Indholdsfortegnelse for Dec-2018 i The Field

A record number of hunts are moving point-to-point fixtures to before Christmas to avoid the congestion and often poor weather in the spring. Fourteen meetings are taking place before the end of the year, a 75% increase on last season. The North Hereford has moved its fixture from April to 24 November. “We chose to move because there’s so much point-to-pointing in the Welsh border area in the spring,” said Hilary Bubb, the hunt’s point-to-point secretary. Held on a new course at Eaton Hall in Herefordshire, home to the Price family, who bred and trained Champion Hurdle winner Flakey Dove, the meeting starts at 11.30am with a seven-race card. The Atherstone hunt has moved its fixture from March to 16 December. Secretary Mary Bourne says the move was taken to…

Christmas will have a different flavour this year for William Quarmby and his four-strong team of rowers, as they’ll be taking part in the 3,000-mile long Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge 2018. Departing on 12 December, the team, all Fieldreaders from Yorkshire, will be rowing for 24 hours a day across the Atlantic with a bucket for a bathroom, all food on board and converted sea water to drink. All apart from Quarmby, who is a landscape designer, have a forces background. Fraser Mowlem, 41, is a serving RAF technician and Glyn Sadler, 37, a former Marine who now runs a CrossFit business. The youngest member of the Row4Victory team, Duncan Roy, 28, is an ex-Army Royal Engineer who is now fitness director of a Yorkshire-based health spa. Generous sponsorship from…

1 OPEN FEATHER BRACELET STEPHEN WEBSTER A pheasant feather in white pavé diamonds, choose from 18 carat white or rose gold. Other pieces available in the Magnipheasant collection. Bag the perfect brace. • Price £11,650 • Tel 020 3298 0970 • www.stephenwebster.com 2 GROSVENOR SMOKING JACKET FAVOURBROOK Cut to a slim silhouette in striking new season colours. Smoking jacket in velvet, made in the UK. Country house smarts for the festive season. • Price £690 • Tel 020 7493 5060 • www.favourbrook.com 3 SILK PURSE THE ENGLISH ROOM Limited-edition Chinese silk in pink or red, with vibrant lining. Choose from monogram or Chinese motif. Made in England. • Price £68 • Tel 020 7839 2318 • www.theenglishroom.com 4 CANDLE MR TROTTER’S Three British, alcohol-inspired scents from piggy snack guru Mr Trotter. Gin, whisky and IPA candles, come in glass…

BRExIT boltholes are like buses. I am now torn between a spectacular old quarry in Wales complete with derelict farmhouse, a remote Highland estate on the banks of a loch or a fortress island off Plymouth named after Sir Francis Drake. By Brexit bolthole I mean an escape from the incessant noise and conflict emanating from the negotiations. Never mind Brexiting or remaining, just hide me from the one-eyed armies. The Trimm Rock Quarry is breathtaking, looking more like some ancient, lost kingdom with dramatic rock faces forming an amphitheatre around a five-acre lake. To mix legends, you expect Excalibur to rise from the water into the hands of Frodo as his quest takes a detour through Mold in Flintshire. The quarry has Outward Bound opportunity written all over it.…

HIGHHEAD CASTLE IVEGILL, CARLISLE, CUMBRIA As shells go this is an impressive one, belonging to a four-storey Palladian Grade II*-listed country house with a Grade II* Tudor wing and an Edwardian Grade II servants’ hall – the only part habitable. Highhead Castle, which comes with 18 acres, was gutted by a fire in 1956. It sits on a 100ft gorge above the River Ive, eight miles from Carlisle. When a house has been ‘de-vegetated’ and stabilised, you can guess the state it is in. The servants’ wing has two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room and bathroom. The grounds include gardens and woodland. Agents: PFK and Savills Tel: 01768 862323 and 01325 370500 Guide price: £250,000…

YOU know that song, All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth? Well, all I want for Christmas is a lateral incisor implant, some top and bottom Invisalign braces and three new white fillings, which turns out will cost about 7,000 quid, so if anyone is feeling generous do get in touch, or I’ll be making a paper bag from Christmas wrapping paper to stick over my head in the new year. In fact, that’s not all I want for Christmas. I have a list, at the top of which is a bed to sleep on for the festive period. When I was a child, and our oversized family all used to stay at Grandma’s, I thought it was wonderful. How fun it must have been for my…

Local advice is often invaluable but this caught me by surprise. “Like a squirrel?” I replied, not quite sure I’d heard. “Yes,” confirmed the shop owner, leaning forward to point towards the sort of thing he had in mind. “Much bigger. Like this. Like a squirrel.” The fly he was referring to, if fly was a term that came anywhere near describing the thick nest of deer hair laid on the counter before me, looked more like a small rat. There was a reason. Trying to avoid the cold stare from an extremely realistic rodent eye, my look of disbelief must have been evident. “It is true. The last big fish caught here had three or four mice part digested in its stomach. If you use the tiny flies you…

It was an engraving on the cover of a Christmas supplement to the Illustrated London News that launched the Christmas tree onto an unsuspecting British public. Introduced from Germany to the Court of George III, the tree had become central to the Christmas festivities of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 1840s, and when an endearing picture of the Royal couple and their young family beside a candle-lit tree adorned with gifts and baubles was published in 1848, the convention of bringing a decorated fir tree into the home was eagerly imitated by Britain’s wealthier families. “Some 7.5m trees are sold in Britain each year, at an average price of £40” The idea of illuminating a Christmas tree with burning candles seems remarkably risky to our sensibilities, and in…

Pheromones are essentially our external hormones: it’s alleged they induce sexual arousal in others. But their existence is contentious. What is less open to debate is the primal effect fragrance can have on us. Dove puts it pretty bluntly: “We smell with the most primitive part of our brain, where all of our emotions are processed. It’s the animal part of us and, of course, sex is one of the most animal things we do, so if someone doesn’t smell right, the sex is going to go nowhere.” He warns that, “very fresh, citrus scents communicate someone with an overly clean home. If you want to create an environment bordering on disciplinarian try leathers, mosses, woods. These materials suggest the excitement of someone who is self-assured and will take you…

Entrants for Gundog Photograph of the Year, capturing the best of our companions in the field CHRISTMAS CRACKERS If you have a photograph you would like to enter for the 2019 awards, please email field.secretary@ti-media.com Full terms and conditions apply www.thefield.co.uk/gundog-awards…

RURAL OSCARS Village shops, pubs, butchers and rural enterprises that ‘go the extra mile’ are sought for the 14th Countryside Alliance Awards. Judges are looking not just for great produce, customer service and innovation, but stories of how businesses have served their communities. The regional winners go to the House of Lords next June for the final. To nominate, by 9 December, go to: www.countryside-alliance.org/campaigns/caawards ANNE VOSS-BARK AWARD PhD student William Davison has won the 2018 Anne Voss-Bark Memorial Award, set up by Salmon & Trout Conservation. In October, he spent a week at the West Country Rivers Trust to further his research as part of his prize. After a degree in biological sciences at Exeter University, Davison continued his studies on aquatic environments with a PhD titled, Using physiology…

2 BASC Young Shots Introduction to Wildfowling Day Lakeside Sporting, Wymeswold, Leicestershire. Minimum age 13 and with own gun. Cost £35. Tel 01283 810910; email central@basc.org.uk 3-5 Retriever Championship Packington Estate, Meriden, West Midlands. www.igl.org.uk 4-8 New works by Mandy Shepherd Rountree Tryon Gallery, St James’s, London SW1 and from 10-15 Petworth Gallery. Tel 020 7839 8083 or 01798 344207; www.rountreetryon.com 5 Concert: Songs of The Light Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire. thelight2018.com 5 The Essex Hip Flash Challenge Great Pitley Farm, Great Bardfield, Essex. www.gwct.org.uk/events 6 G4 Christmas Tour 2018 Durham Cathedral (plus 24 other cathedrals). Tel 0191 338 7178; www.durhamcathedral.co.uk 6-9 Burghley Christmas Fair Burghley House, Lincolnshire. Tel 01780 752451; www.burghley.co.uk 12 Gavin Gardiner’s Sale of Fine Modern and Vintage Sporting Guns Sotheby’s 34-35 New Bond Street, London W1. Tel…

THE inaugural Eat Game Awards celebrated the very best in game eating, cooking and retailing at Boisdale of Canary Wharf in October. The awards – an initiative by Taste of Game, James Purdey & Sons and Boisdale Restaurants – gave the general public the chance to vote for their favourites and celebrate those who are cutting a swathe as the champions of the game world. Hosts Adam Henson, JB Gill, William Sitwell, Rose Prince and Mark Hix exhorted both the necessity of and pleasure in eating game, the latter message reinforced with an elaborate menu that included many of our gamebirds. Even the pre-dinner drinks had a shooting-party flavour, with guests served King’s & Tonic, a zesty concoction made with the King’s Ginger Liqueur. Such was the level of enjoyment…

ASHTON MANOR LOWER ASHTON, EXETER, DEVON Set in the Teign Valley eight miles from Exeter, Ashton Manor stands in 83 acres, including landscaped gardens, parkland, woodland and pasture; there is also stabling, a tennis court and a kitchen garden. It has 10 bedrooms, an indoor swimming pool and coach house. Agents: Strutt & Parker and Knight Frank Tel: 01392 215631 and 01392 848842 Offers in excess of £3m GREAT NURCOTT WINSFORD, MINEHEAD, SOMERSET Great Nurcott comes with just over 477 acres in the Exmoor National Park. It has been occupied by the same family for more than a century. The house is Grade II listed and there are shooting rights across the whole property – currently let – and double-bank fishing on the Exe. Agent: Greenslade Taylor Hunt Tel: 01769…

TADDLESTONES TARRANT MONKTON, DORSET This Grade II-listed thatched cottage sits in just over a third of an acre of landscaped gardens. It has four bedrooms and a wealth of period features. The kitchen/breakfast room was added in the 1980s. The property is six miles from Blandford Forum. Agent: Abbot & Slater Tel: 01258 830860 Guide price: £625,000 THE CHESTNUTS ASTON TIRROLD, DIDCOT, OXFORDSHIRE A Grade II-listed, late-17th-century detached cottage that has been extended and updated to provide almost 2,300sq ft of accommodation. Period features include beams and an inglenook fireplace. The gardens were designed by a Chelsea gold medal winner. Agent: Strutt & Parker Tel: 0118 984 5757 Guide price: £1.25m PEACOCK COTTAGE CRAWLEY END, CHRISHALL, ESSEX A three-bedroom, Grade II-listed cottage, re-thatched in 2016. It also has a modern…

Whatever climate change deniers may say, the climate has most definitely been extremely changeable lately. Last summer’s heatwave followed a winter that was as white as a Dickensian Christmas card. However, some pheasants are very much at home in snowscapes, so while I was trapped in a drift on the M6, the birds at Old Long Mountain shoot near Welshpool, in the Marches, flew very happily. Gerwyn Jones’s roving syndicate, with members coming from all over the country, had wisely decided to stay up the night before. Jones says: “It was lucky that everybody had come up before the snow hit. The snow started to come down just as we were beginning the first drive and it wasn’t really enough at that stage to make it difficult. Then, by the…

A certain wistfulness coloured the claim, in 1612, by Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, that “there were wont to be reckoned three wonders of England – ecclesia, foemina [sic], lana – churches, women and wool”. For 200 years, beginning at the end of the 13th century, the wool trade had formed the backbone of England’s economy, a mainstay of national revenues, funding, for example, opening skirmishes of the Hundred Years War. In the dog days of Tudor England royal taxation was among factors that brought about its decline; the same period witnessed completion of the English Reformation and the Church of England’s break from Rome. Although neither development dimmed the wonders of English womanhood, falling wool revenues and new attitudes to church building and decoration contributed to the demise…

This year, don’t exhaust yourself trudging up and down the High Street while jostling with the gift- seeking hordes. Let us help take the stress out of Christmas shopping with a few excellent present ideas for the countryman or woman in your life. (Perhaps even treat yourself to a little something, too?) From jewellery and clothing to field kit and footwear, these great items have been created by those at the top of their game, offering the style, originality and practicality that is required at the Boxing Day meet, on a high-bird day in Devon, stalking in the Highlands or simply enjoying a stroll after that Christmas dinner. Check out the producers’ websites for other options and then start ticking off names on that Christmas gift list. Christmas shopping? Its…

4711, Mäurer & Wirtz - 1779 Technically an eau de cologne, neither cool nor sexy but enthusiastically old-fashioned. Jicky, Guerlain - 1889 The oldest, continuously produced perfume has notes of spice, lemon, lavender, wood and vanilla. Mitsouko, Guerlain - 1919 Top notes of bergamot, middle notes of peach, clove, rose, jasmine and iris, with base notes of vetiver, oak moss and labdanum. Shalimar, Guerlain - 1921 This oriental fragrance with amber-woody notes was popular with flapper girls in the 1920s, giving it a risqué reputation. No 5, Chanel - 1921 Citrus top notes alongside rose, jasmine, vanilla and aldehydes were enough for Marilyn to turn this into a classic.…

This large sheet from 1535-40 must be part of a collection on the theme of wisdom and folly symbolised by birds. The Prints Department holds two others, featuring a passerine bird advocating lust and a cockerel as a good governor. Here, the peacock encourages the behaviour of a rich tyrant who has no desire to be loved. Judging from their format, ornamental quality and the poor state of their reverse sides, they were likely to have been used as wallpaper. Edited extract from Animal: A Beastly Compendium by Rémi Mathis and Valérie Sueur-Hermel. Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts. RRP £30. Treasures from the prints and photographs department at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France…

I HOPE everyone who made it to the Game Fair at Ragley Hall in July set aside plenty of time to wallow in the weaponry on display at the various specialist gun auctioneers’ tents. These viewings are a golden opportunity for we folk not involved in the gun trade to spend time with killing kit we would not normally get our mitts on, be that modern shotguns or ancient flintlocks; pick them up, ask questions, swing them around, look at them in natural sunlight (always different to electric light); decide if you want anything and – unlike other ‘selling’ stands, whereby failing to lash out with your bank card you risk returning to find it has been bagged – all with no pressure to buy as it is a preview.…

DON’T get me started. DO NOT get me started. But am I right or am I right when I say that Christmas gets earlier every year? There were mince pies (best before 12 October, for heaven’s sake), Christmas puddings, festively packaged bottles and Santa Claus chocolates in my local supermarket in the middle of September. The MIDDLE of SEPTEMBER! There were even – and I kid you not – festive bloody dog chews. I mean, what the heck is all that about? ‘Santa’s on his sleigh, Santa’s on his way!’ shouted one sign. ‘Christmas is coming, get ready!’ yelled another. Why on earth does everyone want to wish away autumn, one of the loveliest times of the year? Grrr!! “I ensure there’s some tawny port in the cupboard, Baileys in…

Wear a life vest. If you are unfortunate enough to fall in and get washed down the river, wearing a lifevest may just save your life. Your chest waders don’t fill up with air and keep you afloat! All your waders do if you are wearing a properly fastened wading belt is reduce the speed your waders fill up with water. Please don’t be macho and ignorant when you are wading a river and wear a lifevest. The hooks we use when salmon fishing tend not to have the barb removed. Please wear your glasses and a hat, which not only protect you from the sun’s rays and the glare off the water but will save your eyes and head from hooks during a stray cast.…

HORSE RACING TERMS Even if one is adept at telling a puller from a maiden, a short head from a nose, Rosemary Coates’ delightfully illustrated volume will still find itself a favourite with connections. The racing enthusiast and artist has put together a comic racing glossary, alongside her witty drawings, to help us decipher the language of the turf. With an introduction by Adrian McGlynn at Weatherbys, the reader can be sure the guide will be authoritative. Coates manages to balance humour and pithy, to-the-point explanation. The complexities of the racing world are defined with clarity. A sure bet for the Christmas stocking, the sport of kings has found a colourful interpreter. By Rosemary Coates Merlin Unwin, £9 WRITTEN IN HISTORY Letters are love, longing, life. They are pain, hurt…

IF I asked you to provide me with three interesting facts about beavers, could you? And let’s keep Boris Johnson and Donald Trump out of the answers. Here are my three. Firstly, they are herbivores, so they don’t eat fish – riparian owners, often their most vociferous protagonists, please note. Secondly, like the Bee Gees, their front teeth never stop growing. And, thirdly, it was estimated that just 100 years ago there were more than 60 million American beavers. Currently, the figure is less than 12 million. The cause of their destruction: man. We have killed them for their fur and destroyed their habitat for our own pleasure and commercial gain. “We are now living in the ‘Me Me’ moment… no wonder there is so much frustration” A friend of…

MOST VIEWED Serious kit This super outtake by Mark Beedie from our Three Valleys shoot report in the October issue got Fielders talking about serious kit for serious sport. Many admirers were keen to get their hands on this type of cartridge bag, usually sported by professional loaders for those hot moments in a drive. Some, however, are kitted out already: “I have the same make – just less pouches in front,” said one. “Still not enough for me, I’ll still miss,” joked another. #THEFIELDMAGAZINE Braking point Fielders were greatly amused by this picture of working clumber spaniel Bentley and Ruby, a rescue French pointer. “Clumbers have 4x4 brakes. Unlike pointers,” joked Bentley’s owner. “Love the way the spaniel is totally unconcerned by a cartwheeling pointer,” said one Tweeter. “Bentley…

ASKED to name a classic shooting book, few would pick Richmal Crompton’s Just William, the story of a feral schoolboy and his gang, the Outlaws. Yet reading it, aged eight, began my shooting career. William, Ginger, Douglas and Henry are on the warpath, determined to bash the rival gang led by the ghastly Hubert Lane. Like all proper warriors, they are heavily armed, festooned with an array of weaponry including wooden swords, catapults and an airgun. Now I possessed most of this childhood armoury and was pretty adept with a catty lethally loaded with marbles. But I lacked an airgun and, keen to emulate William, my boyish heart yearned for one. Acquiring such a treasure took guile. Parents never bought stuff on demand and pocket money being sporadic meant the…

“My aunt never got out of bed with out Guerlain Jicky. I can’t smell it without bursting into tears. Proust and all that.” Jenny Elkus, architect, Boston, MA “I really loathe anything with a vanilla base, because it’s so cloying and makes me feel claustrophobic, and usually like anything that has vetiver or citrus in it for exactly the opposite reason.” Caroline Gill, classical music commentator, Hampshire, UK “Lalique Amethyst. The cherry low note drives me wild.” Edward Evans, writer, Tel Aviv, Israel “I wear Floris, Bergamotto Di Positano, but the smell of basil or lemongrass can stop me in my tracks. I had Floris make me a scent but I rather ruined it by insisting on too much passion fruit oil. It’s a great gift though.” Catherine Hackett, blogger,…

VEG WITH AN EDGE Q I am a traditional cook who has been preparing shoot lunches for many years. I like to provide a roast joint of some description but with all the youngsters coming through and a few modern gentleman I feel it’s time I introduced a few changes. I plan to stick with the roast but would like to try something different on the veg front. Nothing too complicated. Any suggestions? VC, by email A A tasty recipe pinched from a shoot lunch and ideally served with a joint of meat involves spicing up the traditional roast potatoes. Peel and cook 1 kg of potatoes in boiling water until tender, then drain. Place them in a large bowl with 6 peeled banana shallots halved lengthways. To the bowl…