Innholdsfortegnelse for August 14, 2024 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk TECHNOLOGY: brilliant at solving problems, even better at creating questions. No matter what genius ideas come along, we always want more. Deriving from the Greek techne, meaning ‘art, craft’, and logos, for ‘word, speech’, technology was meant as discourse on the Arts, both fine and applied. As centuries passed, it embraced an increasing range of processes, tools and machines, until today, when we speak of technology as software and smartphones, robots and rockets—inventions that have transformed the way we live within a handful of decades and change as quickly as we breathe. It has gone from an addition to a necessity and whether we willingly or reluctantly accept its creations, it would be hard to deny…

Drawing the short straw A SAYING passed down from my late father (born in 1923) in rural Norfolk went along the lines of: ‘If you don’t like someone, then leave them a thatched house’ (Town & Country, July 31). In his youth, a typical thatched cottage was worth little more than the cost of a single thatching. I experienced long-straw thatching in about 1960, when the traditional barn on our farm was thatched for the last time before its eventual demolition in the late 1970s. My father, as tenant, had to provide the straw. We still had the old farm binder, which was brought out of retirement to harvest a 10-acre field of wheat in order to provide sheaves for threshing, with long straw being the desired by-product. This hard…

RARER than the giant panda,’ is always an eye-catching slogan, especially when applied to a native British breed such as the mighty Suffolk Punch. How can such a familiar horse—or hen, cow, pig—be rarer than China’s famously elusive bear? Most declines began when pressure fell on post-Second World War farming, as food shortages demanded faster-maturing meat animals, milkier dairy beasts and mechanisation. These factors, combined with outbreaks of bovine TB, brucellosis and swine fever, almost wiped out some horse, pig and cow breeds. Some animals owe their existence purely to the dogged persistence of small groups of enthusiasts and farmers, whose argument, surely correct, is that these breeds, which leave a lighter ecological hoofprint than their Continental counterparts, are as much part of this country’s cultural heritage as buildings and…

THIS Thursday, thousands of 18 year olds across the UK receive their A-level results. In one swift glance, years of schoolwork are validated, university places confirmed or denied and future careers mapped out. For those who miss the mark, it can be bitterly disappointing. Pressing questions arise, as marmalade is passed across the breakfast table: ‘So dear, what is it you plan to do with your life?’ or ‘What kind of mark do you want to leave on the world?’ These are, for most of us, near impossible questions, with ‘I don’t know’ being the resounding answer. For those plunged into this purgatory, it is comforting to note that many figures in British history spent their young lives plagued by similar upsets and unease. Take Horatio Nelson. By the age…

THE ox stood still, not stirring, nor disturbed. Some days in a field, sometimes by a pond, others at the cliff’s edge. Yet this was no ordinary beast, but a Trojan ox, with a hollowed-out belly and a camera poking from his head. He belonged to Richard and Cherry Kearton, the Yorkshire-born brothers credited as the first wildlife photographers, who used the ox to take the photographer’s ‘hide’ to a literal level. They started out in the 1890s, using a cheap box camera to capture the first images of living birds’ nests, which were published in the first natural-history title to be illustrated entirely by photographs, British Birds’ Nests (1895). Notorious for daring escapades, the brothers would hang off rock faces, bury themselves in pits and don animal disguises (they…

ONE of Ireland’s great fishing rivers, much prized for the wild Atlantic salmon that run through it, the Munster Blackwater rises in the Kerry mountains and flows east for more than 100 miles through Mallow and Fermoy in Co Cork before entering Co Waterford at Lismore and draining into the Celtic Sea at Youghal. Over the centuries, the titled, rich and famous acquired vast estates along its banks, building grand country houses where they entertained lavishly and hunted, shot and fished to their hearts’ content. Idyllic Fortwilliam, one of the hidden jewels of the Blackwater valley, sits in almost 400 acres of rolling pasture and ancient woodland overlooking the sparkling river, with far-reaching views to the Knockmealdown mountains on the Co Tipperary border. It’s less than two miles from the…

SOME of us are fated to desire plants that we will never grow. Sometimes, the problem is our climate—there is no point in longing to grow Amorphophallus titanum unless you can simulate its growing conditions in the jungles of Sumatra. Another problem may be that the plants we long for are not available from British nurseries—I have been looking for stately herbaceous Eremostachys laciniata and the dwarf cherry Prunus incana ever since I saw them in Soviet Armenia nearly 50 years ago without success. However, the most intractable are those parasitic plants that live off other plants and take their entire nourishment from what their hosts can offer. When we lived in Wiltshire—where we first opened our garden for the NGS in 1983—I longed to grow mistletoe, which was entirely…

TIME is running out for the red squirrel as its alien grey counterpart spreads squirrel pox into its last refuges, in mainland UK in Galloway and northern Scotland—it’s possible that soon the only reds left will be on islands. Other non-native species are simultaneously damaging the ecosystem: muntjac are destroying undergrowth that is needed by nightingales and other ground-nesting birds, parakeets are out-competing native avian species and mink and American signal crayfish are causing biodiversity loss in aquatic environments. Certain insects are becoming a problem, with the birch-bark beetle ruining spruce trees and Asian hornets threatening bees. Help is in sight, however, thanks to a scientific breakthrough at the Roslin Institute on Edinburgh University’s veterinary Easter Bush campus, where Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was born in 1996. Scientists there…

ONE and a half million new homes—that’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s target. Country people should beware. Her key advisers, Sir Michael Lyons and Dame Kate Barker, are essentially urban figures and this issue must not be left to those whose priorities and experience have little to do with the countryside. In turn, countrymen need to provide an informed response to the challenge and that begins with a recognition of the problem. For years, housing demand has outpaced provision. Property ownership is out of the reach of an increasing number of young people who don’t have access to the bank of mum and dad—few have a chance to buy. With rents reaching record levels, homelessness is on the rise and many are forced to live in damp and crowded accommodation…

IN summer 1924, a new pastime gripped the nation. People from all over Britain and the world travelled to the outskirts of London to go ‘Wembling’. It was something of an endurance event, because the 216-acre site built at Wembley was intended to offer a complete tour of the Empire at the largest international exhibition ever planned. No one could hope to see it all in a day, perhaps not even in a week. Seventy-eight governments took part; there were 1,000 exhibitors in the Palace of Engineering and 800 more in the Palace of Industry. Highlights included a sculpture of the Prince of Wales made of Canadian butter, a subterranean reconstruction of the recently uncovered tomb of Tutankhamun, a working coal mine, an Indian pavilion based on the Taj Mahal,…

AN overlooked corner of this room on the ground floor of an elegant 19th-century building on Paris’s Left Bank has been transformed into a cosy, salon-like space, thanks to a hand-painted wallcovering by de Gournay titled Voyage of the Pacific. Painted on Deep Rich Gold gilded paper, the vista depicts a Capt Cook-style seafaring adventure along tropical coastlines dotted with palm trees and exotic birds. ‘This is part of our existing collection and it lent itself perfectly to this space,’ explains Harald Donoghue, director of special projects for the firm. ‘The uninterrupted far wall was the perfect space to bring to life the narrative.’ A muted sea blue called Jamestown from Benjamin Moore was used on the walls; it underlines the theme of crossing oceans, but also adds a sense…

I’M standing in a quaint French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees at night. Looking around a corner, I spot an alleyway; I follow it along to find a little church. Thirty seconds later, I’m on the balcony of a four-storey mansion in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, California, US. The owners have installed an artificial putting green, so they can practise their six-footers as they look out over the Golden Gate Bridge. A putter leans against a wall. Inside, I read the titles of the books on the coffee table and wonder if my own table would fit in the space, so I click to ‘ruler’ mode. A moment later, in an elegant Georgian rectory in Somerset, I check to see if my favourite painting will suit the landing…

THERE is no more beautiful a woodland sight than that of the splendid chicken of the woods (right) or few sights more startling than that provided by a hen of the woods (below right) nestling incongruously at the base of a tree. Both species are rot fungi and grow on a variety of broadleaved trees, with oaks being favoured. Chicken of the woods is one of the relatively benign brown rots that slowly consume the heartwood of their host, whereas hen of the woods is a take-no-prisoners white rot. The first bracket is common, the second less so. I find both every year on my walks and I saw chicken of the woods in May this year, although it will fruit irregularly into early October. Hen of the woods is…

Trelawny’s Cornwall Petroc Trelawny (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £22) THE author, who was brought up and educated on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall in the 1970s and 1980s, takes his name from the 5th-century saint Petroc, after whom the Cornish honeypot of Pad-stow (originally Petrocs-Stow) is called, and from the 17th-century Royalist bishop Jonathan Trelawny, whose imprisonment in the Tower of London sparked a riot and an unofficial county anthem (‘And shall Tre-lawny live?’). Petroc Trelawny was, therefore, shaken when, at a church service to celebrate Trelawny Day, he was accused of being a fake, of adopting a romantic name to enhance his image as a classical-music presenter—he has a daily Radio 3 show and is currently fronting the BBC Proms. (He does, however, admit that, as a teenager, he dropped…

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IT rarely occurs to us, when rattling a keyboard or tapping a screen, that the origin of the devices we use every day—mobile phones, laptops and smart televisions—is a steam-powered machine the size of a locomotive first conceived almost 200 years ago. Although never physically completed, Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage honed his design for the Analytical Engine for decades and it received the kiss of life in 1842 when his close friend, the mathematician Ada Lovelace, wrote for it the world’s first computer programs. Her published notes describe how the Analytical Engine could compute Bernoulli numbers and even create music: it ‘weaves algebraic patterns,’ she wrote, ‘just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves’. Credited as the world’s first computer programmer, Lovelace’s writing influenced Alan Turing when he developed the…

IN The Wheelwright’s Shop of 1923, George Sturt described being ‘really pained’ by the experience of watching an old farm wagon, overloaded with bricks, trundling towards a building site on what had previously been ‘a quiet country place on the Surrey and Hampshire border’. Sturt (1863–1927) was an astute observer of rural Surrey who had run a wheelwright business in Farnham, inherited from his father. He felt the rising of the new villas signalled the passing of Old England and its farm wagons. ‘Here was this stately implement forced to carry the materials for its own undoing,’ he wrote. What made it more poignant was that, rather than being pulled by beautiful cart horses, ‘a little puffing steam engine was hurrying this captive along, faster than ever a farm-waggon was…

ANDY STANFORD-CLARK once owned what was promoted as the smartest historic home in Britain. It so captured the imagination of the media that he had journalists virtually lining up at his door to interview him. The IBM innovation leader and master inventor—who popularised the Internet of Things (IoT), the ‘smartening’ and interconnecting of home devices to the web—had filled his 16th-century thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight with an abundance of smart tech, such as mouse traps that alerted him if they went off, windows that gave notice of being left open if he went out and a fountain that wouldn’t switch on unless it was to be a windless day. Fifteen years later, Mr Stanford-Clark believes his home continues to be ‘smarter than most, but is no longer…

ONE of the many attractions of The World of Interiors when it was launched in 1981 was the quiet disregard it showed towards anything remotely useful. It was never going to tell you how to hang wallpaper or gather a pencil pleat. Instead, its pages offered a rare glimpse of a world of crumbling châteaux, cobweb-swathed palazzi and dimly lit (but oh-so-charming) hovels, to inspire, not instruct. The unspoken message was that if anything was too practical, it probably wasn’t desirable. The cover of the first-ever issue of the magazine, published in November of that year, featured the sitting room of interior designer and hotelier Anouska Hempel, to which she lent an ethereal vibe with two immaculate cream sofas. Pale upholstery was nothing new, having been made popular in Britain…

The garden at Bryngwyn Hall, near Llanfyllin, Powys, WalesThe home of Auriol, Marchioness of Linlithgow AURIOL, Marchioness of Linlithgow stands by the lake in her nine-acre Grade II*-listed garden at Bryngwyn Hall, near Llanfyllin in Powys, and points to the nearby hill: ‘The name Bryngwyn means “white” or “blessed” hill. I am convinced that there was an Iron Age place of worship here because this place has a certain magic about it. Some people can cope with the magic and others find it daunting.’ One can’t imagine the redoubtable Lady Linlithgow finding anything daunting, not even the parlous state of the red-brick house (also Grade II*) she inherited from her mother in 1986, nor the mass of Rhododendron ponticum, laurel, brambles and weed trees such as ash and elder that…

THE recipe sounds simple enough, if a touch spartan. Water, a ‘dash’ of vinegar, some cloves of garlic, onions ‘cut into quarters’, slices of cucumber, a few pieces of red pepper and a pinch of salt. All mixed together with a few slices of bread. However, Théophile Gautier—19th-century poet, critic and all-round French renaissance man—was less than convinced. He described this Spanish recipe as one ‘which would have made the hair of the late Brillat-Savarin stand on end’. Mon dieu! And that was only the start. ‘At home, a dog of any breeding would refuse to sully its nose with such a compromising mixture,’ he sneered. ‘It is the favourite dish of the Andalusians, and the prettiest women do not shrink from swallowing bowlfuls of this hell-broth of an evening.’…