Country Life

Country Life; architecture, gardens, countryside, property, the very best of British life.

Country Life1 min read
Miss Serena Ansell
EDDELL.CO.UK claire@eddell.co.uk spab.org.uk gallery@islandfinearts.com www.islandfinearts.com decorativefair.com ■
Country Life2 min read
Wishful Thinking
Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk WORLD peace, cancer cured, nutritious food for all, coastal erosion halted—January 1 must be a day for optimism, but most of us know we
Country Life5 min read
Town & Country Notebook
1) In which Kent town is Pocahontas buried? 2) Which bird became extinct in 1681? 3) Corduroy fabric is traditionally woven from which material? 4) Who is the Roman deity of beginnings and endings? 5) What type of nut is used to make noisette chocola
Country Life3 min read
Letters To The Editor
YOUR fascinating article about Stationers’ Hall, which I must have passed many times unaware on Ludgate Hill in London, reminded me that my father attended gabled, redbrick Stationers’ School in Hornsey in the 1920s (‘Putting in a Good Word’, Decembe
Country Life3 min read
Payback Time For Defra
AGROMENES is a fan of the BBC’s Countryfile and the direct and cheerful reporting of Charlotte Smith. However, when interviewing the Defra Secretary of State, Steve Reed, last month, she didn’t pose the one question on the family farm tax that every
Country Life3 min read
Athena
MIXED feelings always greet the annual report of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest: what works that meet the definition of a ‘national treasure’ have been saved and what has got away? If a ‘nationa
Country Life1 min read
Country Life
Editor-in-Chief Mark Hedges Editor’s PA/Editorial Assistant Amie Elizabeth White 6102 Telephone numbers are prefixed by 0330 390 Emails are name.surname@futurenet.com Deputy Editor Kate Green 4171 Managing & Features Editor Paula Lester 6426 Architec
Country Life2 min read
My Favourite Painting Alice Webster
This painting was a spur-of-the-moment purchase on a trip to St Ives, after viewing the last day of an exhibition of works by Jack Davis. We saw Emerald and it captured the depth and beauty of the sea around the Cornish coast. It also transported us
Country Life5 min read
The Long Goodbye
ALTHOUGH my mother stayed married to my father until the day she died, she tended to fall in love every 10 years. This rocky rhythm of passion was hard on her daughters and wearing for her husband. It was also vexing to her own mother, who mourned th
Country Life7 min read
A World Of Illusion
Moor Park, Hertfordshire, part I The property of the Moor Park Golf Club DID ever golf club have a 19th hole so sumptuous as this?’ asked John Betjeman of Moor Park, now the clubhouse of Moor Park Golf Club in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, in Metrola
Country Life2 min read
Robert Burns and Auld Lang Syne
NO New Year celebration the world over is complete without a raucous, swaying rendering, arms linked, of Auld Lang Syne, a sentimental paean to old friendships, the ancient phrase meaning, literally, ‘old long since’. Despite its ubiquity, few people
Country Life9 min read
All Creatures Cute And Revolting
WELCOME to the COUNTRY LIFE British Wildlife Awards 2024. Here, we celebrate our national and treasured animals… and, to be frank, some of our less beloved. As Oscar Wilde once noted: ‘Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and
Country Life5 min read
When One Door Closes
JANUARY is the month that has us looking in two directions as we review the past year—its sweet moments as well as its sadness—and crane our necks forward in anticipation of what the year ahead holds. The Romans found a way to cope with this transiti
Country Life4 min read
Completely In The Dark
I STEP into the woods, my dog by my side, leaving the streetlights behind me. Even in winter, the canopy gives a sense of enclosure—of entering a separate space, darker and wilder. My fingers trace the shape of my phone in my coat pocket as if for re
Country Life6 min read
Skating On Thin Ice
CELEBRATED for his verse, William Wordsworth is less acclaimed for another of his passions—ice skating. Perhaps that is just as well, for his friend Thomas de Quincey said that, on skates, the poet resembled ‘a dancing cow’. Wordsworth did not see hi
Country Life2 min read
Whatever Next?
The cocktail larder As if it wasn’t enough for an all-singing, all-dancing, multifunctioning kitchen to double as a dining room, television room and office, some can now be found masquerading as an occasional cocktail bar, such as with this delightfu
Country Life7 min read
Give Me Land, Lots Of Land
PEOPLE love land and, although some other estates found the sale of large houses problematic this year, at the end of the day, anything that comes wrapped in a good piece of land will eventually find a buyer.’ So said David Hebditch, head of land sal
Country Life7 min read
What’s On In London
Batten down the hatches for English National Opera’s splendidly silly production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance at the London Coliseum, until February 21. Tickets from £10 (www.eno.org) Somerset House celebrates its 25th anniversar
Country Life5 min read
Keeping It In The Farm
AS a bottle of pudding wine is uncorked, chef Oliver Gladwin hands me his phone to show a picture of a palm-sized beefsteak mushroom. ‘You can’t get these for love nor money at the moment.’ Ever the forager, he’d spotted it beneath a tree on the way
Country Life5 min read
Plant A Winter Pantry
IT’S easy to be dazzled by summer’s colourful supply of scrambling courgettes, runner beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. You’d be far wiser, however, to develop a winter pantry of vegetables that you can use for months on end: winter crops stand still an
Country Life4 min read
Taste Explosions
MANY years ago, leading the garden team at River Cottage in Devon, I had a trick I used on every course, event and garden visit: I’d pull a single 2in-tall coriander seedling from its compost, lift it to my mouth and start chewing, then ask the perso
Country Life2 min read
Kitchen Garden Cook Red Cabbage
Serves 4 1 small red cabbage, cut into thick wedges (leave the core intact to hold the wedges together)1 large red onion, cut into wedges12 sausages (pork, chicken or plant-based)2 apples, cored and sliced into wedges—I used Braeburn4 fresh thyme spr
Country Life2 min read
Highland Base, Kerlingarfjöll, Iceland
IN the middle of Iceland, there is a man named Róbert Marshall. He is, and was, many things. He was a journalist and he was a politician. He is a rock musician, a storyteller, a long-distance runner and a ski guide. He once interviewed Nelson Mandela
Country Life3 min read
New Year, New You
STEP back 2,500 years and the dominant civilisation on earth was Sparta on the Laconia plain beneath the great Taygetus mountain range. The military-based society never lost a land battle until its ultimate defeat by Thebes at Leuctra and remains fam
Country Life3 min read
All Roads Lead To Rome
ON Christmas Eve, the great bronze Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica eased open, marking the start of the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope. Jubilees, which take place every quarter of a century, offer pilgrims the chance to renew their faith through prayer a
Country Life3 min read
Beginnings And Endings
IS there a doctor on the plane?’ I can’t say I’ve heard this announcement often in my travelling life, but there have certainly been a couple of times when the call has gone out. The most recent of these took place on a return flight from New York fo
Country Life2 min read
Architecture Galore
Clive Aslet (Triglyph Books, £20) A concise and engagingly written account of the life of this outstanding architect. The author—a former Editor—and architect both have close connections with COUNTRY LIFE (review, May 15, 2024). John Stewart (Lund Hu
Country Life7 min read
A Leap In The Dark
A COVEN of bald, misshapen heads gathers around a blazing fire, eyes sunken, mouths twisted, bodies swallowed by darkness. The Witches Cauldron could easily be the artistic love child of Francisco Goya and Edvard Munch, but it’s a drawing by British
Country Life3 min read
The Past Is A Foreign Country
I SPENT most of a recent weekend lying on the bathroom floor in a hotel room in Lisbon. It wasn’t what I had planned and my only advice for visiting the city—having seen almost none of it—is don’t buy oysters from the half-drunk man with a big mousta
Country Life2 min read
Tottering-by-gently
Visit Tottering-By-Gently on our website: www.countrylife.co.uk/tottering We are committed to only using magazine paper which is derived from responsibly managed, certified forestry and chlorine-free manufacture. The paper in this magazine was source
Country Life3 min read
Bridge And Crossword
WE return to Coventry and the Crockfords Cup Finals weekend. My team was lying second (out of eight) at the halfway mark. On this Four Hearts vs the fancied Irish international team (lying third), the Irish declarer had gone one down at the other tab
Country Life6 min read
Mama, Ooh…
LITTLE could the wives of Henry VIII have known that the King’s favoured rendezvous—hunting lodge Greenwich Castle, atop a hill beside the Thames—would one day become an observatory so renowned that its location would define the Earth’s two hemispher

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