Indholdsfortegnelse for July 23, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk THERE once was a time when MPs fell over themselves to go to The Game Fair (held this weekend at Ragley Hall, Warwickshire) and other countryside events in order to burnish their rural credentials and impress potential voters. Similarly, the serious press attended to report what they had to say for the next morning’s papers. Now, it seems that country dwellers need to go directly to Westminster to attract the attention of politicians and to explain the realities of life. Farmers are certainly having some success in raising their profile. Although there is no movement as yet on inheritance tax, it has surely sunk in by now that the presumed intention of penalising the affluent who…

Is ‘intelligent dressing’ the new preppy? FASHION is a fickle mistress. If, as we’re told to believe, trends change and style endures, it seems that trends take appellations with them. Take, for example, the word ‘preppy’. We cannot use it to describe clothes any more because of what it connotes: wealth, elitism, a private education. Yet, the style endures—so we rename it. Enter intelligent dressing. Last month, Jonathan Anderson kicked off his tenure at Dior with a catalogue of literary bags, inspired by the classic covers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal. His debut collection gave preppy style an erudite makeover, nodding to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s signature take on ties—half of which he wore on top of his shirt collar rather than underneath. It is a…

READERS may be surprised to learn that, by weight, the male sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) is our smallest raptor. He can be a mere 4oz and is often dwarfed by his partner: the female sparrowhawk is on average 75% heavier than her mate. However, all sparrowhawks compensate for their lack of heft with a gift for startling unpredictability. Often the best indicator of their presence is a sudden hullabaloo among the local songbirds. Then comes the cause of the anxiety: a round-winged hawk bursting forth in classic fashion, flap-flap-glide, flap-flap-glide. In an instant, it surges away and vanishes. The ornithologist Leslie Brown, known for his brilliant work in East Africa, suggested that the sparrowhawk gives an ‘impression of nervous tension unequalled by any other raptor’. It is, as a consequence, extremely…

IN an era when space is a valuable commodity, a four poster might seem an anachronism. However, when the interior designer James Thurstan Waterworth (020–8129 5855; www.thurstan.co) was asked to breathe new life into Templeton Garden, a revamped hotel in west London, he decided scale was the secret to injecting drama. ‘The aim was to refer to the history of the building, as well as introducing a contemporary, simplified look that felt young and fresh and wouldn’t detract from the garden views.’ A pared-down four-poster bed was the obvious choice; its crisp, clean lines and classic form strike a balance between modern and traditional. Designed in-house and crafted from blackened metal, it features a straight box pelmet with smart corner pleats in a honey-toned linen and cotton-blend fabric. Increasingly, four…

Grove Ley garden, Somerton, SomersetThe home of Dr and Mrs Michael Horder JAMES ALEXANDER-SINCLAIR and Monika Horder don’t bother dancing around dainty conversational niceties: ‘How many times did I tell you that you were taking on rather more than you can cope with?’ asks the designer of his German-born client. ‘Every time we met, which did of course rather irritate me,’ says Mrs Horder. Mr Alexander-Sinclair now eats his words somewhat, as Mrs Horder, a retired Lloyds underwriter-turned-letter-press printer, has proved herself more than equal to managing the acre of ornamental and kitchen garden he created for her and her husband, Michael, around their home in Somerton, Somerset. ‘It is a challenge that Monika has taken up admirably; it is quite extraordinary the way she has kept the garden going,…

To The Sea by Train: The Golden Age of Railway Travel Andrew Martin (Profile, £18.99) HAPPY are the seaside railway-terminus stations, for they signal the escape from the dusty inland city and the beginning of the summer fun. The names trip off the tongue: Eastbourne, Brighton, Skegness, Scarborough, Blackpool and Llandudno are among the best known of these resorts of human delight. Perhaps that description belongs in the past tense, however. In 2023, in her lugubriously affecting The Seaside: England’s Love Affair, author Madeleine Bunting drew a picture of a relationship turned sour. Some of these places are now resorts of despair for the left behind. Andrew Martin does not dispute Ms Bunting’s diagnosis, but insists the magic has not entirely vanished and that: ‘Sometimes the sun swinging out from…

Hear the insect hum THE ‘insectageddon’ foretold by some conservationists may be on hold: 2025 is turning out to be a remarkable year for insects. Ladybird numbers were so great at Lord’s Cricket Ground during England’s recent Test match against India that play had to be paused and there are anecdotal reports of insects splattering car windscreens in Scotland for the first time in years. Dr Francis Buner, an ornithologist and the head of wildlife recovery at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), explains that insects do well when it’s warm and humid: ‘Despite not having much rain lately, the spring was warm and quite wet, which seemed to help insects emerge.’ Jake Fiennes, head of conservation at the Holkham estate in Norfolk and a former gamekeeper, reports that…

Heart of glass YOUR July 9 issue mentioned the Barley Stained Glass Studio in York (‘The Experts Experts’). Could I draw your readers’ attention to an extraordinary example of its work in Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire? There, Keith Barley and his team have installed the huge Angel West Window (pictured): the original glass was lost to the Parliamentarians, but, in 1997, Sir Patrick Reyntiens produced a design that was modern, yet sympathetic to the 1446 framework, and spanned the 500 years between the stonework and the glass. The achievement is close to miraculous. Sally Machin, Nottinghamshire Local heroes BRITISH regional cheeses (Town & Country, July 16) really do have history in every slice. My ‘local’ is Cotherstone, deliciously crumbly and not unlike Wensleydale. We have the dreadful weather of 1947 to…

The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio ‘At university, I lived in a Jesuit hall of residence in Dublin. This painting was nearby in a smaller house only for Jesuit priests. It had hung there for more than 60 years and they always thought it was by a Belgian artist. Whenever I’m in Dublin, I see it. It means I’m home–and I always discover something new. I find the light very interesting: the dominant light sets out Jesus in that most awful moment. St John is lit in a particular way: he seems to be running–away or towards something? Then there’s the mirror reflection on the guard’s armour. This is the ultimate betrayal and I always thought the polished metal is asking us to reflect on our own lives–perhaps when we’ve…

CHAIRMAN MAO found out the hard way that Nature is not merely a ‘nice to have’, but the very life force on which our species depends for its survival. Having ordered the extermination of half a billion tree sparrows on the basis that they ate the grain destined for humans, it turned out that they actually ate the locust nymphs and aphids that ate the grain and 40 million people died in the resulting famine. We cannot even begin to imagine what happens when ecosystems start to crumble and we need our children to understand this, even if we don’t. Here in Britain, it is increasingly hard to enable children to fulfil their natural fascination with Nature; parents see themselves as too ‘time poor’ to show them the wonders of…

JULY. It’s an odd month in farming. Hay month and the ‘topping’ of weeds month. As the old rhyming saw has it about cut weeds, ‘in July they die’. Also, July is the month when friends ask for a favour, such as moving Priscilla the pig up to her summer dacha. Pampered and—how to put this kindly?—generously built, Priscilla is P. G. Wodehouse’s Empress of Blandings dressed in Gloucestershire Old Spot livery. Yesterday was D-Day, dacha day, and the morning was bright after the rain. By 11am, the valley scrimmed with haze. Mysteriously, when I arrived at the farm, Priscilla’s owner was nowhere to be seen. I was not unduly concerned. I consider myself a ‘pig man’. Besides, I had my canine assistant Rupert along to help and I had…

BOWLING along a country road at this time of year, you find yourself joining a slow-moving queue of traffic and spy what you think is smoke from a tall chimney. At last, the obstruction is revealed: an enormous pair of steel-straked rear wheels and what appears to be a coal bunker, the whole set-up reminiscent of a steam train. The driver and mate are standing, bouncing with the vibrations. As you overtake, with some alarm at the sheer size and noise of the spectacle, you catch a glimpse of shining brass and the blur of mechanical motion. You’re looking at a traction engine, quite possibly more than 100 years old and more than likely travelling to or from a steam-engine rally. ‘The engines line up and, on command, blow their…

IT is a rare privilege for a gardening writer to have a new edition of a book published posthumously. Such luminaries include Gertrude Jekyll and Russell Page… and now Roger Phillips. His bestseller, Trees, has just had a revised edition released by Macmillan, which published the ground-breaking original in 1978. The book covers trees of North America, Europe, the UK and Ireland and has been expanded to cover 650 species from the original 500. As well as its comprehensiveness, it has all the other instantly recognisable hallmarks of Phillips’s particular style that made this—and all the books he produced over a lifetime of writing about plants—so compelling. He had a way of combining simplicity of description with botanical authenticity, so a book such as Trees becomes much more than an…

THE great 16th-century Portuguese mariner Ferdinand Magellan wrote that: ‘The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore.’ Painters were among those willing to take a chance on it, too, explorers of a type, eager to search out the pictorial possibilities offered by the oceans. Some artists were as comfortable on the waves as they were on shore. Willem van de Velde witnessed the Battle of Solebay in 1672 from a rowing boat at the edge of the action; J. M. W. Turner, apocryphally perhaps, once had himself tied to the mast of a ship—like Odysseus—the better to observe a storm at sea; and Winslow Homer was never happier than in a sailing skiff off the American east coast. Others…

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Quiz of the week 1) Duke of York, Sharpe’s Express and Kerr’s Pink are all varieties of what? 2) Clio is the Greek muse of which academic subject? 3) ‘Clown of the sea’ is a nickname for which animal? 4) In which European city can the tallest church in the world be found? 5) Which brand of soup features in Andy Warhol’s soup can series? 1) Potatoes 2) History 3) Atlantic puffin (‘Fratercula arctica’) 4) Ulm, Germany (530ft) 5) Campbell’s. Riddle me this: A red herring Riddle me this I sound like a colourful fish, but that is just a distraction. What am I? Time to buy On this day… July 23, 1599 Italian painter and Renaissance bad boy Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio signed his first public commission—the Contarelli Chapel…

THIS week, our cows are in Great Broad Oaks, the field closest to the house. Sadly, after weeks without rain, there is not the usual supply of lush grass, but, as we’re not overstocked, we ought just to manage. It’s hard for them in the hot sunshine, despite the shade from overhanging trees. Oddly, cows don’t always seem to congregate where there is shade, but range over the field with no discernible pattern, except, being cows, they tend to end up on the drive just when I want to get out. It’s the one drawback of an electric car. As it makes no noise, progress is slow as each cow and calf inspects the vehicle and then, only reluctantly, decides to lumber out of the way. These cows bring joy…

Sennowe Park, Norfolk, part 1The home of Charles and Virginia Temple-Richards SENNOWE PARK is among the most magnificent and perfectly preserved of all Britain’s great Edwardian country houses. Remodelled from 1905 by the Norwich architect George Skipper for the colourful figure of Thomas Albert Cook—the grandson and namesake of the founder of the eponymous travel agency—it exemplifies the luxurious and opulent tastes of the period. The Edwardian building, however, incorporates the fabric of an earlier house and it’s only by tracing the history of this property that the form and evolution of what we see today can be properly understood. It has been speculated that the story of Sennowe might stretch back into the Middle Ages. In fact, as most recent authorities agree, it is a near certainty that the…

DAME JILLY COOPER is the master of merrily uniting two charismatic characters destined for one another on the page. In life, however, her matchmaking skills were often scuppered by another charming, coltishlegged figure: her late greyhound, Bluebell. ‘If ever I wanted to introduce a single man to a single woman and put them side by side on my sofa, Bluebell would saunter in, leaping between them, waggling her silken hips to separate them,’ she confesses. ‘She was as larky and bossily assertive as Feather was gentle.’ Feather was her first greyhound, a former racing dog that had been abandoned. ‘Hearing my beloved lurcher Hero had just died, Dr Mary Jane Fox, who rescued greyhounds in Ireland, flew Feather over to the Cotswolds to meet me,’ she recalls. ‘One lovely summer…

WHEN Jon Culverhouse went for his second interview to be curator of Burghley House in Lincolnshire, he was invited to stay overnight at the estate—together with his future wife. ‘We were due to be married in a month’s time,’ he recalls. ‘Yet, we were given separate guest flats to stay in. It was quite remarkable, because it was relatively modern times—1984.’ It was his first taste of what life at Burghley would be like. There is a long-standing tradition among Britain’s aristocracy for couples, even married, to sleep apart. As Lady Pamela Hicks, cousin of the late Duke of Edinburgh and former lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth II, told biographer Sally Bedell Smith in Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch: ‘In England, the upper classes always have had separate…

Dorset, £3.5 million Chamberlayne’s Farm, which comes with 1,520 yards of double-bank fishing—brown trout and the occasional late-season salmon—on the River Piddle, a small chalkstream rising in the Dorset Downs, stands in 182 acres between Bere Regis and Wool and within easy distance of the Jurassic coastline. The Grade II-listed former mill house and farmhouse is in need of some modernisation, but has potential as an exceptional family home, says agent Matilda Stent. Mill Pond cottage, a converted coach house, is currently used as a holiday let. Savills (01962 834036) Pembrokeshire, £1.5 million The River Cych, a trout stream that connects to the River Teifi and is classified as an SSSI, twists around the northern boundary of Lancych Mansion’s 15 acres of grounds. The river is known for its salmon…