Indholdsfortegnelse for September 17, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk THERE is a fly in the Government’s housing ointment—or, more accurately, a bat and a newt. Committed to constructing 1.5 million new homes in England, Labour figures, among them the Prime Minister and Chancellor, have railed that protections for wildlife are ‘blocks’ on building. Indeed, Rachel Reeves recently blamed the animal order Chiroptera for HS2’s failure to reach Leeds, declaring: ‘I’m afraid, as a country, we’ve cared more about the bats than we have about the commuter times for people in Leeds and West Yorkshire.’ She proceeded to add snails to the list of obstructionist fauna. HS2 is a particular bugbear with the Government, which cites the rail line’s £100 million ‘bat tunnel’ in Buckinghamshire as…

Is peated whisky living on borrowed time? WHAT is the best use of £60? According to Charles Spinola, founder and director of Cartwright Jenson Group, a whisky-acquisition advisory firm, the answer is buying a bottle of peat. This is the colloquial name given to whiskies that have been laced with smoke from decomposed plants and mosses. Although the liquor has been a drinker’s favourite for centuries, its flavour achieved by burning peat beneath the flowering barley in a kiln, its future is anything but certain. This is because the magic ingredient is also a huge pollutant: when peat burns, it releases a large amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. Will peated whisky’s stock rise before it disappears? This is the question being posed by collectors…

Capel House, Badminton, GloucestershireThe home of Gerald Harford and Jane MacEwen THE village street at Badminton is a charming architectural set piece, redolent of benevolent feudalism. It forms a wide, straight, east-west axis focused on the 19th-century gates of the ‘Big House’ and is lined with ochre-washed terraces, cottages, as well as some larger houses mainly dating from the reign of Queen Anne. There are muscular rubble, and barge-boarded Victorian model dwellings too, designed by Tait, the estate surveyor, in about 1860, to add a little grit to the oyster. At the east end before the lamp-flanked gates, the street widens into an informal square with a grass rondel and a handsome hybrid plane tree planted 50 years ago as a present by the Countess of Westmorland. This is over-looked…

THERE is a wooden step stile a mile or so from my front door: old and rickety, mossy-stumped and hedge-bound. I rarely approach it without thinking of our first family dog. A stout, sturdy and athletic fellow, he crossed that stile from puppyhood, front paws as a lever to his leap, landing on the other side with a thump or splosh depending on the weather. Then, one day when he was in his 11th year, he made to do the same. This time, however, he failed to clear the cross-bar and fell backwards in an inelegant heap. Twice more he gamely tried to vault the stile with the same painful result. After the third failure, he sat down and looked up at me with the sad, bewildered eyes of one…

The Men Who Created Winnie-The-Pooh: The Lives Of A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard James Campbell (Michael O’Mara Books, £25) WHEN A. A. Milne, as a young assistant editor of Punch, saw a cartoon submitted by aspiring illustrator E. H. Shepard in 1907, he exclaimed: ‘He’s perfectly hopeless.’ Who could have foreseen that, within 20 years, the pair would ‘create a language, an image and a brand’ that resonated across generations. Yet, with the centenary of the publication of Winnie-The-Pooh next year, the second in a series of four children’s books (When We Were Very Young was first in 1924), memories of Milne and Shepard are fading. None of Milne’s other works, apart from Toad of Toad Hall, adapted for the stage from The Wind In The Willows (the…

Counting the cost of bird flu WHEN egg farmer Jerry Saunders found two of his hens struck down by avian influenza (AI) in February this year, he had to cull his entire flock of 5,000 home-bred, free-range birds. He lost all his customers including the biggest, Riverford, and says that he has neither the heart nor the finances to re-stock. ‘Compensation would have barely touched the sides and the disease is still rife,’ he says. ‘Why on earth would we go back for more? It is probably endemic. Certainly insurance companies think it is and don’t want to cover free-range birds.’ His Orchard Organic Farm is in Devon, which has been a hotspot for the virus, believed to be brought in by seabirds, although protection zones in the county and…

Sting in the tale TOGETHER with many others, my wife and I have noticed a booming insect population this year, but one piece of behaviour has us stumped. We have a space on our terrace in which mint grows prolifically—as I write, it is still thriving and in flower—and, for the past few weeks, a single European hornet has been a regular visitor. It spends 20 minutes or so flying slowly around and through the mint, brushing against the leaves and flowers, very occasionally settling, but never for more than a second or two. Eventually, it flies off, only to return, usually within the hour. Googling ‘are hornets attracted to mint?’, the consensus seems to be that the opposite is true and that wasps in general find mint repellent. Do…

THE candid photographs taken in 1877 by Julia Margaret Cameron of Marianne North at her home in Ceylon reveal much of the character behind this extraordinary Englishwoman who ignored the expectations of Victorian society to travel—mostly alone—to the remotest parts of the world to paint in situ (something that had never been done before) the exotic plants she loved. She discovered several new ones and eventually financed her own gallery in Kew Gardens. North (1830–90) made it a part of this bequest that her original hanging of 832 of her botanical and landscape works should remain so in perpetuity. She grew up in a seemingly traditional middle-class family (her father, Frederick North, was a Liberal MP). Yet, as her (posthumous) autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1892), makes clear, here…

Gloucestershire, £795,000 Longborough is home to the delightful, family-run Festival Opera, established in 1991 and renowned as a Wagner specialist—last year’s programme included a full-length Ring Cycle. In the heart of the village, which is equidistant between Moreton-in-Marsh and Stow-on-the-Wold, is Washpool Cottage, a three-bedroom detached stone cottage. It offers far-reaching views across the Cotswold countryside and has three reception rooms on the ground floor, as welll as a conservatory. The garden wraps around it and includes several inviting areas in which to sit and eat. According to agent Helen Waddilove, it is ‘a true gem in a highly desirable village’. Knight Frank (01451 600617) Gloucestershire, £650,000 The village of Avening lies on the southern edge of Minchinhampton Golf Club, next to the Gatcombe estate and about four miles north…

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Quiz of the week 1) Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer spent two terms at which Cambridge college? 2) Which flowering plant in the mallow family is also known as lady’s fingers? 3) Croatia, Slovenia and Italy combine to form which peninsula? 4) In what year was the Battle of Trafalgar? 5) Which regiment has a canine mascot called Turlough Mór? 1) Christ’s College (1925-6) 2) Okra (‘Abelmoschus esculentus’) 3) Istria 4) 1805 5) Irish Guards. Riddle me this: The letter ‘r’ Riddle me this You’ll find me in Mercury, Mars and Jupiter, but not in Venus. What am I? Time to buy On this day… September 17, 2013 A wedding service at Holy Cross Church in Sherston, Wiltshire, was delayed by an hour when Darcy, the ring-bearing barn owl, decided to…

THE Government reshuffle has left the rural world in total bewilderment. The sacking of Daniel Zeichner as Farming Minister is inexplicable. Despite being asked to defend Rachel Reeves’s family-farm tax, he had established a surprising rapport with farmers. Given the Government’s palpable lack of knowledge or interest in agriculture, this was a real achievement. Farmers did feel that he cared about them and he wanted to do the best he could for the industry. He had to defend the indefensible tax policy, but his personal dedication to the job was always clear. To be replaced by a serial minister of state, Angela Eagle, must have been something of an insult. Experienced she may be, but rural she is not. She has never been more than a number two and has…

HENRY LYTTON COBBOLD, 3rd Baron Cobbold, holds a portrait of Emily Bulwer Lytton (1828–48). A concealed inscription declares in French: ‘When I am gone, think of me!’ Emily was the daughter of the celebrity Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton and the forceful beauty Rosina, née Wheeler. After their acrimonious separation in 1836, Rosina tried to exact vengeance on her husband for his infidelities by writing novels based on her experiences. By the terms of their settlement, she was denied access to her children. Emily suffered from curvature of the spine and died aged 19, alone in a boarding house in London. The discovery of her coffin in the family mausoleum—prised opened by thieves—and a box of her letters at Knebworth prompted Lord Cobbold to research and write up her tragic…

THE Emperor Claudius, whose mother once described him as ‘not so much unfinished by nature, as barely begun’, ordered the invasion of Britain in AD43. A legion crossed the Cotswolds unopposed and came to a pagan temple set by inviting hot springs. They liked it. By AD75, the Romans had built a classical temple and bathing complex there—a blend of healing, restful sophistication and imaginative architecture at the edge of the known world. They called it Aquae Sulis: Bath. It heralded a transformation. The former Cotswold elite, nobles of the Dobunni tribe, were recruited into a new ruling class—a Roman method of governing that was admired by the orator Aristides: ‘There is nothing like it to be found anywhere else at all.’ Roman control lasted 400 years, nearly as long…

Pick of the crop Kitchen chairs…

SHANE CONNOLLY, florist By Royal Appointment, has been saying that flowers should be ‘grown not flown’ for years. ‘I have been preaching British since the early 2000s and certainly promoted it at the wedding of The King and Queen in 2005, even more so for The Prince and Princess of Wales in 2011.’ For the 2023 coronation, all the flowers were grown in the British Isles and it seems that this example is changing the way we buy cut flowers. More than 80% is still imported from Holland, the global market leader, but Brexit, concerns about sustainability and the influence of Mr Connolly are shifting habits. Since 2011, when Gill Hodgson set up trade association Flowers from the Farm, more than 1,000 local growers selling fresh homegrown bunches have joined,…

IT is September 19, 1780. Queen Marie Antoinette of France, in a fetchingly ‘chic-rustique’ costume, is on the stage of the exquisite small theatre she has had built at Versailles, performing as Colette, the shepherdess heroine of a one-act opera by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer) in front of a select invited audience. This was not her first experience of (comparatively) public performance. As a child in the Austrian court of her mother the Empress Maria Teresa, she had appeared in the ballet section of the opera Il trionfo d’amore by Christoph Willibald Glück, the prominent composer at the Habsburg court in Vienna. Her elder sisters Amalia, Josepha and Charlotte sang as Muses, her brother the Archduke Leopold conducted the orchestra and played the harpsichord and…