Innholdsfortegnelse for November 13, 2024 i Country Life

Quiz of the week 1) ‘Warwickshire Drooper’, ‘Opal’ and ‘Marjorie’s Seedling’ are varieties of which fruit? 2) The band name Mungo Jerry was a misspelling of a character from which book? 3) Which is England’s deepest lake? 4) In Greek mythology, which weaver was turned into a spider by Athena? 5) Which future English duchess was born Bessie Wallis Warfield? 1) Plum 2) ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ 3) Wastwater, Lake District 4) Arachne 5) Wallis Simpson/Duchess of Windsor. Riddle me this: They’re beds Riddle me this The king, the queen and the twins are all sharing a room, yet there isn’t a person to be seen. How can this be? Time to buy On this day… November 13, 1979 The Times appeared on newsstands for the first time…

Apethorpe Palace, Northamptonshire, part IA seat of Baron and Baroness von Pfetten APETHORPE PALACE, built in warm, golden stone, with its clustered gables, mullioned windows and tall stone chimneys, strikes the eye almost as a small town. Arranged around three courtyards, this great residence has grown incrementally over time (Fig 1). As will be described in next week’s article, a medieval manor house was massively extended in the early 17th century to accommodate royal hunting parties and further remodelled in the mid 18th century, before its adaptation in the early 1900s by Reginald Blomfield. Since 2014, it has been subject to an exemplary programme of repair and refurbishment by Baron and Baroness von Pfetten and it is now once more a family home, for the first time since the 1930s,…

IN a world where influencers are paid to promote products across their social-media accounts, it can be difficult to know who and what to trust. Thankfully, when on the hunt for a genuine and honest recommendation, we can always turn to the original influencers: the Royal Family. The big names on Instagram and TikTok have only really been in play for the past decade or so, whereas the Royal Family has been leading the charge on what’s hot and what’s not for centuries and the ultimate stamp of approval is awarded in the form of a Royal Warrant of Appointment. Granted as a mark of recognition to those who have regularly supplied goods or services to the Royal Household, the history of royal patronage can be traced back to medieval…

CHRISTMAS, with all its rituals and traditions, begins with the appearance of the Advent calendar. How well I remember stealing downstairs in my nightdress as a child on December 1 to prise open the cardboard door before the rest of the household was awake. Even now, I can visualise the candle behind number one, with its evergreen wreath and flame dusted with glitter. It wasn’t a surprise because this was the same Advent calendar we’d had the year before, with the doors pressed firmly shut again. Yet, somehow, this familiarity didn’t matter a jot; in fact, it was all part of the build-up, gently melding memories and nostalgia to last a lifetime. Advent without a calendar to track the mounting excitement is unthinkable, yet, although the innovation has delighted children…

WHEN the team at Sims Hilditch was asked to overhaul the interiors of this house overlooking Mylor Creek in south Cornwall, the clients explicitly requested a neutral colour scheme and that patterns be kept to a minimum. ‘On the upper floors, we were able to push this a bit, but, for this sitting room, we kept close to that original brief,’ explains senior studio lead Hannah Linford. ‘When people think of Cornwall, they imagine a beautiful day with blue skies, but we all know there are plenty of months in the year when it’s rather grey,’ she adds. ‘We wanted to introduce some warm tones to counter those days. Fortunately, our client has a lovely collection of art and these paintings, together with the scatter cushions, provide little injections of…

IS your idea of rural bliss a Georgian gem in a village of honey-coloured stone surrounded by unspoilt countryside? We’re not talking about the Cotswolds, rather the East Midlands secret that is Rutland. This area of gentle rolling hills, where, as Bach may have said, ‘sheep may safely graze’, is England’s smallest county. You could drive past on the A1 and barely know you had done so, which perhaps explains why it is so bafflingly overlooked. Yet it deserves attention. Rutland (and some of the bordering ‘Notswolds’ counties of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire) have the same mellow, creamy limestone as the Cotswolds and boast beguiling market towns and villages that are every bit as attractive, but without the tourists or hefty prices. If you wish to buy a coveted rectory…

Porcini mushroom and beef stroganoff Ingredients 30g unsalted butter500g beef sirloin or fillet, sliced into thin strips1 onion, diced300g fresh porcini mushrooms, cleaned and torn200g portabellini mushrooms, torn2 garlic cloves, grated1tbspn plain flour250ml beef stock1tbspn Dijon mustard1tbspn Worcestershire sauce250ml sour cream100ml double cream3 pickled gherkins1tbspn fresh parsley, chopped400g tagliatelle pasta or wide egg noodles Method ▸ Heat a splash of olive oil and half the butter in a large casserole. Season the beef all over and then sear the strips in batches for 1–2 minutes per side until browned, but still slightly pink in the middle. Remove the beef from the pan and set aside. ▸ To the same dish, add another splash of olive oil and the remaining butter. Add the finely chopped onion and cook gently until…

WHEN Celia Joicey stepped through the doors of a department store in Co Durham in 1989, she had no inkling that textiles would become her life. Now the director of Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios, a contemporary art gallery and museum centred on a 112-year-old tapestry studio, she had grown up in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, where, she says, there were few shops or museums that showed art or design. This changed after her move to North Yorkshire, which allowed her to reach the art galleries in York and Newcastle and the shops in Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees and Darlington that sold beautiful remnant material. It’s there that, as a bright-eyed sixth-former, she bought some Bloomsbury textiles that Laura Ashley had designed a few years earlier. Duncan Grant, one of the Bloomsbury Group’s last survivors, had…

WRITERS and landscapes can produce magic together. Think of Emily Brontë and the Pennine moors or Thomas Hardy and Dorsetshire heath—some writers and some landscapes simply seem made for one another. At Brimham Rocks in Nidderdale, near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, the National Trust is hoping that a young writer can strike up a new kind of relationship with the site’s heathland, birch woodland and ancient gritstone formations. Huddersfield-born Natalie Anastasia Davies is the site’s first writer-in-residence. ‘I believe that connection with the natural world is integral to our sense of meaning and wellbeing,’ the writer said on her appointment earlier this year. ‘It is a rare thing in our bustling lives to have time in Nature, to be, realise and create.’ She feels privileged, she added, to be the first…

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Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IT was perhaps no accident that the anguished poet Sylvia Plath chose an elm tree through which to express life’s suffering. By the time her poem Elm was published in 1965, disease was ravaging this beauteous tree, once a glorious, watchful punctuation mark of the English landscape, a towering element of John Constable’s paintings and a giver of the wood that made the ships of great explorers. In 2014, a lawyer called Dr David Herling, who was not a scientist, but had loved the trees all his life, had the foresight to create a hybrid elm in the hope of producing a robust specimen. Tree planting tends to be a generous act: few planters live to…

’Tis the season OUR experience casts doubt on the ‘small window of opportunity’ for harvesting chanterelles (From the fields, October 30). The earliest we have gathered these treats is May and the latest was Christmas Day. That particular year, we celebrated Christmas on our own and, anticipating an indulgent meal and a somnolent afternoon, went for a preprandial walk through the woods up to Craigmonie with its Scots pine-framed view of Loch Ness. Sitting at the top, sipping coffee, something bright yellow winked at us through the dead grass. It was enough freshly emerged chanterelles to mix with cream, season with sherry, dust with thyme and parsley and enthrone on toast for an elegant starter to our Christmas lunch. Revd Dr John S. Ross, Inverness-shire Seasoned advice MY husband declared…

Night Thoughts by Howard Hodgkin ‘I was fortunate to visit Howard Hodgkin’s studio in 2015, when he was getting ready for a New York show and had many paintings laid out. Night Thoughts stood out because it was monochrome. I have always been drawn to Howard’s work because of his use of colour to convey emotion, but this painting distils all his techniques and preoccupations in gradations of white, grey and black. As a composer, sometimes your best work comes from a sense of constriction–tight boundaries can push you, you find emotional force. When I met Howard, he was listening to one of Bach’s Cello Suites, where a solo instrument has to convey all harmonic expressivity. I feel Night Thoughts has a similar approach: he has constricted himself in colour,…

THE British Museum began in Jamaica. It was there that Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) had gone as physician to the island’s new governor, Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle. Sloane was born in Northern Ireland, apparently a curious child, who grew into a man of voracious intellectual curiosity and a particular passion for natural sciences (right). He gathered more than 800 specimens of plants, animals, shells and rocks from that visit to the Caribbean, which he brought back on his return to England in 1689. This first foray into collecting whetted his appetite. Over the following decades, Sloane not only became physician to three monarchs (Queen Anne, Georges I and II), a philanthropist and a pioneering proponent of the smallpox vaccine, but amassed with abandon everything from fish and insects…

PROCURE a fine, lively fat turtle,’ reads the first line of a royal recipe for turtle soup, which runs on for many pages, including detailed notes on the slaughter (‘kill the turtle overnight so that it may be left to bleed in a cool place…’) and exactly how to cut the flesh from the shell. Edward VII couldn’t get enough of the stuff and was rarely without a flask to hand. Yet, even with a kitchen brigade of 42, making this soup took both time and toil. This blessed broth, however, was nothing when compared with his favourite dish, Côtelettes de Bécassines à la Souvaroff. Here, a snipe was deboned, spread with foie gras and game forcemeat, breadcrumbed, wrapped in pig’s caul, grilled and smothered in a truffle-and-Madeira sauce. Hours…

THE thrilling days of early summer have long passed, the intoxicating perfume of the roses and the dizzying brilliance of their flowers a distant memory. Some roses, however, have not finished enchanting us and are now producing colourful hips that seem to have been designed to sparkle in the low light of autumn. They have none of the plant’s flamboyance of a few months ago, but their charm and simplicity are a perfect accompaniment to the gentle descent into winter. Rose hips are the capsules that contain the plant’s seeds and, given the opportunity, all roses will produce hips. Most gardeners tend to deadhead their roses, either to encourage re-flowering or to have a tidy shrub, thus preventing the plant from producing seed. There is little point, however, in doing…

THERE is an old country saying about good farmers going about their daily chores as if they are going to live forever. Planting trees in the shade of which they will never sit is one example of this wise way of rural thinking. Sons and daughters of the soil who grow carrots are testament to this old adage. The thing is, as many an amateur kitchen gardener will testify, carrots are far from easy to grow. For something so taken for granted—the quick snack for children and the easy splash of colour on the plate—the trials, tribulations and downright tear-jerking torment that go into growing the humble carrot are almost Shakespearean in their pathos. Carrots wilt if there is too much sunshine and rot in sodden soils. They don’t like…

By Jove Jupiter Artland, Wilkieston, West Lothian, recommended by Giuseppe Albano, director, the Freud Museum, London NW3 JUPITER ARTLAND is an outdoor sculpture park that is set in 100 acres of woodland and meadows surrounding a Jacobean-style house. The combination of art and landscape makes for a sublime experience, with some-thing for every generation to enjoy. Don’t miss Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Temple of Apollo is my favourite sculpture in my favourite spot. Originally conceived for Finlay’s own garden, it’s a neo-Classical temple with an elegant gold inscription and a dome and oculus reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome—but in the middle of a forest. It will tease out the inner romantic in just about anyone. If you go in summer, bring your swimming costume and book a swim at Gateway,…

The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History Andrew Jotischky (Yale University Press, £25) IN the early years of the 9th century, an idealised—but very detailed—plan setting out the Carolingian vision of a reformed Benedictine monastery was produced at the island abbey of Reichenau, on Lake Constance in Switzerland. Probably commissioned by Abbot Haito, this remarkable document was sent to Gozbert, who ruled the nearby abbey of St Gall, where it remains to this day. As Andrew Jotischky tells us, it is a strong indication that the Benedictines of Charlemagne’s great empire had been ‘reflecting deeply on the nature of the monastery in abstract terms’. At the heart of the ‘St Gall plan’ was a square open cloister, enclosed on all sides and thus a secret place cut off from the rest…

SOS: save our wild salmon Jane Wheatley examines the dire situation facing the king of fish THE wild Atlantic salmon, kingpin and ‘natural royalty’ of the river, is officially an endangered species in Britain. Stocks recorded by the Environment Agency in England and Wales crashed from 20,000 in 2017 to an all-time low of 5,399 in 2023. Salmon lead a perilous life: after one to three years in the river in which they were born, they set out to sea on a 2,000-mile round trip to feeding grounds in the North Atlantic, dodging predators all the way. Those that do make it back to their natal waters face further hazards on the run to spawning grounds up river. However, for all of the past century, millions did succeed in the…

IN the full flood of the fallout from Labour’s Budget, the Tories have a new leader. Kemi Badenoch defeated her rival by a respectable majority and, agree with her or not, her election must be hailed as a significant moment when Britain’s right-of-centre party elects a Nigerian-raised woman as its leader. Of course, it’s not new in Tory history. Choosing the grandson of a Jewish immigrant in the 19th century, a builder’s son and then a woman in the 20th, a Hindu of Indian heritage and, finally, a woman of African descent in the 21st, helps to explain why Conservative adaptation makes it the longest-serving political party in the world. The question now is what Mrs Badenoch is going to do with the opportunity. In her elegant victory address, she…

‘I wondered why it is that we’re all such bloody fools. Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they do spend their time on, just walk round looking at things? That pool, for instance—all the stuff that’s in it… mystery of their lives, down there under water’ George Orwell, ‘Coming Up for Air’ (1939) I CONFESS that this is a fishy story. I was driving to Crummock Water, one of the Lake District’s less tourist-mobbed destinations (if you want a tip, Thirlmere is another), but stopped on the north-east bank of Windermere for a breather. Parked the car near the village of Troutbeck, walked to the stony shore, admired the spirograph patterns of the raindrops on the gin-clear water, childishly stepped out along a row of black stones into the…

PERHAPS more so than any other feature, the English landscape is characterised by its trees. It’s the impenetrable thickets of blackthorn and hawthorn, billowing with delicate spring blossom. The solitary veteran oaks, punctuating graceful parklands with their ancient, crooked boughs. The formal majesty of an avenue of purposeful limes. Then, there are the innumerable street trees—the quiet sentinels of our villages and towns. Together, these eclectic individuals make up the fabric of the modern British landscape, as they have done for millennia. In more recent times, however, there has been one irrevocable omission: devastated by disease, our elms have all but disappeared. Within living memory, so many of our hedgerows, lanes and parks were awash with elm trees. Several varieties once thrived here, but it’s the eponymous English elm (Ulmus…

A SERIES of owners, from medieval to modern times, have left their mark on three historic country houses that have recently come to the market. The first is Grade II*-listed The Old Hall, a substantial property set in 14¾ acres of old and beautiful gardens on the edge of the picturesque village of Netherseal. It lies in the extreme south of Derbyshire, bounded to the south by the River Mease, which marks the county border with Leicestershire, of which it was once a part. The former manor house, which is largely hidden and enclosed by boundary walls, yew hedges and lime trees, stands next to the 13th-century church of St Peter at the heart of the Netherseal Conservation Area. Comprehensively renovated and modernised by its current owners, The Old Hall…

I HAVE been planting English bluebells. They grow in their millions in the beechwoods that surround us—but not in our own garden. They are, however, a protected species. The law is clear and uncompromising: ‘It is illegal to dig up bluebells or their bulbs from the wild, or to trade or sell wild bluebell bulbs and seeds.’ I have, therefore, had to buy them from a respectable bulb-merchant. The irony is that our garden is swamped by the other sort—vulgar Spanish bluebells, now known as Hyacinthoides hispanica, in the same way that our own English species, which has seen many name changes over the centuries, is now known as Hyacinthoides non-scripta. Some botanists believe that the Spanish invader presents a national threat to our own native beauties. Their learned articles…

GAIL’S, the chain of boutique bakeries that extends across London and the South, has become an institution: its wares are sold in quantity around the country through Waitrose and Ocado. Founded in the 1990s to supply handmade artisan loaves to chefs, the business has grown enormously. However, the backbone of it, which lives on in the bakery, is still a huge bubbling, burping, living thing. It is, of course, a sourdough starter, a primordial-looking organism that is integral to breadmaking. Every bakery worth the name has one and the style of baking it facilitates is ancient. Traces of starters have been found in Egyptian pottery dating from about 1500BC; it’s been hypothesised that someone accidentally left a portion of either flatbread dough or porridge out overnight, returned to discover it…