Innholdsfortegnelse for October 9, 2024 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk HOW many young people leave education with the ability to make a dovetail joint, use a lathe or plane a piece of timber? Sadly, very few—and a fraction of previous generations. Although skills such as furniture-making have been transformed by mechanised processes and digital technology, it’s an area where an understanding of craft remains vital. Nor is it a subject that is relevant to furniture alone; Heritage Crafts, the charity that supports traditional skills in Britain, has compiled a list of those that have an uncertain future in the UK, including rope-making, globe-making and passementerie. Once gone, they will be lost forever. Does this really matter, you may ask, in a world of CNC machines and…

Sweet smell of success SOME four decades ago, I stayed overnight with a pair of married consultants, both of whom worked at Swansea hospitals. The highlight of my stay was attending the local natural-history society lecture on otters (‘Neither fish nor flesh’, September 4). A matchbox containing a sample of the distinctive sweet-smelling otter poo was passed around with as much reverence as a glass of 1950 Petrus. Tom Dehn, Berkshire Hedging bets YOUR recent editorial on the merits of well-laid hedges (‘Life on the hedge’, September 25) reminded me of an article published in the October 1906 edition of the parish magazine for the Parish of St Mary’s, Sturminster Marshall, Dorset, which stated: ‘The hedging and faggoting competition for prizes offered by Esquire Parke, open to young men under…

IF those who truly love horses—who realise what it can mean to be very old, very hungry and thirsty, and very tired, in a country where hard, ceaseless work has to be done in great heat—will send contributions to help in giving a merciful end to our poor old war heroes, we shall be extremely grateful,’ wrote Dorothy Brooke (right) to the Morning Post (now The Daily Telegraph) in 1931. She was living in Cairo, Egypt, as the wife of an army officer and was horrified by the state of the old horses left behind after the First World War. ‘These old horses were, many of them, born and bred in the green fields of England—how many years since they have seen a field, heard a stream of water or…

ON a beach in Dorset, where the earthy hillside merges with a small stream, I spot a young boy playing quite at peace, covered top-to-toe in mud. As the wet dirt dribbles through his fingers, he’s the picture of contentment. It’s no wonder that people immerse themselves in mud baths or come back grinning from an unexpectedly muddy dog walk—there’s something about that sludgy brown goo that makes us feel really good. ‘There’s a whole mixture of physical feelings involved,’ explains Liz Edwards, the founder of Muddy Faces (www.muddyfaces.co.uk), an organisation that promotes outdoor play and that campaigned to make mud-play part of most Early Years settings. ‘It feels fantastic. You can squidge it through your fingers, you can run through it and you can swirl it round.’ As the…

WHEN it comes to ranking English counties by their rural credentials, Herefordshire and Shropshire score highly; in terms of population density, the latter has only one person per hectare, whereas London has 68. Despite being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, these bucolic counties are criss-crossed by hills, forests, farms and rivers and both are barely touched by the motorway network. Although agriculture, forestry and fishing make up the lion’s share of businesses, Herefordshire and Shropshire benefit from relative proximity to the skills hubs of Birmingham and towns across the West Midlands. ‘We followed in the steps of a long line of artists and print-makers’ One of the first to see the possibilities of locating an artisanal business in the Marches was the late, legendary rug designer Roger Oates (020–3924…

WHEN Sarah Corbett-Winder and her husband Ned bought their London home five years ago, the interior decoration was tired and in need of attention. One of the first projects involved extending out into the garden to create enough room for a kitchen where they could entertain. ‘We knew from the start that this would be the heart of the house, where everyone would gather,’ explains the fashion stylist, who last year created a collection of accessories for Birdie Fortescue (www.birdiefortescue.co.uk). ‘My design involved flouting several rules, including leaving the walls in raw plaster and the steel joists exposed, lending the room a slight industrial edge. The builder did a double take.’ An earthy palette of dirty pink, olive green and aubergine is overlaid with flashes of red and yellow. The…

Devon, £3.5 million Just off the edge of Dartmoor and with enviable Teign Valley views, ‘the buyer of this private, beautiful and unique family estate could join the likes of Martin Clunes and Jeremy Clarkson in taking to “the good life”,’ say agents. As well as the highly picturesque six-bedroom thatched farmhouse, the George Teign Barton estate’s 130 acres encompasses a two-bedroom thatched cottage, games barn with galleried office (all of which are Grade II listed), pool house with heated pool, gardens, including orchards and a vegetable area, and stables. The whole stands just outside the hamlet of Higher Ashton, with Exeter about nine miles away. Rendells (01626 353881) North Yorkshire, £900,000 This dream three-bedroom house overlooking the Nidderdale National Landscape is so ‘delightful… it’s hard not to be captivated,’…

A FAMILIAR church stared at Guy Peppiatt from the online catalogue of a forthcoming auction, its crenellated tower and tiny turret delicately rendered in watercolour. It was there, in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, that the art dealer had married his wife, Lucy, so he decided he must have the picture—and fortune smiled at him. Not only did he secure it, but, he recalls, ‘the other lovely thing about it was, I bought it unattributed’. The auction house had called the work ‘English School’, giving it a suitably low estimate, but Mr Peppiatt, who specialises in 18th- and 19th-century British watercolours, immediately recognised the hand of Thomas Miles Richardson Jnr (1813–1890). ‘He did a series of views of the Thames, which he only inscribed and dated. I sold a view of Twickenham by…

The Invention of British Art Bendor Grosvenor (Elliott & Thompson, £40) BRITISH art was a long time coming. According to Bendor Grosvenor, it was not until the early 18th century that a national school existed, which, in his wide-ranging, erudite and often surprising survey, he defines as British artists making work in Britain for British consumers. Even the natives were scathing. When it came to painting, said diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531, ‘Englishmen be inferiors to all other peoples’. An 18th-century critic complained ‘this highly civilised island of ours has produced fewer painters than any other civilised nation’. The greatest artists to work here were, indeed, honorary Brits—painters such as Hans Holbein, Anthony van Dyck and Peter Lely; muralists including Antonio Verrio (whose work gave a continental gloss to…

Galloping to great heights BRITISH photographer Ripley’s extraordinary set of portraits of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment (HCMR)—featuring mounted soldiers and officers of The Life Guards and The Blues and Royals posing dramatically throughout London, often (bravely) from rooftops, for example, on top of Tate Modern—will feature in a new exhibition alongside bronzes by former Frontispiece Zoë Carmichael, who was named the first sculptor-in-residence to the HCMR last year (Town & Country, January 10). A boxed set of Ripley’s 12 portraits was the HCMR’s official coronation present for The King last year. These images will be displayed at the Osborne Studio Gallery, London SW1, with nine bronzes by Ms Carmichael, including ones of the regiment’s horses Verona, Juno and Hastings. ‘The Household Cavalry went to great lengths to help me…

AS summer moves into autumn, it’s still raining. The Met Office tells us there’s more to come, not only this year, but every year. Good news for the roofing contractors, not so much for everyone else. For farmers, the alterations to our seasons—the earlier springs, the drier summers, the wetter winters and all-round warmer temperatures—pose real challenges. These changes may be incremental, but they’re not measured, nor predictable. Sudden downpours of tropical intensity; long periods without any rain at all; waterlogged fields in March that are baked hard by June; floods and drought in the same year. It all means that agricultural practice will have to change if we are to produce food from our own resources. The direction of travel is very clear. The past couple of years have…

WHEN my long-standing agent, Raymond O’Shea, retired with his technical team at the grand old age of 82 in August, it was, to put it mildly, a shock to the system. Suddenly at the helm of the Tottering ship, I needed to become au fait with ‘systems’, ‘invoicing’, ‘archiving’ and ‘bottom lines’—all wildly removed from my usual day-to-day routine. I also needed to get Daffy, Dicky and the rest online, with a new website through which business could be done at the top of the to-do list. I had a couple of weeks to ‘get a grip’, as my father would have said, before I headed off to exhibit at Burghley Horse Trials in September. It soon became apparent to me that technology had changed beyond recognition since I had…

IN The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian poem dating from about 2000BC, gigantic cedars form a forest of terrifying extent, ‘where no man would willingly walk and explore its depths’. The titular hero successfully slays a monster who lives in the forest and then celebrates by chopping down some of the trees. Generally, however, cedars have inspired great respect. In several religions, they are referred to as ‘trees of God’. In the British landscape, they are associated with serenity and beauty, as loved and reassuring as any fine church steeple or familiar view. Until they succumb to age or disease, only a vandal would want to fell one. There are three types of true cedar present here, the cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani), deodar (C. deodara) and Atlas cedar (C.…

MARRY in haste, they say… and repent at leisure. But when we found the right house in a lovely Hampshire village, we had decided to buy it before our car had even crunched up the drive. The penitence only lasted a few (arctic) months as we decided what to do with our tired 1630s cottage that had been badly extended in both the 1880s and 1950s. Understanding its past was key to plotting its future. Built as an unassuming hall house, it was embellished in the 1730s and furnished with cutting-edge mod cons, including a hearth and a bread oven. In the late 19th century, a barn was converted to a joinery workshop and another to a saw shed that later became a weaving studio in the 1970s. The heritage…

DEEP within the chromosomal make-up of classic English decorating in the post-war era was a strand of DNA best known by the genetic code MDAM (make do and mend). It arose out of necessity, in a world where rationing was still in place and there was, compared with now, little choice. Fabrics were dyed interesting colours, furniture brought to life with a lick of white paint and both fabrics and walls stencilled (remember those?). As a result, interior decorators were required to think on their feet, either commissioning their own designs or doing a bit of DIY, particularly when it came to jobs such as mixing paint. The totemic Roger Banks-Pye, of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, is reputed to have flicked ash from his cigarettes into mixtures to lend…

The garden of Foscote Manor, Buckinghamshire The home of Simon and Kate Pryke PEOPLE of my late mother’s generation used to refer to gardens and people as having ‘good bones’. They were referring to an underlying layer of quality that remains intact despite superficial neglect and whatever (often inappropriate) layers might be applied—plants or decorative items in the case of gardens, clothes and make-up on people. The garden of Foscote Manor has good bones, built up over centuries and, in recent years, carefully revealed and enhanced by the present owners, Simon and Kate Pryke. The manor of Foscote (or Foscott) was listed in the Domesday Book as belonging to the Bishop of Bayeux. The square main part of the present house was built in the mid 17th century, of gorgeous…

IT’S one of my earliest food memories and happiest, too, that first weekend back from boarding school, sometime in the early 1980s. The Fall Guy is on the television, the dogs at my feet and there’s a plate of cottage pie on my knees. As Lee Majors’s Colt Seavers hauls in yet another wrong ’un, I shovel spoonful after joyous spoonful of beef, lusciously rich, mixed with buttery, juice-soaked mash into my mouth. A fragrant symphony of softness. After a month spent enduring the sullen staples of the English prep-school diet—all grey, greasy, gristly mince and grim, with rock-hard, black-flecked potatoes—home never tasted as sweet. More than four decades on and the cottage pie has yet to lose its appeal. A British comfort-food classic, it soothes and satisfies in equal…

THE history of British art has been told from many perspectives. Usually, it is through the lives of ‘the greats’, not least Hogarth and Turner, or the evolution of styles, such as Baroque and Rococo. The part played by collectors is well covered. In recent years, the essential, but overlooked role of women artists has finally got the attention it deserves, as seen in Tate Britain’s excellent exhibition earlier this year, ‘Now You See Us’. However, I want to tell you about the sheep and how our artistic destiny was forever changed by their rapacious nibbling in English fields. Actually, the story begins with fleas. In 1348, a bubonic plague first arrived in Britain via rat-borne fleas, and spread rapidly through England and Wales before reaching Scotland about a year…

IN 1978, the amiable architectural historian and expert on traditional building materials Alec Clifton Taylor made his first appearance on television with an informative BBC series, Six English Towns, on the evolution of the featured places. It was so popular that two further series followed in 1981 and 1984. I can remember watching some of these programmes when still at school, cementing a fascination with towns that I have carried with me ever since. The shape, depth and perspective of streets and townscapes inspired me to start drawing them. Unlike photographs, the process of drawing allows the key ingredients of a scene to be seen and digested despite the distracting elements of clutter, cars and signage. It also gives the opportunity to absorb the atmosphere of the place, hearing snatches…

‘The combination here of the uncultivated and the refined is a beautiful one’ Edward Thomas, ‘Richmond Park in November’, from ‘The Last Sheaf’, 1928 OH, deer. Anciently we worshipped the cervid fauna. On an Ice Age cave wall at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire are engravings of deer, painstakingly accurate in their depiction, much as Gothic stonemasons chiselled the sculptures on the west front of Wells Cathedral in Somerset carefully for the glory of God. Any Victorian gentleman worth his relish had a stag’s antlers mounted on the wall, a trophy proof of mastery over the most sought-after beast of the hunt. Today, of course, deer are reduced to the caste of pest, overabundant. They eat trees, which is an unforgivable sin. ’Twas not always thus. The propensity of deer to…

WHAT do we really mean by Englishness in design—that magical language that is found in our long-hewn relationship between building, decoration, landscape and history? Over centuries, its many facets have intertwined to create a unique sense of style, one that has been packaged and sent around the world for three centuries, perhaps our greatest export industry of all time. It’s a question I’m rather often asked: no surprise, perhaps, given that my 2012 book English Decoration was followed four years later by English Houses and now, eight years later, by An English Vision, published last month by Rizzoli Books. Of course, few publications have done more to promote the mythic ideal of England than COUNTRY LIFE, with that particular blend of nostalgia, sense of loss of better times past and…

Pick of the crop Lampshades Pick of the crop Candle holders…

WILLIAM PEPPITT of Savills (07967 555712) is handling the sale of handsome, Grade II-listed Court Lodge, a recently renovated Queen Anne house set in 8½ acres of gardens and grounds on the western edge of the historic village of ‘old’ Chelsfield, near Orpington, which stands high on the southern edge of the London area green belt, 13½ miles from Charing Cross. He quotes a guide price of £10 million for ‘probably the only Queen Anne country house within view of Canary Wharf’, which offers 10,786sq ft of elegant living space on three floors, including four reception rooms, a cinema, study, gym and vast kitchen/breakfast room on the ground floor, with a cellar below, and nine bedrooms, plus seven bath/shower rooms on the floors above. Built in the early 18th century…

IN October, a gardener’s fancy turns to… devising a survival strategy to get himself through the winter ahead. I have never shared my wife’s great love for all that mist and mellow fruitfulness. Autumn colour brings the promise of six months of cold, miserable weather. The days get shorter and darker and none of my favourite flowers is in action. The best way to get through the gloom is to escape to a warmer climate, rather as our rich ancestors did 100 years ago. Most of them took le train bleu to the Riviera, but some more adventurous sparks overwintered in Malta or North Africa. My great-grandfather sailed off to Madeira, where his youngest son, deemed to be delicate, told me he spent the happiest days of his childhood. He…

IF you wanted a salty snack in a British pub before 1872, then there really was no need to order anything other than a pint from the barman. Before the Licensing Act that became law that year, breweries would put salt in the beer itself, keeping—as was no doubt intended—their customers thirsty and masking the often appalling quality of the ale sold to drinkers. A century and a half on and the issue of salt with your beer is once again coming out of its shell. This time, it’s due to the decline in sales of that most venerated of pint accompaniments: the humble bag of dry roasted or, more commonly, salted peanuts. Market-research firm Kantar reports a 4.5% decline in the sale of peanuts between 2020–23, worth £29.4 million…

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