Country Life

STACKING stones have been used since prehistoric times, for navigation or to mark trails or boundaries. One such stack on a beach at St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly provided ‘an anchor for the Milky Way piercing through the night’s sky’ in this image

Unpublished A photograph taken in an unidentified garden is one in a small group enigmatically labelled ‘Miss Wilmot’. The image of two girls facing each other through the doorway invites the viewer to imagine a contextual narrative, a conceit popul

DOWNSIZE while you still can,’ someone advised. So it’s goodbye to a large north Norfolk farmhouse, garden, meadows, spinney and big pond with its own eels. I never miss houses, but I always mourn surrounding gardens and country. During 25 years in t

THE frescos by Giotto di Bondone, known as Giotto, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua epitomise early-Renaissance painting. Three tiers of painted scenes present the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary beneath an ultramarine ceiling that glitters with

LORD BYRON got it right. For this is truly the most wild and majestic of sights. In summer, the heather is purple as far as the eye can see. And, on a perfect day, when the sun is shining and the sky a cobalt blue, Loch na Garr, to quote Lord Byron o

I OPEN my eyes to the ward… I lie and stare at the wall and become aware of my body. A roll call of body parts checking in. It’s too painful and strange to be me—I am dislocated from this broken flesh. My nerves have been shocked by explosives and ev

IN late May 1944, COUNTRY LIFE published a pair of articles on Hall Place, which stands in the intimate chalkland valley of the River Meon. This ‘delightful house’, begun in the early 18th century, had been remodelled on the eve of the Second World W

Champion credentials Lifelong advocate for the environment, farming and the countryside; established The Prince’s Countryside Fund in 2010 (www.princescountrysidefund.org.uk) MY husband is a countryman to his very core. It’s the place where he is mos

I AM one of those lucky people who remembers childhood very fondly. One of the main reasons, apart from my family, is that it was spent in the beautiful and exhilarating South Downs in ‘Sussex by the Sea’. The South Downs rise majestically out of the

ON a warm spring day in the West Country, I am taken to meet a woman we’ll call Amy, a startlingly pretty blonde mother of four children and a survivor of an abusive marriage. One of the bedrooms in Amy’s house has a solid fireproof door fitted with

DURING a visit to Old Windsor Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in December 2020, The Duchess of Cornwall was tasked with opening some new kennels named in her honour. In the end, however, it was her Jack Russell terrier, Beth—a former Battersea resident—wh

LIKE a glimpse of 18th-century whimsy —a cartouche painted on a Meissen coffee pot or a vignette from an exotic scenic wallpaper—an elephant stands ankle deep in flowers in a corner of an English garden; fringed by fading daffodils, with crows on its

DURING the week, The Ritz’s John Williams lives and breathes haute cuisine. Ballotine of duck liver with cherry and pistachio, veal sweetbreads with Parmesan and truffle, tournedos of beef—these are only three of the classical, Escoffier-inspired rec

DO I dare eat a peach?’ asked J. Alfred Prufrock in his eponymous love song, T. S. Eliot’s paean to male anguish, awkwardness and indecision. Compared with his desire to wear ‘white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach’, biting into this golden

DOWN one of the prettiest streets in London’s Belgravia, in the most enchanting shop window of all, dramatic, contoured hats adorned with feathers and curlicues sit just so atop blank-faced mannequins. The tiny shop has drawn clients from all over th

A HEALTHY coral reef is one of the noisiest places in the ocean. A snapping sound produced by the pincers of small shrimp—thought to be the loudest creatures in the sea—is actually bubbles popping to shock and kill tiny fish, which the shrimp then go

Based in Par, near St Austell, The Cornish Bed Company is one of the last surviving foundries to hand-cast iron beds using traditional methods. The Rebecca, shown here, costs from £1,520 for a double (01726 825182; www.cornishbeds.co.uk) Pops of pret

PRIVACY, seclusion and spectacular views are among the attributes most prized by buyers of landmark country properties in sought-after areas of southern England, as the prices quoted for two notable recent entrants clearly demonstrate. Mark Astley of

We don’t usually feature rental properties, but the library, painted in Adam green, at The King’s Observatory in Richmond’s Old Deer Park is too beautiful to miss. Built for George III in 1769 by Sir William Chambers, it has three floors connected by

ROYAL life is unimaginably attended. Life is plotted out in an unending procession of events, duties, attendances and performances, with every aspect prescribed by a retinue of the faithful, conscientious, anxious and frankly terrified. It must be co

A FRIEND of mine was walking past some allotments back in the 1970s. As he gazed over the fence at the serried ranks of 10-pole plots, he noticed a cloud rising from one of them. From the centre of the cloud, a figure appeared carrying one of those p

THE collector of sporting art is often as much in love with the precious world movingly depicted on the canvas as with the art itself. For these are works that evoke happy memories and feelings of longing and nostalgia, as well as admiration for the

I HAD left Maastricht before the excitement at TEFAF and so am unable to reveal the identity of the stoical onlooker who sat unmoving (if perhaps not unmoved) through the robbery at the Symbolic & Chase stand, nor that of the man who wisely decided a

FLEETS of music stands, umpteen water bottles for thirsty singers, coaches for travelling performers, cushions for cellists with backache or fans for the hundreds of people who stand, sit or lie on the floor of the Albert Hall arena and gallery durin

Catherine Hanley (Yale University Press, £25) THE 12th and 13th centuries were spanned by eight successive kings of France and seven of England. They were all married, sometimes more than once, and produced well in excess of 100 children. Those child

REFLECTING on David Copperfield (1850), Charles Dickens wrote in the preface to a later edition of his eighth novel: ‘Of all my books, I like this the best.’ It has long been a favourite among readers, too, although, perhaps surprisingly, its early s

A prize of £25 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened. Solutions must reach Crossword No 4738, Country Life, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR, by Tuesday, July 19. UK entrants only ACROSS7 Single ma

FOUNTAINS ABBEY and the water gardens of Studley Royal in North Yorkshire nestle in a mesmerisingly beautiful bowl of the River Skell as it tumbles eastwards. To their west is a vast rural landscape, once part of the great Cistercian estate; to the e

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