Innehållsförteckning för December 24, 2025 från Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IT is too easy to dismiss 2025 as a downbeat year of failure: a litany of cricketing embarrassment, the second-worst harvest in recent history, cyber attacks, bin strikes and the cloth-eared political responses to rural protest. Yet good things did happen; here is a view through a rosier lens. In February, archaeologists working near Luxor, Egypt, became the first British-led team to discover a pharaoh’s tomb (that of Thutmose II) since the 1922 Tutankhamun moment. At the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival in March, David overcame Goliath when Jeremy Scott, a West Country sheep farmer, saddled Golden Ace to win the Champion Hurdle; the all-conquering Irish trainer Willie Mullins graciously conceded that it was ‘good for racing’.…

Time for church? SPOTIFY recently curated a playlist for me under the title ‘Ethereal’. Its subtitle, ‘modern heavenly sounds’, seems to indicate I’m overdue repentance and would probably find it helpful if I listened to Max Richter. Really, it’s Spotify that ought to apologise: its annual report of my personal listening habits, published earlier this month, declared I had the ear of a 21 year old. Oh, sorry: was that meant to be flattering? Perhaps Spotify has also come across the headlines about Britain’s churchgoing youth. In 2018, only 4% of 18–24 year olds attended church at least once a month, but that figure now stands at 16%. Those who came of age during the pandemic are now entering a particularly precarious job market: no wonder they yearn for a…

THE last of the carriage doors slams shut. The guard, impatient to be off, gives his whistle a long, urgent blast. The engine lurches forwards, forcing the standing passengers to steady themselves. Slowly, the train picks up speed. One minute, the platform is there; the next it is far behind. Passengers waving goodbye to friends and family step back from the windows and settle into their seats, wriggling to make themselves comfortable, conscious of the rough kiss of the upholstery against their legs. Soon the train is rattling over the points, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: Faster than fairies, faster than witches,Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;And charging along like troops in a battle,All through the meadows the horsesand cattle. This departure ritual has barely changed since the…

WHAT would a summer outing be without a ride on a miniature railway? Adults with their knees around their ears, children giggling as the whistle blows and drivers in sooty overalls are a familiar sight across Britain, with hundreds of tiny locomotives, public and private, chugging along through gardens and parks, fields and farms. They may seem frivolous now, but miniature railways were born from practicality. Engineer Sir Arthur Heywood forged his skills as a teenager, building a 4in and 9in railway for his younger siblings to ride on. After marrying and moving to Duffield Bank in Staffordshire, he built his own 15in railway, the ‘smallest width possessing the necessary stability for practical use’, as a less labour-intensive way to move feed and crops around his estate. The land being…

UNMITIGATED England’/Came swinging down the line/That day the February sun/Did crisp and crystal shine’, rejoiced Sir John Betjeman in Great Central Railway, Sheffield Victoria to Banbury as he rode the ‘trail of glory’ of the Victorians’ last mainline railway. For writers such as Betjeman, railways—especially steam engines—have offered endless inspiration. Pioneered by the British, they denote national pride and nostalgia, as well as providing the perfect metaphor for the narrative journey. David Lean’s 1945 film adaptation of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter delivered one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history when Trevor Howard removed the grit from Celia Johnson’s eye. The railway station where they meet, and where Howard’s character departs by train, marks the beginning and the end of the story and their short, but tender affair. ‘Railway…

Express yourself When talk turns to luxury locomotives, there’s one name that comes up again and again: Orient Express. However, rather confusingly, there are two—soon to be three—trains trundling along the tracks with the name. The groundbreaking original set off on its first sevenday round trip, from Paris to Constantinople, in 1883 and underwent myriad alterations and expansions, including the introduction of the Simplon-Orient-Express 36 years later (using the newly opened Simplon Tunnel). It was from this service that Belmond’s Simplon-Orient-Express—which has been in operation since 1982—drew inspiration. Founder James Sherwood sourced the Art Deco, midnight-blue carriages at auction and had them restored, including Sleeping Car 3309, once marooned in a snowdrift for 10 days and the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. New routes for 2026…

WHEN the owners of a Georgian house in Hampshire asked interior designer Georgie Wykeham for help re-designing their coach house, she could barely push her way in through the door to examine the possibilities. ‘It had been used for storage and was a complete wreck. When we managed to clear the space, it revealed an earth floor in the stalls, an expanse of open space and an old hay loft upstairs,’ she explains. Having decided on an all-purpose entertaining area away from the main house, the clients were keen that the redesign would be as sustainable as possible, reusing materials and remaining true to the original form, hence the decision to retain the stalls and convert each into a kitchen, a dining area and a bar. ‘We rescued everything we…

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Note well YOUR article on the Bank of England (‘A fate worse than demolition?’, December 3) mentions that the only part that can be visited by the public is the Museum. Strictly speaking, that isn’t true: old banknotes can be exchanged for new ones at the Bank of England counter, which means the visitor can catch a brief glimpse of the entrance hall and courtyard beyond as they are directed to the room where they make their exchange. Jonathan Notley, London Black magic BEING sadly in arrears with my reading, it was only today that I saw the article on black pudding in your October 29 issue (‘Nice day for a black pudding’). The Bury Black Pudding Co produces, as you aver, an excellent pudding, but if you were to…

Il Mondo Nuovo by Giandomenico Tiepolo ‘This is a painting that speaks to a sense of trepidation that is shared as part of our human condition. Giandomenico often is considered the lesser of the two [Tiepolos], but I think here you see his strength as an artist. You have this horizon, wide and broad, but vague, unclear, a figure with a lantern, doing a show, and the various reactions [to it]–somebody’s interested, somebody’s not so sure–and there’s a Pulcinella, which we know he used as a figure in his satirical drawings. I think the picture speaks of not knowing what lies ahead and how we address that. This was painted very close to the end of the Venetian Republic: it’s a society that looks to something it’s not necessarily prepared…

ON Saturday, November 1, 1879, the Wakefield Express printed an account of a ‘substantial luncheon’. ‘Glasses were filled with wine and placed on the tables, and not a drop was spilled,’ its correspondent reported, after detailing a menu of mutton cutlets, mashed potato and green peas, cold meats, cheese and celery. ‘Ordinary decanters and bottles betrayed no tendency to topple over into the laps of the guests, or plates to empty their contents on the carpet.’ Nothing newsworthy there, you might think—except for the fact that this particular lunch had taken place on a moving train. Following America’s lead, the Great Northern Railway had shipped over a Pullman dining car from Detroit, turned it into ‘a model of elegance and luxuriousness… the only one in England’ and launched it on…

THE distance from London to Inverness is only 443 miles, that to Penzance a mere 255, yet it’s still possible, six nights a week, to travel by sleeper to the throat or toe of Britain—or to do the journey in reverse. The Americans pioneered the sleeping carriage, the Belgians created the legendary Orient Express, but within their modest radius, the British developed a network of astonishing complexity and made sleeper travel synonymous with adventure and romance. The three surviving services—the Highland and Lowland Caledonian Sleepers and the Night Riviera to Cornwall—are among the last vestiges of a golden age immortalised in film, literature and art. Seasoned sleeper-goers look back nostalgically to when cabins were equipped with an opening window, gas fire and chamber pot—and that curious anachronism, a little suede…

WHEN Wilbert Awdry lay in bed as a child, he heard voices in the noise of the trains chugging up Box Hill in Wiltshire: ‘Yes I can, yes I can, yes I can.’ Those voices became Thomas the Tank Engine and friends and, on the hundreds of heritage railways across Britain, locomotives still speak to mechanics, drivers and enthusiasts. For Steve Oates, CEO of the Heritage Railway Association (HRA), the voices ring loud: ‘A steam locomotive is the nearest mechanical thing to a living beast. They grunt and they groan and they chuff and they steam.’ Rebecca Dalley, CEO of the Watercress Line in Hampshire, agrees: ‘Driving a locomotive is more like riding a horse than driving a car.’ Rob Gambrill, trustee of Hollycombe Steam in the Country in West…

IN the lowland bogs of Britain, the creeping, jewel-like cranberry emerges from tiny pink lantern-shaped flowers, acquiring its characteristic scarlet blush as the weather cools and our thoughts turn to Christmas. Meeker than its North American relatives, it is yet to make it into the ruby-red sauce that we spoon onto our plates over the festive season. That prize is reserved for the plump and showy Vaccinium macrocarpon, shipped from the New World to our shores (and kitchens), where it is boiled with sugar, citrus and spices into a soft pulp interspersed with its chewy, tannic skins: sweet, but sharp in the mouth. Meanwhile, our native cranberry species continue their lives in the rain-soaked peatlands of the British countryside, existing among sphagnum moss and drinking water as acidic as lemon…

Quiz of the week 1) Caesarion was the son of Cleopatra and which Roman politician? 2) Which country is the largest producer of saffron? 3) ‘Strawberry Thief’ and ‘Willow Bough’ are patterns designed by which 19th-century craftsman? 4) How many strings does a traditional violin have? 5) Name the band that used a red telephone box in Meols, Merseyside, as an unofficial office in the late 1970s Riddle me this I crowned victors’ heads in Ancient Rome and at Christmas time I hang in your home. What am I? 1) Julius Caesar 2) Iran 3) William Morris 4) Four 5) OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark). Riddle me this: A wreath Time to buy On this day… December 24, 1914 Five months after First World War hostilities had begun, an…

COUNTRY people are rooted in their local communities. It is why we are passionate defenders of the village pub, even if we don’t drink, and the village church, even if we never worship. This sense of place is what defines us and is our defence when the wider world becomes increasingly menacing. It keeps us sane when the old order seems fundamentally challenged. Centuries ago, when we didn’t know too much about that wider world, the local community was our stay and support. These days, when we are exposed to the whole globe through 24-hour news, it plays a necessary part in retaining our sanity and our equilibrium. For now, we see the world order changing before our eyes. The concept of a free world, firm in its resolve to…

The Cathedral Church of St Peter,Exeter, Devon, part II ON April 21, 1871, The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette carried a detailed report of a lecture delivered two days previously by Archdeacon Philip Freeman to the Exeter Literary Society. The lecture, titled ‘The History and Architecture of Exeter Cathedral’, was chaired by the Bishop and the auditorium was packed. One novelty was the illustration of the talk with ‘nearly four dozen’ diagrams and photographs ‘reflected on a white screen by the aid of the oxyhydrogen light, magnifying them 15ft. in diameter’. During the course of what must have been a marathon presentation, the audience was ‘highly delighted’ with these images, ‘testifying their pleasure by frequent applause’. There was another reason, however, for this good attendance. The Dean and Chapter were on…

TRAIN travel has changed enormously since the poet Edward Thomas made his famous unscheduled stop at Adlestrop in 1914 and found himself surrounded by ‘willows… meadowsweet and haycocks dry… [and] all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’. However, the denizens of the natural world that exist in the land around railways are still gloriously—and surprisingly—diverse. Often referred to as ‘green corridors’, the 20,000 miles of rail track criss-crossing Britain have become a refuge for many endangered species, including the great crested newt, the hazel dormouse and sand lizards. Most of the UK’s 18 species of bats use railway tunnels and bridges for roosting, badgers create homes in embankments and hedges and edges provide both cover for small animals and food for pollinators. The rail-network estate is something of a paradox…

IN early writing about railways, trains tended to kill people or destroy Nature. In Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, they do both. In his poem of 1844, On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway, Wordsworth asked: ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’ Yet it turned out that railways rather suited the countryside. They carried crops to market and did not sully the landscape unduly. By the start of the 20th century, they were often depicted as bucolic. In The Railway Children, the porter, Perks, gives the children strawberries from his garden. They talk to him as they recline on the ‘hot’ grass of a railway bank. The country station was promoted as an idyll by the 100 or so railway companies of the time and…

IN May 1844, a steam locomotive hurtled down Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Maidenhead bridge into the Royal Academy’s annual picture show, its plume of steam melding with the sky as it left behind a golden blur of a landscape. Britain’s first public railway, linking the Durham collieries to Darlington and Stockton, had only opened 19 years earlier, but J. M. W. Turner had been quick to see the train’s artistic potential. ‘The railways have furnished Turner with a new field for the exhibition of his eccentric style,’ commented the Lloyds Weekly Newspaper on May 12. In the years before his Rain, Steam and Speed, trains had primarily been the preserve of prints, often produced by the operators themselves to assuage fears or reduce resistance to the development of new lines. Some…

The Convent Garden of Il Redentore,Giudecca, Venice, Italy THE Church of Il Redentore, as it is familiarly known (its official name in English is the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer), sits south of Venice proper, across the water on the narrow island called the Giudecca. For centuries known primarily as an industrial zone, the island has attracted people to its lower rents and relaxed atmosphere. In 1884, Frederic Eden and his wife, Caroline Jekyll (elder sister of Gertrude), took up residence in an old palazzo a stone’s throw from Il Redentore, just across the Rio della Croce canal, where they made a celebrated garden that was visited by Henry James, Jean Cocteau and many others. (Last occupied by the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who died in 2000, it is…