Innholdsfortegnelse for 23-Sep-2020 i Country Life

IT seems that just about everything went online during lockdown and that includes rare-breed societies, such as the Portland Sheep Breeders’ Group (PSBG). The organisation works alongside the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) to preserve the small, tan-faced sheep, the mutton of which was considered by George III to be the finest of all—so much so, in fact, that he would travel to Weymouth each year specifically to eat it, as the sheep were historically only kept on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. In 1953, COUNTRY LIFE reported that the Portland was ‘rapidly nearing extinction’ and, by the end of the 1960s, fewer than 50 breeding ewes remained. Now, thanks to the work of the PSBG, RBST and the late Joe Henson (who rescued one of the founder flocks…

THIS autumn is remarkably fecund, with boughs breaking under the weight of fruit. Old trees in orchards, long considered past it, are, this year, laden with pears. Quince, apples and plums in profusion—although, oddly enough, not a medlar to be seen. The squirrels, as always, have had the nuts and, by the look of the carpet of shells under the trees, had them in profusion. We’ve already made the damson cheese, the fig jam and marrow-and-apple chutney and I’m gearing up for a record amount of quince and rosehip jelly, so perhaps the medlar failure is a blessing in disguise. ‘Half a dozen of us fought through the undergrowth, pulling out the pink horrors’ However, the harvest that’s really been huge is one I don’t want. We’ve had a bumper…

THERE is a quality in the Somersetshire landscape which gives it a unity in spite of all its variety,’ wrote Edmund Barber ( COUNTRY LIFE , December 5, 1931), describing ‘a checkerboard effect, full of play of light and colour’ and ‘a thousand points of vantage on any of the Somerset hills’. This is a county in which the wild moors and cliffs of Exmoor sweep eastward into the wind-lashed, misty fields of the Brendon Hills, where the warmer Quantock Hills subside into the quivering, rhyne-riven Somerset Levels before the land rises magnificently up to the secretive Mendips. This AONB is a landscape within a landscape: the limestone cliffs and thrilling caves of Cheddar Gorge (pictured) below a grassland plateau 1,000ft above the Bristol Channel, where bucolic, cattle-grazed pastureland split…

AT Westminster on May 5, 1458, Ralph Botiller, Lord Sudeley, a soldier and royal servant in his late sixties, was issued with a pardon for having fortified or battlemented two of his manors without royal permission. One of these, The More, Hertfordshire, is now forgotten, but, in the 15th century, it was one of the grandest residences in the environs of London. Enlarged by a succession of powerful owners, it eventually came into the hands of Cardinal Wolsey and, in 1525, was judged by the French ambassador to be more magnificent than Hampton Court. The More fell into ruin during the reign of Elizabeth I and the site of it is now a field. The other manor mentioned in the pardon was Sudeley, Gloucestershire, on the edge of the Cotswolds.…

Doing it differently Architects George Gardner and Peter Foulk have set up ELK, producing bespoke kitchens that feature their own patent-pending storage solutions, which are designed to ensure that all cupboard and shelf space is used to the maximum. These include their striking, triangular-shaped V-drawers, intended as ‘function centres', with contents visible and accessible. ‘Unlike most kitchens, which are built from boxes, ELK's designs are based on a framework, which frees the designers from standard restrictions and uses less than 50% of the material of a conventional kitchen,' explains Mr Gardner. Each kitchen is constructed at ELK's workshop in Hampshire, using responsibly sourced timber engineered to produce a stable framework, often using light and dark woods for contrast and to highlight the unusual shape of the furniture. ‘Our aim is…

TO stand at the entrance of the Painswick Rococo Garden today, with the hanging beech wood glowing copper in the autumnal light and, below it, the crown of white finials of the 18th-century Exedra marking the boundary between the informal and the formal garden, is a thrilling experience. In his painting of Painswick House and gardens, of about 1748, Thomas Robins the Elder (1716–70), of Charlton Kings, Cheltenham, positions himself further back and, applying a splash of artistic licence, renders the estate larger than it actually is. Happily, this only serves to increase the impression of being about to step into a painting—which is quite surreal and rather Mary Poppins. Painswick is one of the best surviving Rococo gardens in the country and, although it underwent extensive restoration from 1984…

FROM tiny thimbles to candlesticks, cutlery and ecclesiastical silverware, Hart’s gold and silversmith in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, has been crafting exquisitely ornate, original and timeless pieces for generations. Indeed, some of the firm’s most notable recent commissions include a solid-silver model of a reaper plane that has pride of place in the officer’s mess at a local RAF base, a crown for the boar’s head at The Queen’s College, Oxford, which incorporates the college’s coat of arms, a honey stand for Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and an intricate armillary sphere (a model of objects in the sky, comprising a spherical framework of rings, centred on the Earth or the Sun, that represent lines of celestial longitude and latitude). The establishment’s expert craftsmen have been making silver in a traditional workshop,…

IN a rare victory for common sense, Wales has become the first nation in the UK to formally consider using wool as insulation in public buildings. The decision comes after a crash in the price of wool during lockdown, which led to some farmers burning fleeces or composting them to use as fertiliser. In response, a petition was launched earlier this year asking for the UK Government to use sustainable British wool products (as insulation or carpets, for example) in publicly financed building projects. Last month, the Welsh Conservatives’ Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Energy and Rural Affairs, Janet Finch-Saunders, pressed the Welsh Government on the issue and, in response, Lesley Griffiths MS said: ‘I am pleased to say the Welsh Government’s own facilities management team has committed to…

Fashion A man was spotted wearing a live snake as a face mask on a bus in Manchester. Transport bosses in the area confirmed it was not a valid covering, adding that, although there is some leeway on what constitutes a mask, ‘we do not believe it extends to the use of snakeskin-especially when still attached to the snake' Plug-in hybrid cars Plug-in hybrid cars aren't as ‘green' as they seem, after environmental groups found out they emit, on average, 120g of CO2 per km, compared with the advertised 44g. However, that figure is still less than conventional hybrids, petrol or diesel cars…

THE world was aghast to see Notre-Dame de Paris in flames in April last year. It turned out that the damage was not as devastating as it first seemed, although the erasure of the famous silhouette, when Viollet-le-Duc’s flèche was consumed, was bad enough. That fire gave the world a shock. ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ says Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Well, possibly not. A thing can be of the utmost value—revered as a landmark, precious as a work of art, totemic as a manifestation of national identity—and yet, tomorrow, it could have gone. This made me wonder what we could not bear to lose in this country. What would cause national trauma, provoke the same depth of mourning as Notre-Dame? Fire officers advise householders to keep a grab bag of…

ON the vertiginous slopes of Box Hill in Surrey, Andrew Wright, National Trust countryside manager, is examining the contents of an aggressively prickly bush. He is checking on the progress of the aromatic berries of the juniper (Juniperus communis), which, despite being one of the first trees to colonise Britain after the last Ice Age, has been in steady decline over the past few decades. Southern counties have experienced losses of between 60% and 70% and, in some regions, the species has disappeared altogether. Box Hill on the North Downs, the scene of Jane Austen’s imagined picnic in Emma, was once a stronghold, but, even here, its Juniper Top and Juniper Bottom sites are worryingly diminished, with no young plants and only a few ancient bushes remaining. ‘Juniper has everything…

THERE was a publishing genre in the early 1980s that involved gathering a lot of women with impeccable taste and photographing aspects of their home to create books entitled The English Woman’s Kitchen/Bedroom/Garden, and so on. The rooms were blessed with a deeply reassuring quality derived from the fact that they had evolved over a few decades—and from their owners’ unshakable but unspoken belief in their own aesthetic instincts. They had a distinctive, sometimes eccentric charm that you didn’t get in interiors magazines of the time, the focus of which tended to be polarised between a fixation with dried flowers at one extreme and the swaggy confections of interior designers at the other. The exception was my alma mater, The World of Interiors, that ploughed a lonely, but lovely…

SEPTEMBER is a magical month in the Cotswolds. For lifelong supporters of the Heythrop Hunt, however, this week is a time for nostalgia, following the launch onto the market of North Rye House near Donnington, Gloucestershire, a handsome Cotswold stone house set in 148 acres of gardens, pasture, parkland and woodland, a mile from the pretty village of Broadwell, and 1½ miles north of Stow-on-the-Wold. From 1986, until his death in April last year, this was the much-loved home of former joint-master the late Peter Stoddart and his wife, Joanna, who, during 30 golden years from the late 1980s, hosted the opening meet of the Heythrop each year. Rupert Sweeting of Knight Frank (020–7861 1078), who quotes a guide price of £7.5 million for the beautifully maintained house and…

THE life and work of Barnett Freedman, echoing those of Edward McKnight Kauffer (Artist of the Week, August 5), exemplify the fickleness of fame. Both artists excelled as illustrators, as well as designing posters for Shell and the London Underground, and, for a time, both were household names. Yet, today, they are barely known, although many of the images they created remain instantly recognisable. ‘It was as an auto-lithographer that Freedman outstripped all comers’ Freedman was born to Russian Jewish parents in the East End of London in 1901. He spent long periods in hospital between the ages of nine and 13, during which time he taught himself to write, draw and make music. By 1916, he was working for a monumental mason designing tombstones; later, he was in an…

BASC is calling on the Government to work proactively with the shooting organisation to deliver on its 25-year Environment Plan. The plan, which the Government set out in 2018 and updated last year, aims to ‘improve the UK’s air and water quality and protect our many threatened plants, trees and wildlife species’. Specifically, BASC feels that shooting will help with the England Tree Strategy, which is currently being drawn up, and is asking that it be ‘proshooting’. The strategy will aim to increase tree planting and woodland creation, increase protection for trees, bring more woodland into management, maximise trees’ role in supporting the economy and engage more people with them. BASC notes that the positive influence and investment in woodland of people who shoot is ‘substantial’ and that the ‘Government…

BLACK, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) people and those on lower incomes find it harder to access the nation’s green spaces, according to a new report from the Ramblers, published last week. In the report, titled The grass isn’t greener for everyone: Why access to green space matters, only 39% of people surveyed from a BAME background lived within five minutes’ walk of a green space, whereas the figure was 46% for those with a household income of less than £15,000. In total, 57% of all adults questioned said they lived within five minutes’ walk of a green space and for those with an annual income of £70,000 or more, the figure rose to 70%. In conjunction with the report, the Ramblers group has called on the Government to set…

READING your article, it would be easy to think the Battle of Britain was won solely by RAF Spitfires (‘Those magnificent flying machines’, September 9), yet two-thirds of our fighters were Hurricanes and some 20% of the pilots came from overseas. The largest of these foreign groups was the 147 pilots of the Polish Air Force, including the members of 303 Ko ś ciuszko Squadron—supported by its Polish ground crew, it was the highest-scoring squadron in the battle. The pilots flew under the RAF’s strategic direction, but remained members of the sovereign Polish Air Force, some 8,500-strong in Britain in 1940, answerable to the Polish Government-in-exile in London. Poland may have been occupied, but never surrendered. As Lord Dowding, commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, said: ‘Had it not been for the…

1946 February 8 unpublished A view down Broad Street in Ludlow, Shropshire, with its Elizabethan half-timbered townhouses in all their historic splendour. The view includes Valentine's family grocers and the famous DeGreys' cafe, which sadly closed its doors in 2016. The COUNTRY LIFE Picture Library contains 120 years' worth of photography and articles from the world's leading architectural and gardens experts. We are delighted to note that works are again available to license or purchase in print form, from £35 plus VAT. Please email enquiries to clpicturelibrary @futurenet.com…

The circus producer WHEN we put this year’s show, The Hooley, on hold, we were under the impression that we’d open again, that we might lose only a month of the tour,’ says Lil Rice, producer of Giffords Circus. ‘As it became clear that it was more serious than that, we started thinking.’ The creative brains that give flight to the visual and aural delight that is Giffords’s annual show came up with The Feast. Branded ‘a scrumptious circus and dining experience under the big top’, it inverts the traditional idea of the travelling circus coming to you—instead, you come to the circus at its winter headquarters, Fennells Farm, Stroud. ‘It was the idea of our head chef, Ols [Halas]. He said: “Everybody’s doing takeaways—why don’t we?”. We got really…

‘Slow worms are exquisite and slip frictionlessly through fingers when handled’ AN encounter with a slow worm (Anguis fragilis) is always a pleasant experience for me, as they are gentle creatures that hang about long enough to allow you to have a really good look at them. Saying that, however, the slow worm can move quickly if alarmed, retreating backwards or forwards into its burrow or loose vegetation. This fascinating creature is actually a lizard that, over time, has evolved to not need legs, giving it a snake-like appearance. This led to the name ‘deaf adder’ and means that, sadly, they’re often killed out of ignorance. An endearing trait of being a lizard is that, when you look into their small eyes—unlike the death stare of a snake—a slow worm…

HIGH in an apple tree, orbs of fruit hanging around my head; a private constellation of red planets. Where the sun touches through the leaves, the apples become enringed with gold-shine. September sunlight is hazy and imprecise and cannot be mistaken for the sunlight of any other month. The day did not begin like this. In the early morning, there was the sort of mist that is actually fog and it had a choke-hold on the valley. I could barely breathe and, when I was at the top of the ladder picking the apples—Worcester Pearmain, a Victorian breed—my head was in a blind bag. Fortunately, the sun of summer came back for a last, valiant hurrah, and it banished the fog, except at the brook. I can see the…

Gloucestershire, £945,000 ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop' declared Edward Thomas and, looking at this peaceful Cotswolds town near Moreton-in-Marsh, you would struggle, too, to forget the place. Blending in seamlessly with the rural charm of the surrounding countryside is Tolsey Cottage, a four-bedroom family home of Cotswold stone that has been sensitively looked after and extended by the current owners. The cottage has anything those looking to escape to the countryside could ever need, with plenty of space and top-notch appliances, such as a Rayburn cooker. Outside, the 1½ acres of gardens are set to lawn and bordered by mature shrubs and woodland, with a small stream meandering through the property offering a constant source of calm. Knight Frank (01451 600617) Gloucestershire, £1.45 million There are few more…

I FIRST visited the Grade I-listed garden at Iford Manor, Wiltshire, 25 years ago, when I travelled from Sissinghurst in Kent to Bath to buy a Morris Minor. I was instantly captivated, not because of the horticultural excellence, nor even its design—strangely for a garden best known as the masterpiece of Edwardian architect and garden designer Harold Peto. Rather, it was something intangible: the embedded sense of place that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. Tucked away at the bottom of a steep-sided valley, Iford slips discreetly into the topography of its site, folding together buildings and garden, garden and farm, farm and country. It was in 1899 that Peto arrived here on his bicycle, with his good friend H. Avray Tipping, COUNTRY LIFE’s Architectural Editor. Peto had been…