Innholdsfortegnelse for 11-Aug-2021 i Country Life

So always remember your terriers, Protect them from wet and from cold, For the love of a tyke for his master, Can never be measured in gold. The Terrier Song OUR writers this week are much preoccupied with their dogs, their dependence on them and the pleasure derived from their loyal company. Jonathan Young writes (page 40) of the ‘soul-lifting beauty’ of the pointer or setter as it floats over heather, alert and exhilarated. Carla Carlisle (page 36) and Jonathan Self (page 118) tell of the grief of old age, final decisions and irreplaceability. As the Animal Sentience Bill makes its creaky, bureaucratic way through Parliament, a place where frighteningly few seem to have much common sense about animals, this week heralds an autumn of field sports, when the dog,…

Bridging the gap Striatus, Venice's newest footbridge at 52ft long, has been built by a robotic 3D printer and is formed of a new type of concrete ink-a process that could cut the environmental impact of construction Hedgerows The Government has granted £81,561 to a GWCT scheme to develop a Hedgerow Carbon Code, which will provide guidance and potentially unlock £60m in income for farmers Tomorrow’s gardens The RHS reports a 58% increase in applicants for apprenticeships this year, the highest in decades; demand for skilled workers is set to rise in the growing horticulture sector, currently worth an annual £24bn to the UK economy Soggy Yorkshires The UK's first ever Yorkshire pudding race took place earlier this month; 250 Aunt Bessie's were released into the River Wharfe and the…

Fine and Dandie THIS is my litter of Dandie Dinmont terriers. One of the oldest British breeds, they are included on the vulnerable native-breed list and are very difficult to find. The terriers are so-named for literary figure Dandie Dinmont, a farmer in Guy Mannering by Walter Scott, so we have called the puppies Hermione (from ‘Harry Potter’) and Cosette (Les Misérables). Judy Sillem, by email The sweet smell of success JOHN LEWISSTEMPEL’S article on raking dung (From the Fields, July 28) brought a smile to my face. As a volunteer for Riding for the Disabled, I had to provide a pony experience for a group of disadvantaged teenagers. Poo picking seemed a good place to start. My plan generated some reluctance and a few colourful expletives. I persevered, putting…

A BRACE of English setters, creamy patches in a haze of purple, are working into the wind ahead. They’re covering the moor quickly, but as effortlessly as the zephyr trembling the bell heather. Abruptly, the lead dog—the older, more experienced bitch—stops her tacking as the scent of grouse fills her nostrils. Seconds later, the younger dog also collects the waft and they lower their supple bodies, heads level, to gather in and analyse the strength and direction of the smell. At this stage, they are still dog-like—but, as the scent grows hotter, they grow more feline, placing each slow step with the care of a stalking tiger. Finally, they halt. They have ‘set’ their game. Within feet is a covey of grouse, the birds’ eyes fixed on the setter and…

SHEARSBY in Leicestershire could have been famous. In 1807, a spa was opened outside the village, the pungent waters of which offered relief from a wide range of complaints, including skin diseases, indigestion, rheumatism, bilious problems and nervous disorders. The name of the Bath Hotel, which still exists, bears witness to the hopes had for the development—but, alas, Shearsby was one of dozens of spa developments that failed during the 18th and 19th centuries: evidence of intense competition. Landowners who could turn a spring, strongly laced with minerals—if not marmalade in colour from the iron content—into a successful resort could make quick profits. As a result, some of Britain’s most beautiful Georgian cities were spas. Wells and springs have been credited with special properties since early times. Sacred to the…

OH! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings,’ wrote John Gillespie Magee in his sonnet High Flight. The Second World War pilot may have flown lark-like in a Spitfire, but that feeling of liberation, lift and those ‘wind-swept heights’ conveyed can equally be applied to ballooning. ‘That’s a poetic way of looking at it,’ acknowledges 82-year-old Don Cameron, a ballooning pioneer both in the air and in his business, Cameron Balloons, which is half a century old this year. ‘Ballooning has a beauty to it, a magic and a mystery—you are defying gravity and you never quite know where you will end up.’ On cloud-free, still mornings and evenings, balloons take to the troposphere, turning the uniform blue to a kaleidoscope of colour.…

THE re-emergence of the ever more spectral Kinmel Hall in north Wales on the property market (Athena, March 17), sold two months ago for a mere £950,000, is a reminder that there are still many spectacular country houses that resist resuscitation efforts—often, big dreams (and not enough money) fizzle out. Kinmel is in unhappy company, with some 88 country houses on Historic England’s current Heritage at Risk Register. The all too familiar circumstances are, usually, a swift succession of owners, lack of assets, structural deficiency, high repair costs and land sales. The effort required to contend with a stately pile mustn’t be underestimated—and it doesn’t only mean having deep pockets. ‘Taking on a country house in need of complete renovation is not a decision for the faint hearted, and not…

ELTON HALL, tucked into the fold where the Fens meet the Northamptonshire hills, has been in a state of continual adaptation and renewal since the reign of Henry VII. Sir Richard Sapcote built the first major buildings in about 1469, but, by 1664, when Sir Thomas Proby took ownership, the house was in disrepair and had to be pulled down, with only the gatehouse and chapel remaining. For almost four centuries, the Proby family has added, extended and rejuvenated the property, concocting a magnificent collage of octagonal bay windows, castellated turrets, Gothic embellishments and Classical façades (COUNTRY LIFE, June 9 and 16). The garden is more of a mystery. There are no records of the original medieval outline and only one drawing from 1730 showing formal gardens to the north-west…

MANY commentators have noted that the proportions of the Scott Monument in Edinburgh are akin to those of a Gothic cathedral spire. Rising to 200ft, it looms to your left after climbing the steps out of the railway station onto Princes Street. It’s the largest monument to a writer in the world, an emphatic declaration to the visitor that they’ve arrived in the land of ‘the wizard of the North’, Sir Walter Scott. Even Waverley Station itself is named after the anonymous authorial signature (‘by the author of Waverley’) he gave his novels. Scott’s novels reflect his interest in history and folklore, landscape and human character Scott is to Scottish literature what Shakespeare is to its English equivalent, but, unlike the Bard of Stratford, the details of his life and…

One in, one out AMID controversy over the loss of Liverpool’s UNESCO status, there’s much to celebrate in the designation of Britain’s new World Heritage Site (our 32nd, again)—the sprawling slate-mined landscape of Gwynedd in north Wales. Its jagged, carved-up mountains are a violent, but beautiful, symbol of a former industrial prowess, in an area that quite literally ‘roofed the 19th-century world’. Slate has been quarried in Gwynedd for 1,800 years, but its heyday was between 1780 and 1940; by the end of the Victorian era, a third of all roofing slate worldwide had its origins here, with Welsh slate everywhere from Westminster Hall to the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and, at one point, half the buildings in New York. To produce some 485,000 tons of slate a year,…

HISTORIC costumes and accessories ingeniously handcrafted from paper and thread form a new exhibition at Firle Place, East Sussex —‘The Regency Wardrobe’, open from the end of this month. Paper textile artist Stephanie Smart’s impressive fusion of fashion and craft includes dresses, shoes, fans, jackets (below) and bonnets, created using the ancient art of paper quilling or filigree, plus rolling and shaping to mimic lace and embroidery. ‘I love working with paper because you can collage and pull bits out and sew other bits in. My degree was in decorative arts and I have worked in multimedia, but have no training in fashion, textiles or pattern cutting and I’ve never made a fabric garment,’ explains Miss Smart, who started her fine-art studio The House of Embroidered Paper in 2017 (www.stephaniesmart.net)and…

As we advance through August, diminutive pied flycatchers start to be seen sporadically along southern coasts. They have spent summer nesting in upland oak and deciduous forests in the north and west of Britain, especially Wales. Such places provide clean air and enough humidity to support an abundance of insect life. The chicks (usually about half a dozen in a moss- and wool-lined nest) have been raised on beetles, mosquitoes, bees, wasps, moths, spiders, butterflies and plenty of ants-a crisp and crunchy diet, leavened with quantities of caterpillars that are so numerous in the oaks. The male is striking in his black-and-white breeding plumage, the hen a soft brown. One of the unusual characteristics of the pied flycatcher is his inclination to bigamy, which requires serving two territories, although studies…

AS a retired architect, ‘The problem with house building…’ (July 28) caught my eye. Having qualified only 14 or so years after the introduction of the first Town and Country Planning Act in 1947, I do have some further thoughts: • Prior to the 1947 Act, people tended to live near to their work, whether in a rural or an urban setting. Thus the infrastructure did not need to cater for everyone driving to work, which is now essential with the creation of separate estates for work and living. Should we not seek to reverse this format? •People’s perceptions of what is attractive vary hugely and, dare I say it, the British do not generally appreciate good design. Shouldn’t ‘aesthetic appreciation’ be taught in schools as a subject? • In…

1912 Unpublished One of a set of autochrome photographs of Gertrude Jekyll's garden at Munstead Wood, Surrey, probably taken by the then garden editor of COUNTRY LIFE, Herbert Cowley. The set was discovered in the magazine's archive in the 1980s and offers a fascinating illustration of Jekyll's use of colour, which was inspired by her training as a painter. Every week for the past 125 years, COUNTRY LIFE has documented and photographed many walks of life in Britain. More than 80,000 of the images are available for syndication or purchase in digital format. To view the archives, visit www.countrylifeimages.co.uk and email enquiries to licensing@futurenet.com…

‘Many of the audience walked out, believing the deliberately ham acting was genuine incompetence’ DAVID GARRICK once said: ‘Any fool can play tragedy, but comedy, sir, is a damned serious business.’ Yet farce seems to be in another league; it was defined thus by the theatre critic and diarist James Agate: ‘Comedy is unreal people in real situations; farce is real people in unreal situations.’ In an interview for The Paris Review, Michael Frayn commented: ‘Everyday life has a very strong tendency towards farce… things go wrong… Often in a very complex and logically constructed way—one disaster leads to another, and the combination of two disasters leads to a third… the essence of classical farce: disaster building upon itself.’ Interviewed in 2012, Sir Donald Sinden, a classical actor, film and…

Buxton, Derbyshire The 5th Duke of Devonshire built The Crescent at Buxton, in the Derbyshire Peak District, between 1780 and 1789, hoping to exploit the waters that bubble up from thermal springs at a consistent temperature of 82°F (28°C). This magnificent terrace stood in solitary splendour, until the Opera House and Pavilion Gardens were created in the Edwardian period. Malvern, Worcestershire Whereas other spas celebrated the rich mineral content of their waters, a Georgian physician who tested the water at Malvern proclaimed it as being ‘famous for containing just nothing at all’. It was pure. Bottling followed in the Victorian period, as well as hydrotherapy clinics accompanied by large hotels. Harrogate, North Yorkshire According to the 1813 Guide to All the Watering and Sea-Bathing Places, ‘Harrogate water tastes like rotten…

WITH the hot summer days of August comes the need to plunge oneself into cool water. For those lucky enough to have access to a pool, Devon-based Weaver Green makes ideal outdoor rugs and cushions from recycled plastic bottles (the aim being to help clear up some of the billions of plastic bottles that end up in our seas and landfill every year). The company cleverly turns them into a robust, waterproof yarn with the look and feel of wool. It’s machine washable, stain resistant, weatherproof and, with UV protection, the products can stay outside for the whole summer, come rain or shine (01548 431902; www.weavergreen.com).…

IN old age, one regrets the snobbery of one’s youth. Tulips, when I was young, were considered not for proper gardeners. The public parks had endless plantings of ‘Queen of the Night’ poking out from a ground-covering of forget-me-nots. That made them a complete no-no. The only tulip a plantsman might be allowed to grow was a species he had collected somewhere in Greece, Turkey or Central Asia. I was a late convert to planting garden varieties, not least because I thought they were expensive, and especially as they rarely flowered again after their first year. My conversion came at the historic collection at Hortus Bulborum in the Netherlands. I did not realise that there was so much choice—so many colours, sizes, shapes and different flowering times. Yes, some are…

This is the only major industry in Britain ‘that throughout its history has been conducted in a language other than English,' according to Dr Gwyn ‘Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island.’ Churchill’s protection plan for National Gallery treasures in case of German invasion led to some works being kept deep within the Manod Quarry in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Meanwhile, Glyn Rhonwy quarry was a secret munitions store Then the largest slate quarry in the world at 2,800 strong, Penrhyn Quarry was also the site of one of the longest workers' strikes-three years from November 22, 1900 The Rev W. Awdry’s beloved Thomas the Tank Engine was inspired by the Talyllyn Railway (for which he was a volunteer), built to carry slate between Tywyn…

A RARE opportunity to roam the gardens at Glyndebourne, West Sussex, arises next month, as the public is invited into the 12-acre estate (with a picnic if they choose) to stroll around the lake and admire sculpture by the likes of Nic Fiddian-Green, Henry Moore, Antony Gormley and Halima Cassell. The gallery will show historic photographs by Ilse Bing, the shop and restaurant will be open and two short documentary films reveal Glyndebourne in the 1950s and 1990s (when the opera house was built). Vita Sackville-West described this beautiful place best: ‘The graciousness of civilisation here surely touches a peak where the arts of music, architecture and gardening combine.’ Tickets cost £10 for adults, £5 for children; September 4 and 5, 11am to 4pm (www.glyndebourne.com/events/open-gardens).…

IT’S soon the Harvest Festival season with, Covid permitting, all the hymns about ploughing and scattering. They remind us that however much agriculture changes, our images of the countryside remain stubbornly traditional, bound by the picture books of our childhood. Yet the farms of Beatrix Potter, and even of Kenneth Grahame, are a world away. Air-conditioned tractors and combines contrast vividly with the backbreaking labour in the fields right up to the 1950s. For the agricultural worker, even one with a good landowner and a tied cottage, life was very hard. Frozen while sprout picking in winter and sweating under the weight of heavy sacks in the summer, most men were bent and arthritic by the time they were 45. ‘The horrific behaviour of modern gangmasters equals anything from the…

‘A favourite painting in my case is not a recognised work of art, but a painting that I acquired more than 30 years ago by an artist that used to exhibit on the railings overlooking Green Park in Piccadilly. It is called the Roundabout and was painted by Roy Petley. He began his life in a children’s home, became one of the first artists to open a gallery in Cork Street and subsequently became an artist admired by the late Queen Mother and other members of the Royal Family. I love it because it brings back memories of the freedom and fun of past times and for its beautiful vibrant colours’ John McEwen comments on Roundabout ROY PETLEY writes: ‘A balmy summer evening in 1986, with my little paint box,…

ONCE part of the Confederation of the Cinque Ports before the draining of the Romney Marshes led to the silting-up of its riverside port at nearby Smallhythe, the historic town of Tenterden, 10 miles from Ashford, Kent, stands on high ground on the edge of the High Weald AONB. Its picturesque high street is lined with Georgian and Victorian buildings that blend pleasingly with cottages of traditional Kent tile and weatherboarding. For years, the eastern end of the elegant High Street was blighted by the semi-derelict gatehouse to Heronden Hall, a Grade II-listed building that was already in a poor state of repair when a tree fell on it during the epic storm of 1987. Left unrepaired, the crumbling gatehouse was in an even sorrier state when the current owners…

THE buyer of a lot in a book sale held by Bellmans of Wisborough Green, West Sussex, on July 15 may find further research to be profitable. No doubt they know this already, since the 1762 French edition of Ovid’s Epistulae, or Letters of Heroines, translated into Italian about two centuries earlier by Remigio Nannini, a Florentine friar, had cost £3,287 against the upper estimate of £300. It was a clean copy with the translator’s portrait, illustrations and ‘culsde lampe’ typographic ornamentations, but there must have been some greater attraction. The catalogue described it as ‘finely bound by Antoine Michel Padeloup or Padeloup le Jeune in contemporary tan morocco gilt with red and brown morocco onlays including a large central starburst on each cover with a cut-out revealing a painted…

HOW did a member of the minor gentry from Huntingdon become the head of state? It’s one of the great questions of British history, and Ronald Hutton, professor of history at Bristol University, comes as close as possible to answering it. Until the early 1630s, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was an unremarkable, provincial gentleman. His greatest claim to fame was as a descendant of the sister of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. His real surname would have been Williams, if his family hadn’t adopted the lofty surname of Cromwell. The main element in Cromwell’s make-up was his belief that he had a special relationship with God. It was Cromwell’s conversion to a passionate Puritanism in his early thirties that sparked him into life. In a 1638 letter to a cousin,…