Innholdsfortegnelse for July 9, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IF the past is a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley wrote, it’s not necessarily one where you would ​want to spend a holiday. Those who speak longingly about the ‘good old days’ tend to have spectacles tinted with the rosiest shade. Their colander-like memories forget both the big things (two World Wars, rudimentary healthcare, the criminalisation of homosexuality) and the more trivial (Carnation milk, coal tar soap and Bronco tissue paper). Then there were those ubiquitous features of daily life that younger generations find hard to comprehend, such as landlines, typewriters and video players. Moreover, who can seriously be nostalgic about an era when smoking was permitted on Tube trains, buses and aeroplanes? Banning it…

Are people marrying younger? THE media would have you believe that Glastonbury 2025 was a wildly political affair. From where I was sitting, it was more of a romantic one. Pop megastar Charli XCX asked a 60,000-strong audience if they were ‘in love tonight’ before launching into a song about romantic bliss on the Amalfi coast; The Script and The Prodigy both dedicated their sets to former band members gone too soon; and, at the tender age of 22, Olivia Rodrigo seems to have endured so much heartbreak that she was able pack out the Pyramid Stage with a set almost entirely about failed relationships. I didn’t hear John Paul Young’s Love Is In The Air at any point at Worthy Farm, but I felt it. Others did, too. On…

THE idea for a book of records began in the early 1950s when Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of the Guinness Brewery, got into an argument about the fastest gamebird and failed to find an answer in any reference book. He conceived a Guinness promotion for settling pub arguments and was advised exactly who could put it together: twins Ross and Norris McWhirter. Born 20 minutes apart on August 12, 1925, they were educated at Oxford, both competing athletes who became sports journalists in 1950 (talk about identical). In 1951, they founded an agency to supply accurate facts and figures to Fleet Street and published Get to Your Marks, Britain’s first major athletics statistics and history book. They were interviewed by Guinness directors in 1954, who tested their knowledge of…

Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots Rosemary Goring (Birlinn, £20) THIS is a Scottish book, through and through. The publisher, Birlinn, which is named after a Hebridean and West Highlands long boat, focuses on books with Scottish and UK general interest. Its author, Rosemary Goring, was born in Dunbar, studied at the University of St Andrews and now lives in the Borders. She was literary editor of two Scottish newspapers and has written a study of the nation’s history by the women who lived it. Exile follows the same format as her 2022 Homecoming, which charts the Queen’s Scottish years through the locations and settings where the historic events of her life took place. The present book deals with Mary’s years of incarceration in England, from her…

Pitt sticks I VERY much enjoyed Joe Gibbs’s recollections of his misspent youth (Spectator, June 25). I remember emerging from the Pitt Club in Cambridge, having dined exceedingly well after a hard day’s beagling. All five of us piled into my little Renault 4 and were about to depart when there was a rap on the side window. There was a very large policeman standing there. ‘I don’t think that I would drive off if I were you, sir,’ he said. ‘Quite right, officer,’ I replied; we all piled out and walked rather unsteadily home Harry Bott, Hertfordshire Berry nice OUR garden blackbirds have for many years taken grapes and cherries from my study windowsill. Almost all of these were consumed on the lawn, busy adults enjoying a brief sugar…

APRECIOUS stone set in a silver sea. The British have long considered their isles a sort of Eden and seabirds would certainly concur: with 19,491 miles of coastline and fish-rich seas to plunder, our avian neighbours unsurprisingly find the place an absolute des res. For statistical starters, 80% of the world’s Manx shearwater breed here, 60% of great skua and 34% of European shag. It’s not only the quantity of our coastline that draws them in, it’s the quality: the wave-girded inaccessible islets and the towering sea cliffs with ledges that provide near impregnable nesting refuges for seabirds. Skomer was once the haunt of men—Vikings—now, it is the home of Manx shearwaters and puffins. That question, of course, is: what is a seabird? Peregrines and choughs live on cliffs, but…

TO misquote the poet John Donne, no architect or designer is an island: collaboration is pivotal to successful houses, their interiors and the gardens that surround them. It’s not only what you know, but who you know; joiners, restorers, specialist nurseries, art dealers, plasterers. The best outcomes rely on where you look for inspiration, too, from people and places to books and buildings. That’s why we have asked, for the second year, some of the experts featured in our Top 100 (March 12) to plunder their lists of contacts, well as their libraries and memories, to share the names of the specialists whose breadth and depth of experience make all the difference to a project—so they can make a difference to yours. GK ‘Their breadth and depth of experience makes…

The garden at Ash Park in the South Hams, Devon The home of Chris and Cathryn Vanderspar WERE Chris Vanderspar to need a motto, ‘onwards and upwards’ would be most suitable. Having recently retired from 47 years of travelling the world as principal cellist at the Royal Opera House, he has fully turned his attention to further developing the 3½ acres of garden he shares with his wife, Cathryn, at Ash Park near East Prawle in the South Hams district of Devon. He shows no sign of saying ‘enough, we’re done’. Situated three miles from the ferry to Salcombe, East Prawle is a pretty village on the brow of long slopes down to the English Channel. Just below the village, down a steep lane and tucked in under a steep…

WHAT could be more welcoming at the entrance to one’s stately pile than a pair of stone lions, pineapples or—bronze cannon? Although artillery pieces have gone out of exterior-design fashion, they used to make a bold statement at the spectacular Powis Castle in Powys, Wales. With several ferocious tiger heads cast in bronze, there were always clues that they might not have been native to the UK. The two cannons were removed from southern India in about 1799, with the fall of the last dynasty that had resisted British colonialism in the subcontinent. The ruler who died fighting for this cause was Tipu Sultan (1751–99). The ‘Tiger of Mysore’ had long been painted as Britain’s bogeyman: an eastern counterpart to Napoleon in the west. The two were allies in their…

TECHNICALLY, this wonderful bird of prey is called the common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), although it is probably the only raptor better known by one of several affectionate nicknames: ‘kes’, ‘kessie’ or, in Orkney, by a lovely dialect word, ‘moosie-haak’. One thing we can conclude about the official title is that it is no longer quite as appropriate as it once was. Kestrels have seriously declined and are now an amber-listed species. They are still widespread across almost all of Britain, except north-west Scotland, but the breeding numbers have tumbled. At the time of a census in the late 1980s, it was suggested that there were 50,000 pairs. The total today is 31,000. Accounting for this decline has been challenging. Fluctuations in vole numbers, the impact of rodenticides or agricultural changes…

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Quiz of the week 1) What is the largest native reptile in Britain? 2) How many symphonies did Beethoven complete? 3) What distinguishes Lorne sausage from other sausages? 4) Which two wives did Henry VIII divorce? 5) What baking ingredient gave the Rolling Stones a number-two hit in 1971? Riddle me this No bones, no brain, but I can sting. Through the water, my tentacles swing. What am I? 1) Grass snake (Natrix natrix) 2) Nine3) Its square shape 4) Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves 5) Brown sugar. Riddle me this: A jellyfish Time to buy On this day… July 9, 1947 George VI announced the betrothal of his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, heiress presumptive to the British throne, to Lt Philip Mountbatten, a former Greek prince, by Court…

THE Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, turns out to have been right all along! There was one optimistic conclusion in last week’s definitive report from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) on the serious effects of air pollution: the number of preventable deaths caused by toxic air has fallen from 40,000 a year to 30,000 in less than a decade. Although this is still an intensely worrying figure, it can now be shown that there are effective solutions. Initiatives such as the Ultra Low Emission Zones (ULEZ) brought in by Sir Sadiq are having a real effect. This shows that we don’t have to put up with the toll on health if there is the courage to make the necessary changes in the way we conduct our lives. The issue…

VISITORS left the gallery with tears streaming down their faces. That is what Sir Roy Strong, director of the V&A Museum, recorded in his memoir of the ‘Destruction of the Country House’ exhibition in 1974. No wonder The Observer called the V&A show ‘the most emotive, propagandist exhibition ever to grace a public museum’s walls’. Sir Roy declared that ‘no other country has been party to such artistic destruction in a period of peace’. By the time it was staged, British buildings were finally being listed for preservation. The National Trust was taking ownership of more each year. Yet it was reported that one house a week was still being lost. Hidden behind walls and up drives, the massacre continued. There was no one to love them and few to…

CHAUFFEUR-DRIVEN cars sweeping down manicured drives. Tail-coated lords summoning butlers. Steely-eyed dowagers glowering across the formal gardens. In the world of film and television, a country house—with its grand halls, rolling grounds and upstairs-downstairs intrigue—can lend a production instant cachet and drama. Quite what the architects of yesteryear would have made of Netflix and iPlayer is anyone’s guess, but, when they set to work on the Baroque palaces and Palladian piles of the UK countryside, their designs were based on pomp and grandeur. These are places of soaring façades, oak-panelled bedrooms and manicured lawns. Such houses are expensive to maintain—making filming income a godsend (‘And now for something completely different’, April 30)—but their timeless air means they can double as backdrops to anything from genteel Jane Austen films to Four…

LAST month, I revisited our old house in France. We lived on the Cherbourg Peninsula for 14 years and made a garden where we never ran out of space to plant more trees and shrubs. Roses have always been my first love and we grew more than 1,000 of them. It was a special pleasure to cover our cider apples with climbing roses and to encourage the super-vigorous rambling species, such as Rosa longicuspis and R. filipes, to clamber up the ashes, poplars and cherry trees. However, it became increasingly difficult to manage the giant we had created. Skilled labour was impossible to find and it was clear that Brexit would make our comings and goings more complicated. Our younger daughter then suggested that we might like to live in…

DA ALFREDO is a small restaurant that sits on the seafront of Santa Marina on the small Aeolian island of Salina. There’s a large terrace, gazing out over the eternal azure of the Tyrrhenian Sea, towards Lipari and beyond. Alfredo, the eponymous owner, lean and leonine, is now in his nineties and sits in a chair by the door. He is king of all he surveys. You could order pane cunzato, or ‘dressed bread’, that Sicilian open sandwich topped with anything from olive oil and herbs to tuna, anchovies, aubergine and capers. They’re very good indeed, but really, Alfredo is all about the granita, quite possibly the finest you’ll ever taste. Made fresh every morning from only ice, sugar and various local flavourings, Alfredo’s granite are less watery than other…