Indholdsfortegnelse for January 14, 2026 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk FARMERS are famously pessimistic people, but a Farmers Weekly survey reveals that the familiar litany of fears—weather, market volatility, disease and zealous bureaucracy—have been superseded by nervously waiting to see what the Government will impose on them next. In turn, at last week’s Oxford Farming Conference (OFC, Town & Country, page 26), ministers from the devolved nations spoke, without apparent irony, of the need to ‘break the doom loop’ about the profession. Topics of mental health and isolation, which would not have featured at such a gathering a decade ago, were raised. It was observed that suspicious media reaction to any innovation or scientific development—‘Frankenstein foods!’—can be unhelpful and stifling and that debate about topics such…

Rewilding your backyard ASK people about rewilding and they tend to picture country estates: the grounds of a great house, agricultural land, open moorland. ‘Successful rewilding projects need scale,’ says landscape designer Adam Hunt. Rarely, therefore, do we consider cities. Yet these are leading the way in biodiversity recovery—and may continue to do so. Sir David Attenborough explores this in a recent BBC documentary, Wild London, as he follows animals across the capital, from peregrine falcons nesting atop the Houses of Parliament to leopard slugs and their oddly mesmeric copulation. Our royal history means that large swathes of parkland were set aside for hunting and, to this day, keep London looking green. The main takeaway, however, is to do with our gardens: rewilding, more often than not, starts in our…

Peace in the house SIR JAMES AND LADY GRAHAM stand beside a chalk portrait by French Society artist Théobald Chartran of Sister Charlotte Harriet Graham (1839–1927). She was one of nine legitimate children of Sir Bellingham Graham, 7th Baronet of Norton Conyers, who squandered his fortune on ‘slow horses and fast women’. In 1870, aged 31, Charlotte joined the Community of St Peter, an Anglican nursing order and, in 1893, became the head of St John’s House, London. She ran this ‘training institution for nurses for hospitals, families and the poor’ for 18 years. ‘We love this portrait, as the sitter looks kind, calm and sensible,’ says Lady Graham. ‘James feels that her taking the veil may have been a reaction to her father’s feckless and irresponsible behaviour. The artist…

ANY British lover of owls would be forced to admit that these islands are not the best place for the family. Whereas Germany has nine different species and Sweden 10, poor old Blighty holds five—and, had it not been for a few ‘reckless’ Victorian landowners, the total here would have been a paltry four. In the 1870s, there was a guerilla campaign among various ‘owlophiles’, notably in Kent and Northamptonshire, to add a previously unrecorded species. We often come to rue these ‘exotic’ introductions, especially invasive organisms such as Japanese knotweed, Himalayan balsam and American mink, but the little owl surely stands in a completely different category, given that it has lived among us for 150 years with remarkably little adverse impact on our native fauna. As with several other…

ON August 10, 1938, the looming figure of Edward Stanley, 17th Earl of Derby, former secretary of state for war and ambassador to France, opened a fête in the grounds of Marchwiel Hall, Cheshire, receiving a buttonhole for his trouble. His presence might have seemed, even in 1938, rather Edwardian, but it was exactly the sort of afternoon that he enjoyed most. As his biographer Randolph Churchill described: ‘No bazaar or fête was too remote for him to attend, no foundation stone too small for him to lay; no swimming pool too unimportant for him to open.’ Although the public-facing role of the aristocracy has undoubtedly receded since then—and perhaps it will further with the proposed removal of the final hereditary peers from the House of Lords—many peers and members…

I’VE never been much of a skier, despite more than four decades spent in pursuit of Alpine excellence. Ski school was endured, rather than enjoyed, and thankfully came to an end after one particular exchange, on the chairlift, between my mother and the French ski guide. ‘Aimezvous les chevaux?’ she asked, attempting polite conversation. ‘Oui,’ he replied with a grin. ‘Avec les frites.’ So that was the end of that. Although I can still muddle my way down most slopes (especially if emboldened by a glass or three of schnapps), my style could be charitably described as ‘l’homme dans la WC’. Sure, there’s something exhilarating about that first run of the day, when the snow is soft and untouched, the slopes empty and the sky a brilliant shade of azure.…

AN airport departure board can spark painful longing. Jack Kerouac nailed it in On The Road: ‘The road must eventually lead to the whole world’, as did my own hero, Mole in The Wind in the Willows, hurling aside his whitewash brush and rushing towards the open sky. It’s not the pram in the hall that’s the enemy of promise, it’s the suitcase on top of the wardrobe, the stash of unspent foreign bank notes, the half carnet of Paris Metro tickets. Ah, but reality intrudes: the school calendar on the fridge, the blasted team-bonding paintball nightmare. Stay, then, if you must, but know there is another way: open that Christmas art book, or fire up laptop and kettle, and travel with artists: a Grand Tour in your dressing gown.…

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Night music YOUR wonderful series of railway articles (December 24, 2025) brought back so many memories. A key feature of my boarding-school days, starting in 1957 for 10 years, was how we travelled from and to Paris, where we lived. Early on it was always by the Golden Arrow (right), a nightly Pullman sleeper that left the magnificent Gare du Nord in clouds of steam and platform bustle. On arriving at Dover or Calais, as we remained in our ample bunks, we were shunted in sections onto a ferry equipped with rails. When morning came, we found ourselves with different restaurant cars for breakfast: on the French side, the offering was very disappointing to a hungry schoolboy, but from Dover to Victoria there was proper English breakfast, although not long…

I WRITE this sitting in the kitchen sink,’ proclaims Cassandra, heroine of Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle, as she begins her story. If the book were transposed to the present day, its famous first line might instead read ‘I log in to ChatGPT sitting in the kitchen sink, before asking it to come up with a catchy opening for a novel’. AI—Artificial Intelligence, a constellation of technologies that have learned to act and ‘think’ in human-like ways—has been inescapable over the past 12 months (Leader, August 20, 2025). For every environmentally beneficial crop-spraying system using AI to target individual weeds, as spotlighted in the 2025 Savills report on farming technology, there was a flop such as the Kingston-upon-Thames Christmas mural in south-west London, an AI-generated Lovecraftian nightmare featuring snowmen…

SIR JOHN VANBRUGH was a successful playwright who turned himself into an even more successful architect. His achievement in both respects was deeply improbable given what we know of his unsettled early career in business, the army and as a prisoner in France. That in turn, however, may help explain why, in architecture, he was not an orthodox Classicist, but viewed his buildings in free and abstract terms, intending them to evoke an emotional, as much as an intellectual response. During his lifetime, this approach was regarded with suspicion if not hostility, but, a century later, in the high noon of Romanticism, it came to be admired, particularly by architects, for its originality, its extreme vigour and its compositional freedom. On the tercentenary of his death, it is worth exploring…

WHEN the author Emma Craigie was a child, her father bought Ston Easton Park in Somerset. This was in 1964, a time when many great houses were under threat of demolition, but some, including Ston Easton, had been saved by preservation orders. In this case, it was the house’s staircase that had been singled out as a feature of special importance. As are many grand country-house staircases, it was designed to impress: a sweeping ascent from the reception hall to the principal rooms, a visible symbol of status and hospitality. For Ms Craigie’s younger brother, Thomas, however, it was simply the perfect place to hide things. ‘The original 18th-century wooden staircase had a copper pipe above the balustrade, covered in red velvet as a handrail,’ she recalls. ‘My brother used…

WITH raw plaster walls, skirted lampshades and lattice-fronted cabinets with crenellated details, there’s a certain theatricality to Alice Palmer’s kitchen in a 1930s house in north-west London. The room is part of a large extension added to the house after she bought it in 2017 and in creating it she took inspiration from the work of the architect and set designer Oliver Messel—whose style she came to know when spending time in the Caribbean as a child. His trademark shade of pale green, which became known as Messel Green, is a particular favourite. ‘I painted the cupboards in a warm neutral called Clunch by Farrow & Ball (01202 876141; www.farrow-ball.com). The fronts are made from a material intended for radiator covers, as anything custom would have been much more expensive,…

The gardens of Riad Nouria, Marrakech, Morocco The home of Lexi and Helena Oswald MARRAKECH has a long horticultural history, beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries with the channelling of snowmelt waters from the Atlas mountains to reservoirs and fountains, designed to water the city’s vast orchards and olive groves, as well as its mosques, public gardens and private courtyards. Today, visitors to the low-rise desert city (no building is permitted to be higher than a palm tree) are often surprised by the neat, well-watered rows of smartly trimmed citrus trees, the cloud-pruned olives and mounds of clipped, sky-blue plumbago lining the teeming highways, which lead the way to gardens of perfumed roses, and curtains of pink, Pandorea jasminoides or gaudy bougainvilleas that cloak the high, ochre walls of…

Quiz of the week 1) A ‘fluffle’ is the collective noun for which animal? 2) Clove hitch, reef and sheet bend are all types of what? 3) Name the poet who brought a bear into Trinity College, Cambridge, when he was an undergraduate 4) Which feline species does not have retractable claws? 5) What is the name of Don Quixote’s horse? 1) Rabbits 2) Knot 3) Lord Byron 4) Cheetah (‘Acinonyx jubatus’) 5) Rocinante. Riddle me this: Music Riddle me this I have 24 keys, but I cannot open any locks. What am I? Time to buy On this day… January 14, 1900 Giacomo Puccini’s tragic opera Tosca premieres at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, Italy. Despite opening-night critics struggling with its themes of political corruption and exploitative sexual relationships…

THERE is a cack-handed operation under way designed to reorganise local government and, as a result, many local elections may be postponed. The temptation for rural voters must be to say: ‘So what?’ None of the political parties seems to have any real understanding of countryside issues and that leaves countrymen without a political home. Positive support has practically disappeared and we are left with constituents either voting against those of whom they actively disapprove or simply choosing not to vote at all. Postponement of the elections only removes the need to bother and it shouldn’t be like that. Democracy is too important for us to allow it to die by default. We country people must take some of the blame for having allowed urban England to shut us out…

IN 1908, at the age of 21, Henry Mayo Bateman suffered a nervous breakdown and, in his own words, ‘went mad on paper’, sketching a pair of wrestlers ‘without bothering a scrap about the correctness of how it was done’. From then on, his cartoons, inspired by the comics of his childhood and the histrionics of music-hall theatre, would be imbued with explosive energy and excessive facial expressions that rendered them funny in themselves even without words underneath—then the convention. ‘It didn’t seem to matter what the subject was, I had only to draw it in this way of getting inside, as it were, and feeling like it,’ he revealed. ‘I had really found my true métier.’ Bateman started his artistic life with the intention of being a serious painter…

ON the face of it, open-plan spaces offer plenty of upside: flexibility and, often, an uplifting feeling of airiness. However, as many of us have discovered—especially during lockdown—they offer little in the way of peace, privacy or areas dedicated to specific purposes, such as working, laundry or storage. For some designers, the answer lies in ‘zoning’ (or creating a ‘broken-plan’ layout, for a less Orwellian alternative), which involves defining spaces with furniture or low walls, offering a halfway house between open-plan and fully formed rooms. The result might be a succession of seamless spaces, but it might not suit those who may crave the reassuring embrace of four walls. There is another way to achieve a similar result that was integral to the design of many English country houses of…

UnSavory: African Stories of Wildlife, War and the Birth of Holistic Management Allan Savory (Savory Institute) WEDGED in the front of the dugout, I could not swing my upper body round quickly enough to shoot. I could only lunge forward as the hippo’s enormous jaws clamped down, crushing the canoe. His jagged teeth thankfully only went through my bush jacket, but I was wedged by the crushed canoe. I gulped for air and went under the water, clutching the hippo’s ear in my right hand while holding my rifle in my left.’ There are times when this spellbinding book reads like a Wilbur Smith novel, but this is very much more than that. Allan Savory, internationally acclaimed ecologist, recently turned 90 and has written his memoirs. ‘Few men reach 90…