jelly,’ as Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, ‘where is thy lustre now?’ Ok, so the playwright was referring to…

ONE of the many satisfactions of writing this column comes when it is possible to weave connections between objects in the different sales or exhibitions that I have to discuss. This week, there has been no need for any weaving, as it was unusually easy to make a link between Sotheby’s online auction of property from the Marquess of Anglesey’s private apartment at Plâs Newydd and Sloane Street Auctions’s live Spring Fine Arts sale, both of which took place last month. The seat of ancestors of the Paget family since the mid 15th century, the house overlooking the Menai Strait and Bridge was passed to the National Trust in 1976, but is now fairly rundown, so much so that the Trust cannot allow the present Marquess, the 8th, and his…

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk ANY adult seeking to solve a knotty problem tends to confer and collaborate. Yet, over the next month or so, GCSE and A-level candidates will be required to spend up to two hours solving problems on their own without access to resources. Although examination boards might regard the papers they set as the most efficient means of sorting the wheat from the chaff, in their current incarnation exams are more likely simply to sort those who are well schooled in exam technique from those who aren’t. Since school exams were first introduced in 1858, the world has been transformed beyond recognition, most recently by Artificial Intelligence. Yet exam boards—and the schools whose pupils they assess—cling doggedly…

Mic drop DO I need to have Amazon Prime for the spectacle of watching a television programme ‘drop’, or does everything drop nowadays? Apparently, new episodes of Clarkson’s Farm start dropping on May 3 (Town & Country, April 24). Please can we stick with the traditional English language that I know and love—even Jeremy Clarkson, who loves to play with words, might prefer his broadcasting work to ‘air’ or ‘be shown’ and not ‘drop’. Keith Robinson, Berkshire Dawn of the steam age I’M looking forward to Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (above) coming to the Laing Art Gallery in my home town next month (Town & Country, April 24). The sun appears to set behind the ship as it approaches the viewer, although, as it is travelling upstream from Sheerness to…

Maj Gerald Gundry and The Duke of Beaufort’s Hounds by Peter Biegel ‘This picture provides memories of hunting in days gone by with my father, who was joint-master and hunted the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds two days a week from 1951–74. In my parents’ day, the picture hung in the dining room and I can remember many a Sunday lunch when guests would comment on it and my father would fondly talk of the hounds in the picture and how they were his favourite ones of the time. When he was told by the hunt committee that they wished to present a hunting picture, all he said was “Please make sure it is a picture of my hounds and not me”–hence why he is on the grey horse in the…

MANY of Isabella Beeton’s 900-odd recipes were not her own—for which modern-day cookery writers have taken her to task—but she is credited as the first to publish them in the clear format (ingredients followed by method, including cooking time, right) that everyone uses today. Described by biographer Kathryn Hughes as ‘the first domestic goddess’, she remains a byword for domestic efficiency thanks to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the first instalment of which, in 1861, sold 60,000 copies in a year and millions thereafter. Although it conjures an image of the Victorian stay-at-home wife trying to keep her husband away from the temptations of the tavern, chapter one starts: ‘As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of…

THERE are beautiful insects and insects handsome to the human eye, but among the least pretty of those six-limbed legions is one directly descended from ancestors that flourished in the Permian period, some 250 million years ago. It is a living fossil plainly deserving of survival, for botanists surmise that, before the emergence of bees and other busy insects, its forebears were essential pollinators of early seed-bearing plants. ‘He gives her a ball of saliva and mashed insect to gain approval’ With diminutive measurements—it is barely half an inch long, with little more than a 1in wingspan—in magnification, the scorpion fly looks like something out of the creative depths of science fiction. It perches high on its legs in the stance of a parked Concorde, below its prominent brown compound…

THE names of our butterflies are so familiar now that it is easy to miss how strange they are. Some are baldly descriptive: there’s a large white (Pieris brassicae) and a small white (Pieris rapae); a large blue (Phengaris arion) and a small blue (Cupido minimus). Yet we also have the more cryptic grayling (Hipparchia semele), gatekeeper (Pyronia tithonus), Scotch argus (Erebia aethiops) and wall (Lasiommata megera). We have a quintet with linear markings called hairstreaks and a group with chequered wings called fritillaries. These names are full of words that passed out of everyday use some time ago. ‘None of the Aurelians was a scientist; what united them was a keen sense of beauty’ Who coined these unusual monikers? Who decided that one butterfly looked like a wall and…

Gloucestershire, £600,000 Pool End Barn is a delightful Grade II-listed, two-bedroom Cotswold-stone cottage that lies in the heart of the village of Willersey, a few miles north of Broadway. Its position overlooking the village duck pond is particularly picturesque. The house used to be a dairy barn, but was sympathetically converted a number of years ago. There are two gardens: a classic cottage-style one to the front borders the duck pond and a further acre, enclosed by Cotswold-stone walling, lies across the drive. This garden is landscaped with herbaceous borders and a stone terrace. The nearest station serving London Paddington is some 10 miles away at Moreton-in-Marsh. Jackson-Stops (01386 840224) Wiltshire, £1.45 million Turleigh is a hamlet in west Wiltshire, about 1¼ miles west of Bradford-on-Avon—which has the same pretty…

KESWICK’S historic place at the heart of global pencil-making began in Borrowdale in the 1500s, when a Cumbrian shepherd discovered clumps of a soft, black substance in the roots of an upturned tree. He began using it to mark his sheep and the practice caught on. With characteristic lack of pomposity, the Lakeland farmers called this handy stuff ‘wad’. Sixteenth-century scientists concluded that wad was some form of lead and dubbed it plumbago (Latin for lead ore). It wasn’t until nearly 200 years later that a German geologist, Abraham Gottlob Werner, determined that wad had nothing whatsoever to do with lead and gave it the modern name of graphite (from the Ancient Greek graphein, meaning to write, draw or record). By that time, the first Cumbrian graphite mine had been…

SOLAR power is a growth industry, critical to the Government’s pursuit of net-zero emissions and mired in controversy. Britain’s largest solar farm, the 220-acre Shotwick Park in Flintshire, is about to be dwarfed by super schemes already in the pipeline. In Nottinghamshire, 6,920 acres of agricultural land have been earmarked for the Great North Road solar park, together with 3,700 acres for the neighbouring One Earth project and 13 smaller solar farms in an area compared to the Klondike Gold Rush. Last month, protestors marched on West-minster to oppose Oxfordshire’s Botley West solar scheme on land owned by the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim estate (3,440 acres) and the Lime Down project in Wiltshire on the Duke of Beaufort’s land near Badminton (2,000 acres). The latter has been described as a…

RURAL communities are overwhelmingly dependent on volunteers. Whether it’s putting up the flags for the coronation, serving soup at the Cafod lunch or helping out when a local family is in trouble, there are few country places that can’t find some willing hands. It’s the spirit that animates local-history societies, sports clubs, parochial church councils and poppy collectors. It’s a spirit that will be seen at its most impressive in the coming months at the county agricultural shows, which simply would not be possible without the hundreds of unpaid stewards and teams of organisers that put on these amazingly professional events. Voluntarism is a particularly British quality that we all too often take for granted. Only Scrooges and Marxists take exception—the one because they’re too lazy to join in, the…

DRIFT a short way east of the Cotswolds to the cobbles and spires of Oxford and you’ll find the site of England’s first coffeehouse, which opened in the early 1650s. It’s reported to have been a meeting place for enlightened thinkers, although it’s a safe bet that it wasn’t serving flat whites and oat-milk cortados, sourcing almond croissants from the local sourdough bakery or providing Kilner jars of dog treats. Our expectations of what a good café should entail—and, for that matter, a good coffee—have shifted within the space of a generation. The ongoing march of high-street café chains has been an unavoidable part of this, but more influential has been the growth of stylish independent cafés with a more finessed, artisan approach to coffee-making, as well as a commitment…

AS you walk into the dimly lit chancel of St Mary’s in Kempley, Gloucestershire, it’s hard to know where to look first. Behind and around the altar of this pretty church, elaborate decoration covers almost every surface, with winged creatures, robed figures and celestial bodies all vying for your attention. Or, rather, for the attention of the medieval churchgoers for whom this extraordinarily complete Apocalypse scene was painted some 900 years ago. These frescos, the Christ figure at their centre intended to inspire parishioners to live in accordance with the Lord’s will, have lasted down the ages against the odds. Although works such as this were once found on the walls of churches up and down the country, the rigours of the Reformation, as well as the damp English climate,…

Floral fancy The striking Chloe headboard, from £1,682, is available in the new Fable Woodland fabric featuring pretty floral embroidery, from Andrew Martin (020–3887 6113; www.andrewmartin.co.uk) Earn your stripes Inspired by an early-19th-century French design, Salvesen Graham’s Floral Border Stripe fabric in Moss is available as an Extra Large cushion, £260 (020–7967 7777; www.salvesengraham.com) Good find Norris Bedding is a trusted source of high quality handcrafted mattresses and divans, including the drawer bases with headboard, £2,000, and Regency mattress, £4,500, shown here. (020–7274 5306; www.norrisbedding.co.uk) Pattern punch Creative powerhouse Kit Kemp has designed the New Forest collection of rugs in collaboration with Annie Selke, including the Art Deco-inspired Button design in micro-hooked wool, shown here in Multi, Olive and Blue, 8ft by 10ft, £1,250 each (www.kitkemp.com) Restful scheme The Upholstered…

The gardens at Iford Manor, near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire The home of the Cartwright-Hignett family OH, to have been a fly on the wall in 1898 when Henry Avray Tipping first cycled down the steep hill just outside Bradford-on-Avon and saw below him the River Frome, coursing through its pretty Gothic bridge, and, on his right, the buff-stone walls of Iford Manor. He was immediately charmed by ‘its splendid hanging woods, its stately terrace walk, its interesting house with so much history in its medley of styles, its pleasant position near the river with its picturesque bridge’. Was he, perhaps, walking up the garden’s triple flights of stone steps when it first clicked that this was the very same property that his house-hunting friend, architect Harold Peto, had told him about?…

Drink Maps in Victorian Britain Kris Butler (Bodleian, £25) ANYONE tempted to buy this book as a ribald stocking-filler for a boozy uncle, may, on first inspection, find reason to pause. Kris Butler’s text is not po-faced and the book includes, alongside reproductions of the said maps, some wonderfully bright and intentionally attractive period examples of tipple-related advertising. Even so, the subject of this latest spotlight on the Bodleian Library’s diverse collection is very far from merry. ‘The purpose of drink maps was to convince magistrates not to renew or grant new licences’ Drink maps of the 19th century drew attention to the sheer scale and concentration of public outlets for alcohol consumption, by marking taverns, beer houses and so on onto street plans of towns and cities, from Glasgow…

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