Innholdsfortegnelse for 06-Oct-2021 i Country Life

October Ballet Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House, WC2, until February 25, 2022 (www.roh.org.uk) Sport NFL London Games at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, N17, October 10 and 17. Watch the New York Jets (below) take on the Atlanta Falcons or the Miami Dolphins versus the Jacksonville Jaguars (www.nfl.com/uk/london-games) Art Frieze in Regent’s Park, until October 31. This year's work addresses architecture, geopolitical power struggles and the environment (www.frieze.com) Theatre Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Palace Theatre, W1, from October 14 (www.nimaxtheatres.com) Theatre Dear Evan Hansen at the Noël Coward Theatre, WC2, from October 26 (www.noelcowardtheatre.co.uk) Sport Six Day London at The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, October 26–31. Watch some of the world's most accomplished cyclists (below left) take on the velodrome (below right). The event website…

THE word used to be phlegm. Admittedly, it should be used with caution during a coronavirus pandemic, but, traditionally, being phlegmatic was a quality that set the British apart from other more excitable nationalities. It stood for unflappability, the stiff upper lip and the ability to endure a crisis without outward emotion or a change in behaviour. Panicking about an undersupply of petrol simply wasn’t the way to carry on. And, on the whole, country dwellers have shown the rest of the population how to do it. They, more than anyone, rely on their cars to get to work, take the children to school and do their shopping. However, despite the difficulties of supplying rural forecourts, more of them seem to have stayed open than those in cities, where public…

Sheep farmers The US has agreed to lift a 20-year-old ban on imports of British lamb Rare birds Cirl-bunting numbers have increased by one-third on farmland in the South Hams, Devon, as a result to a change in grazing patterns Riverbanks More than 7,000 acres of woodland will be planted along rivers and streams to help to improve water quality, reduce flood risk and support wildlife Nature There is still time to reverse the decline in biodiversity by 2030, according to a report by five leading Nature bodies, including Natural England…

With the abundance of maturing apples, European hornets may be seen zooming by noisily on amber wings, perhaps a little tipsy on fermenting fruits. For most of their short life, they're useful predators of other insects-flies and caterpillars dominate spring and summer menus, but the sugars in autumn's berries and fruits bring sweet sustenance: a sort of ‘last supper' before cold weather slays the colony. Only the fertilised young queens will hibernate somewhere to found new hives next spring. Hollows in trees are favoured nesting places, although bird nest boxes may be used-or convenient corners in outbuildings. The nest is an architectural wonder: a parchment lampshade filled with thousands of hexagonal chambers, fashioned from millions of tiny mouthfuls of wood pulp. Larger than wasps, with yellow faces and marked red-brown…

1889 September 26 The gates of Aldermaston Court, Berkshire, were brought from nearby Midgham House by a 19th-century owner, William Congreve, in settlement of a bet. This view of the village street through them is very artfully contrived with figures, all of them probably posed, to accentuate the topography. 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…

‘Morton questions Ronnie with such eviscerating intensity it borders on sadism’ TERENCE RATTIGAN’S The Winslow Boy is a drama about a court case that, refreshingly, stays outside the courtroom itself. Based on the 1910 George Archer-Shee case, which received widespread newspaper coverage at the time, it centres around the efforts of a father, Arthur Winslow, to clear the name of his 14-year-old naval-cadet son, Ronnie, who has been accused of petty theft and expelled from his training college. Securing the services of the country’s leading barrister, Sir Robert Morton, the play examines the extent to which the Winslow family will sacrifice financial security and personal relationships to take on the assembled might of Britain’s naval establishment and preserve the family honour. It was set in the Winslows’ Kensington home and,…

Suffolk, £480,000 The charming, mostly medieval village of Lavenham is well known as the filming location for Harry Potter's birthplace Godric's Hollow and, although this is not the house visited by Voldemort that fateful night, it has plenty of magic, being the only barn conversion in the village and beside a pretty stream. Characterful, 17th-century and Grade II-listed, 1, Byes Barn has two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a dual aspect sitting room with a handsome fireplace. Ipswich is about 19 miles to the east. Carter Jonas (01787 844290) Wiltshire, £6.75 million Compton Bassett House is where Robbie Williams claims he ‘truly fell in love' with his wife, Ayda. They now have four children and, although ‘the gardens and trees have enchanted us with their magic and, on rainy…

Wild mushrooms with ricotta and herb gnudi and chorizo Serves 4 Ingredients For the gnudi 250g ricotta125g Parmesan, grated, plus extra to serve1 egg50g breadcrumbs2 tbspn parsley (plus extra for the end)Semolina flour for dusting75g chorizo1 onion, diced2 cloves garlic, grated700g mixed mushrooms, cleaned and sliced1 tspn wholegrain mustard100ml white wine250ml vegetable stock200ml crème fraîche Method Make the gnudi by combining the ricotta, Parmesan, egg, breadcrumbs, parsley and some seasoning. Mix everything together until combined. Form into golf ball-sized pieces and roll in the semolina. Place them on a tray and chill until ready to use (at least half an hour). ‘Now is the time to gather wild mushrooms and enjoy their versatility in so many dishes’ In a large frying pan, fry the chorizo until golden. Remove to a…

WHEN writing about Peter and Leonora Petrou, I have often described them as ‘dealers in the unexpected’ or something similar. Their stock ranges from the unimaginably ancient to the 21st century and stems from all continents and cultures. Quality and style are essential to a Petrou piece and there may also be quirkiness and wit. Now, the dealers, who have been active in London for the past 40 years (www.peterpetrou.com), have followed several others with a slimming-down online stock sale with Sotheby’s. Generally, higher-estimate lots did less well than the middle and lower ranges. However, the oldest offering of all, a mounted chunk of meteorite that formed in space up to 4.5 billion years ago and fell to Earth a mere four millennia ago sold for a double-estimate £23,940. Remaining…

Seven years before his death, again resident in Rome, Poussin painted a version of The Assumption of the Virgin, possibly for the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The subject was frequently treated by Baroque painters. In images by Rubens, Carracci and Guido Reni, the Virgin ascends to Heaven amid billowing clouds, attendant putti and swirling arabesques of sumptuous fabric. Not so in Poussin's treatment. Still as a statue, her cheeks flushed with spiritual ecstasy, his passive Virgin sits cross-legged to receive the angel. Her eyes are closed, her clothing boldly lit or in deep shadow, half in and half out of this world-Poussin has internalised the drama of this sacred moment. The Annunciation lacks the soaring movement and theatrical swagger of other treatments of the same subject, but its…

CULTURE MAYFAIR Covid restrictions permitting, you could attend a different cultural event almost every day in Mayfair, spanning from the Arts (the Royal Academy) and history (the Society of Antiquaries), to science (the Royal Institution and the Faraday Museum; the Royal Astronomical Society and the Geological Society) and music (Handel & Hendrix in London, plus countless live music venues). ‘A sense of history and charm is hard to avoid [in Mayfair],’ says Alexander Millett of the eponymous property consul. SHOPPING MARYLEBONE Quiet, sophisticated and studded with independent boutiques, Marylebone is the antithesis to Oxford Street. Shops here range from the chic (Rixo, Sophie Hulme, Matches Fashion) to the stalwarts (The Conran Shop, Anthropologie, Space NK), the quirky (the Koibird concept store, with its changing collections, Gallery Eclectic, with its Japanese…

IN the autumn of 1931, invitations went out for a housewarming at Claridge’s. It was a mild Tuesday in November and guests arrived at the private entrance on Brook Street in the glittering Mayfair dark. The British Porcelain Ball began fashionably at 10pm (supper at 11:30pm; buffet at 12:30am; carriages at 3:00am) and it was the inaugural event in the hotel’s newly built Art Deco ballroom. The extension had been beneath a pile of proverbial bricks and dust, overseen by the architect Oswald Milne, for two years. By the time it was finished, the Great Depression had flattened the effervescence of the 1920s, making the antics of the Bright Young Things at parties such as this one—idealised in the past decade—look like so many boondoggles against a backdrop of mass…

THE Government’s announcement that it will change the rules on gene editing has found a mixed reception. The technology, which consists of altering the existing DNA of plants and animals without introducing exogenous (or ‘foreign’) genetic material, was regulated in the same way as the genetic modification of organisms under a 2018 European Court of Justice ruling. The Government now intends to make research and development easier, with a view to introducing measures at a later stage that will allow ‘edited’ products to be sold in the UK. NFU vice-president Tom Bradshaw welcomed the announcement. ‘Gene editing is about speeding up the genetic-selection process that could have occurred naturally,’ he explains. ‘As we look at tackling the challenges of climate change and feeding an ever-growing population, we need all the…

Gardening know-how The National Trust's longest-serving gardener, Michael Ridsdale, retired after 45 years of service, during which he oversaw the transformation of Studley Royal Water Garden, North Yorkshire Cash People now use credit cards to pay for more than £4 out of every £5 they spend Frugivores Tests on grapes, oranges, dried fruit and herbs revealed traces of multiple pesticides Property buyers Last week marked the end of the stamp-duty holiday, with rates returning to the same levels they were before the pandemic…

BOTANICAL artist Susan Ogilvy was clearing up her garden after a storm when she came upon a chaffinch nest. She took it inside to dry and ‘the sodden lump blossomed into a jewel-like nest... I dropped everything to paint it’. Thus began her fascination with nests: ‘Until I found this perfect object, I’d not realised how diverse nest building is, nor the skill with which they are built,’ she writes. ‘The reed bunting, for instance, lines its nest with the fluff of pulled-apart reed mace and the blue tit nest I found on the Isle of Arran includes deer hair.’ The result of Mrs Ogilvy’s studies is a charmingly illustrated book, Nests, which explores the different structures, from the rather chaotic-looking jumble of twigs assembled by the collared dove to…

I HAVE been looking in detail at the 2021 accounts of a well-run farming enterprise and it’s been an eye-opener. I’ve seen every detail of the figures of a hardworking farmer, recognised as among the best in his county. It’s clear from these accounts that he only makes a living because of what remains of the Common Agricultural Policy. Despite all his professional input, skill and enterprise, it’s the handout that keeps him in business. He knows that the old system of support is to go and, what’s more, he accepts that radical change is needed. Net zero and the collapse in biodiversity has seen to that. What neither he, nor anyone else, knows is what’s going to take its place. ‘Rural families can’t plan because they don’t know the…

Seldom has a popular playwright been so scornfully treated by a later generation than Sir Terence Rattigan (1911–77). As he ruefully commented in 1963: ‘Continually I am reading articles about the need to demolish the old theatre-and blow up Coward and Rattigan.' Up to a point, he had provided the ammunition 10 years earlier when, in a preface to his Collected Works, he wrote of an imaginary person called Aunt Edna whom he deemed typical of a middle-class, middle-aged matinee attender, with time on her hands and money to help her pass it, whom playwrights must always take into account. This was seized upon by the upcoming, so-called kitchen-sink school of writers and their critical champions as reflecting his safe conservatism, absence of ideas and emotional repression. Rattigan (pictured with…

THERE has been a playhouse on the site of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane for longer than any other place in Britain; that is to say, from 1635, 386 years. Now, it is the largest and most complete Georgian theatre in Britain. In 2000, ‘The Lane’ (as it is affectionately known) was bought by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and, in two major campaigns, one completed in 2012 (COUNTRY LIFE, June 5, 2013), and the other last month, has been restored and, where necessary, remodelled (Fig 2). Its rich display of art has been supplemented by pieces from Lord Lloyd Webber’s own collection, as well as by newly commissioned works. By the time the present theatre was opened in October 1812, the Theatre Royal had already been rebuilt four times. Its immediate predecessor…

SWEET chestnuts are everything a strawberry isn’t. Whereas the latter is all sun-warmed succulence enjoyed the instant it’s picked, only a few months from planting, sweet chestnuts might be the definition of slow food. For a year or two, they act like an ambivalent lover, offering scant encouragement by way of a few—and I do mean a few—chestnuts and it is your job to keep the faith. Unseen, long roots push deep in search of nutrients and water: eventually, this expansion is mirrored above ground, and when it is, all is quickly forgiven. Autumn has become synonymous with sweet chestnuts for me. Their earthy, sweet nuttiness perfectly suits the short days and dropping temperatures and I love the festive cold-backs-and-warm-faces palaver of cooking the first of the harvest, balanced on…

Beer-marinated Portobello mushrooms In a medium-sized bowl, combine three tablespoonfuls of olive oil, one tablespoon of wholegrain mustard, grated garlic and seasoning. Whisk together and add two sprigs of rosemary and two of thyme. Pour in 250ml beer and 300g cleaned mushrooms. Marinade for 30 mins and then arrange the mushrooms on a roasting tray, spoon over a few spoonfuls of the marinade and roast for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn and then roast until soft, about another 15 minutes. Remove from the oven, deglaze the oven tray with the remaining marinade over a high heat and then serve this as a sauce with the mushrooms. Serve with whole grains and salad. Japanese-style mushrooms with sesame and miso dressing Halve 400g of a selection of Japanese mushrooms, such…

BELEAGUERED salmon received godly support at the end of last month, when Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery near Buckfastleigh, Devon, opened a new fish pass to replace a Victorian one that was damaged last year. Funded by the abbey with a partnership grant from the Environment Agency, the new pass is equipped with special metal baffles that reduce the speed of water to make it easier for salmon and sea trout to return to their spawning grounds on the River Dart. Construction, which included improvements to an existing eel passage, was completed in 10 weeks, just in time for the autumn migration. The Dart’s salmon population has been plummeting in recent decades, with average catches falling from 330 fish in the late 1980s to 14 in 2019. ‘In the past,…

WILL the horse overtake the steam train? Inspired by a 1938 photograph, this striking picture by Jack Boskett, captured on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway at Didbrook, in the Cotswolds, was much harder to take than it might seem: ‘The main challenge for us was to see what the horse was going to do when it saw the steam engine, as it has never seen a locomotive in its whole 19-year life,’ says Mr Boskett. ‘Thankfully, Shandy didn’t bat an eyelid and went for it. It all came together nicely and I was chuffed to bits with the result.’ Mr Boskett also had a film made behind the scenes and the video and picture will open his upcoming show at the Roses Theatre, in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, on October 22. ‘This will…

WITH National Trust members poised to vote on proposals to ban trail hunting, hound exercise and exempt hunting at the next AGM (Barometer, September 15), the Countryside Alliance (CA) is running a campaign to persuade people who enjoy trail hunting—whether National Trust members themselves or not—to encourage one Trust member to vote against the proposed motion. ‘It is incumbent on all who follow hounds to engage with this campaign to help protect the future of trail hunting on the Trust’s land for future generations,’ says CA spokeswoman Polly Portwin. Voting closes on Friday, October 22.…

M RS S. A. Barnett is greatly exercised in her mind about the way in which children are brought up. In a recent discourse called ‘Reverence the Child’, she reserved her very heaviest artillery for children’s literature, and especially for ‘Hey diddle diddle’. ‘What nonsense,’ she is reported to have said; ‘it neither develops sympathy nor stimulates the imagination, nor nourishes a sense of humour.’ We should have thought that if there were one quality stimulated by a cow jumping over the moon it was that of imagination. It is, perhaps, regrettable that the dish ran away with the spoon, but it is surely possible to put an innocent construction upon that affair.…

Go green in the garden REGARDING the news story ‘Don’t look down’ (Town & Country, September 15), I am astounded that the topiary at Powis Castle, at 40ft high, takes 12 weeks to trim. The industrialisation of a garden, as evidenced by the cherry picker and hedge trimmer in your photo, brings with it noise, pollution and disruption. What happened to the serenity visitors hope for in places of beauty such as this? At a time when we are encouraged to ‘go green’, why not let the hedge grow and enjoy the peace and quiet? Dennis Andrews, Essex Practicality in the parish AS harvest festival approached, many churches will have been cleared of cobwebs and bat droppings (Athena, September 15)—but was there a parson to take the service? Could they…

I’LL never forget the first time I read Edward Thomas’s As the Team’s Head-Brass. I had been familiar with Adlestrop from school and, later, had been introduced to Old Man and The Manor Farm (all three beautiful, rural vignettes), but the gentle pace and understated power of this poem immediately struck me. Penned only months before Thomas (‘And for that minute a blackbird sang’, July 28) was killed in the Battle of Arras in 1917, it is a war poem as much as a farming one, capturing a conversation between a man sitting on a fallen elm and another driving a heavy-horse team—the former watching the latter ‘narrowing a yellow square of charlock’. The men’s conversation is bookended by glimpses of two lovers going into and leaving a wood, rendering…

Special effects Rose of Jericho, the Dorset-based specialists in materials for traditional and historic buildings, offers a range of handmade products, including limewashes and distempers. Vapour permeable and long used to allow buildings to ‘breathe', they are designed for the decoration of porous building materials, including lime plasters and renders, limestone, soft brick, cobs and daub. Made using natural binders, fillers and artist's-quality earth and mineral powder pigments, limestone and distemper have a softness of texture and lack of uniformity, with subtle variations of colour and tone rarely matched in modern coatings-which is also the reason why designers are now revisiting the materials to create dry brush effects with rustic depth of hue and tonal interest. Prices start from £39.48 for 5L of pure limewash and from £51 for 2.5L…

THE launch of three recently restored, historic country houses in the North of England highlights the wealth and power of the landowners that built them. Although shorn of the grand estates of which they were once the beating heart, all three retain their original garden settings surrounded by glorious unspoilt countryside. For sale through Knight Frank’s country department (020–7861 1114) and Blenkin & Co in York (01904 671672) at a guide price of £3.75 million, Georgian, Grade II*-listed Kirkby Hall stands in 20 acres of spectacular gardens, paddocks and woodland, a mile to the north of Kirkby Fleetham village, four miles from Bedale and 10 miles from the road and rail hub of Northallerton, in the picturesque Hambleton district of north Yorkshire. John Aislabie, MP for Ripon and Chancellor of…

THE list of plants reads like that from an established country garden: phlox, hollyhocks, delphiniums, lupins, poppies, asters and dahlias, with broad beans in the vegetable beds, pots of strawberries and apples to pick. This is only a snapshot of the brimming beds and borders that fill this private garden in Hampstead, north London, which was planted in the autumn of 2019 and, only two years later, is humming with honeybees. When Rebecca Glassberg moved here in 2017 with her husband and their young family, the garden had been mostly laid to terrace for entertaining outdoors, but she had a very different vision for the red-brick Arts-and-Crafts house, which dates from 1910. ‘I wanted something with more colour and more plants and to feel the seasons changing,’ says Mrs Glassberg.…

WHAT turns its nose down to bite and furrow the ground? What is driven by a firm hand to create paths half green, half black? What blade skewers its belly, slicing all in its way? The answer is not animal, vegetable or mineral. It’s mechanical. ‘Scorpio twitches its sting in the sky above the labourers’ This riddle, paraphrased from the original Old English, survives with more than 90 others in the 10th-century Exeter Book. No solutions are given, but the answer to this one is thought to be ‘the plough’. Ploughs may be found illustrated on medieval calendar pages alongside a figure in contemporary labourer’s dress scattering seed from a sling or seed-lip. Sowing, the conventional labour of the month for October, comes after the mowing, reaping, threshing and grape-treading…