Country Life June 8th

EVERY WEEK

JUNE 8, 2022

The wonderful West Country 54 pages of dream properties

Hardy’s Wessex: far from the madding crowds Choppy waters: the fight for family fishing boats Marvellous Mapperton and Dartmoor’s big beast

VOL CCXVIII NO 23, JUNE 8, 2022

Miss Kirsty Worroll Kirsty is a business development manager for a Fleet Management Solutions company and is the daughter of Peter and Janet Worroll of Benson, Oxfordshire.

Photographed at The Chilterns View, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, by Mike Garrard

Contents June 8, 2022

The undisputed king of fishing: a jewel-bright kingfisher proves how apt his name is amid spring showers in Worcestershire

This week

Inviting deck chairs on the beach at St Ives, Cornwall (Doug Armand/Getty Images)

Cover stories

82 An ideal manor house New research has shed fresh light on idyllic Mapperton in Dorset, finds Timothy Connor 90 ‘A party real, partly dream country’ Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, the land of Casterbridge and Egdon Heath, exists, at least in some form, discovers Susan Owens 96 Fishing in troubled waters The life of a small-boat fisherman has always been hard, but new uncertainties mean fresh dangers.

Ben Lerwill takes to the waves 64 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

76 Xanthe Arvanitakis’s favourite painting The director of Chiswick House picks a striking equestrian portrait 78 The brilliance of Thomas Telford Fiona Reynolds visits an engineering marvel, the Shropshire canal 80 Masterpiece Jack Watkins on why Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop beguiles 102 To have and to hold The lost art of Devon stavebasket-making is being revived, reveals Natasha Goodfellow 106 The good stuff Hetty Lintell dons her stripes 108 Furniture with a future Arabella Youens meets five designers of the new antiques

126 Walk on the wild side Deep in Cornwall lies Kestle Barton Gallery, the gardens of which link it perfectly to the landscape, says Caroline Donald 132 In good time Amelia Thorpe chooses elegant sundials to enhance any garden 136 Kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson conjures delicious meals with samphire 138 With fairy shoes in every flower Far from stinging their gatherers, pink and white deadnettles have healed country people for centuries, discovers Ian Morton

Every week

66 Town & Country 70 Notebook 72 Letters 73 Agromenes 74 Athena 116 Property market 120 Properties of the week 134 In the garden 144 Art market 148 Books 152 Bridge and crossword 153 Classified advertisements 158 Spectator 158 Tottering-by-Gently

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Lee Hudson/Alamy Live News

142 The slug of the Baskervilles Another black beast haunts the wilds of Dartmoor. Jack Watkins searches for our largest land slug

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Westward, ho!

A

LL roads led west for recent holidays, it seemed, the M5 resembling a car park and the A303 a knotted thread of frustration. Yet why go abroad with the land of cream teas, whortleberries, Poldark and Arthurian legend only a tortuous car journey away? Better to be stationary gazing at Stonehenge or swans on the Somerset Levels than slumped in an airport waiting for an Easyjet flight to take off.

There’s magic around every bend of a narrow West Country lane. There’s big surf on the north coast and trendy art at Bruton, Tate St Ives and East Quay in Watchet harbour.

There are luxurious hotels with top chefs— The Newt, The Pig, The Nare, Tresanton— and farmhouse B&Bs with freshly laid eggs for breakfast. There is theatre in Bath and at the Minack, music at Glastonbury, Exeter Cathedral and the Two Moors Festival.

There are evocative churches, St Michael de Rupe, clinging to its Dartmoor tor, tiny Culbone hidden in farmland; chocolate-box thatch, fishing harbours and cobbles; literary PPA Magazine Brand of the Year 2019 PPA Front Cover of the Year 2018 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year (Special Interest) 2016 British Society of Magazine Editors Scoop of the Year 2015/16 PPA Specialist Consumer Magazine of the Year 2014/15 British Society of Magazine Editors Innovation of the Year 2014/15

pilgrimages galore—Coleridge, Betjeman, Hardy, du Maurier, Christie, Williamson.

There are mystery beasts on Dartmoor and real red deer on Exmoor and the Quantocks, abundant birdlife on the Exe and TawTorridge estuaries and otters and beavers in the rivers—if you’re quiet and patient.

There are cycling and walking projects—the beautifully maintained South-West Coast Path, the Coleridge Way, the Tarka Trail— and spectacular views to Wales.

Best of all is the richly diverse colour palette: the brilliant green of the bracken in silent combes and in the beech hedges that line the wild roads crossing the Brendon

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Editorial

Editor-in-Chief Mark Hedges Editor’s Office/Lifestyle Editor Rosie Paterson 6591 Editorial Enquiries 6591

Telephone numbers are prefixed by 0330 390 Emails are name.surname@futurenet.com Deputy Editor Kate Green 4171 Managing & Features Editor Paula Lester 6426 Architectural Editor John Goodall Gardens Editor Tiffany Daneff 6115 Executive Editor and Interiors Giles Kime 6047 Deputy Features Editor Victoria Marston 6446 News & Property Editor Annunciata Elwes 3961 Luxury Editor Hetty Lintell 07984 178307

Hills; grassy banks sprouting with the cheerful pink of valerian and foxglove; red earth, red stone and red Devon cattle; white Jurassic cliffs; moorland, not yet purple, rising darkly away from fields of lush green and grazing sheep, and all around the sea.

There are chequerboard fields of blue flax, corn, peas and dairy cattle—mixed farming was going on down here long before present commentators cottoned onto it— divided by bushy hedges, woodland and small copses, the established wildlife motorways lately advocated by charities.

Regular trains into London Paddington and Waterloo, improving broadband and homeworking mean the West Country is no remote backwater where everyone talks like Jethro and gets drunk on cider. As in all desirable places, there is also hidden poverty, unemployment, a housing crisis and a struggle to recover post-pandemic momentum. Therefore, visitors, please tread carefully on the treasures that locals toil to preserve, pick up your litter and shut the gates behind you.

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Classified

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June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 65

Edited by Annunciata Elwes

‘When I look outside, I think the rest of the world is going mad, but I could happily shut myself off with four acres and 30 little dogs,’ says Harry Parsons, who has been breeding Sealyham terriers in Devon ‘the old-fashioned way’ for the past 35 years or so. ‘The problem is getting the right dogs to the right people. I turn down more than I sell to, as they need to want the dog for the right reason. Were it not for the COUNTRY LIFE article [‘Save our Sealyhams’, October 26, 2011] and some other coverage, this breed would be extinct by now.’ This most recent litter, of five pups, is eight weeks old (www.mysealyhams.com)

A bigger net for heritage skills

T

HE Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Commonwealth Heritage Skills Training Programme was recently launched at the Commonwealth Secretariat in Marlborough House, London SW1. This project, organised by the Commonwealth Heritage Forum and supported with £4.5 million from the Hamish Ogston Foundation, is the largest programme of its kind ever undertaken.

Over the next five years, it aims to help Commonwealth countries to develop the range of specialist skills needed to protect their heritage.

Through targeted courses, it will train up to 600 people in about 20 specialisms, from stonemasonry to joinery.

The programme will be delivered by both UK and international partners, 66 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

A new chapter has begun for the British Residency, Hyderabad, India, now the Koti Women’s College

including The Prince’s Foundation, the World Monuments Fund India and other international institutions. It will also provide bursaries, MA scholarships and online courses.

The initial focus will be on the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, but later phases of the programme will be extended to cover Commonwealth countries in Africa, Australasia, the Far East and the Pacific. Philip Davies, the chairman and founder of the Commonwealth Heritage Forum, comments: ‘By creating the heritage champions of the future, we will help local people save the buildings and places they value, generating unprecedented opportunities to enhance heritage skills, create jobs and build a more sustainable future.’ JG

Millie Pilkington/Country Life Picture Libray; Saurabh Chatterjee; Jim Holden/English Heritage; Paul Quagliana

Town & Country

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk The Queen of Stonehenge: on a weekend that will go down in history, eight photographs of our monarch were projected onto the Wiltshire monument, including images of her riding, at her coronation and walking her beloved corgis

Good week for

A picture paints 1,000 words

Green fingers An event at the Garden Museum, London SE1, on June 14 will see Gardens Editor Tiffany Daneff in conversation with garden designer Xa Tollemache, who recently published her first book

RTISTIC masterpieces inspired by literature through three millennia form a new exhibition at Christie’s, King Street, London SW1 (until July 14), which will also see the return of the popular Christie’s Lates after a twoyear hiatus.

Part of London Now, a summer festival of events, the loan and selling exhibition comprises 50 works, with highlights including a late-15th-century French Aesop’s Fables illuminated manuscript; J. W. Waterhouse’s Tristram and Isolde, which manages to combine Arthurian myth and romantic nationalism, painted as it was at the height of the First World War; Marlene Dumas’s Magdalena (Venus) of 1995, a presentation of the female body with A legendary romance: Tristram and an accompanying poem that alludes to Vladimir Nabokov, Isolde, depicted by J. W. Waterhouse Sandro Botticelli and Simone de Beauvoir; and seven works by Lucian Freud from 1946, made during his association with French poet Olivier Larronde.

‘A strong thread in the exhibition is figurative and narrative art, which tells the stories of its subjects so accessibly,’ explains co-curator Victoria Gramm. ‘It’s been wonderful to explore how this has been treated across time—from the Old Masters, to the pre-Raphaelites and through to contemporary artists, such as Marlene Dumas and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The Arthurian tale of the forbidden love of Tristram and Isolde seems fresh when you juxtapose it with Modernist poetry.’ Visit www.christies.com for more information.

Village halls A new £3m fund will go towards improvements at 125 village halls, launched for the Platinum Jubilee

Eurasian curlew A Natural England project to rescue the endangered waders’ eggs laid on airfields in Norfolk is under way for a second year; they’re beginning to hatch and, once fledged, will be tagged and released Thank you for the music Hordes from all over the UK gathered outside Binley Mega Chippy in Coventry last week, after songs in praise of its food on TikTok were seen by hundreds of thousands

A

Photographer Paul Quagliana captured the first flutters of a female Emperor moth (Saturnia pavonia) in this picture, which was taken soon after the insect emerged from its chrysalis. ‘These moths,’ explains Mr Quagliana, ‘favour heathland and moorland environments and are the only member of the silk-moth family to be found in the UK. The large “eyes” on their wings are said to startle potential predators’

Hunting the stag beetle The PTES’s Great Stag Hunt has begun: until July, the public is encouraged to report sightings of stag beetles in gardens, parks, woodland and other green spaces (www.stagbeetles.ptes.org) Duke of Burgundy The rare fritillary butterfly has benefited from the efforts of Royal Agricultural University students, whose planting of cowslips and grassland improvements at Cirencester Golf Club, Gloucestershire, have won a conservation award Pembroke Welsh corgi Eight years ago, it was a ‘vulnerable’ breed at risk of dying out, but now the royal favourite is seeing the highest number of registrations in 30 years, says the Kennel Club

Bad week for Oxford University mess Officials hope fines will deter students from ‘trashing’ the city after exams, which involves throwing drinks, shaving foam and confetti over each other, creating a mess that is said to cost £45,000 a year to clean up

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 67

Town & Country

On the history trail

For the love of dog G

ENERATIONS of Earl family artists are celebrated in the new exhibition at the Kennel Club Art Gallery—the largest collection of their works ever amassed. It started with George Earl, perhaps most famous for his chaotic train-station scenes Going North and Coming South, in which crowds and their dogs prepare to travel to and from Scotland for the grouse season. The legacy of canine artists continued with his son Thomas Percy Earl—whose 1935 oil painting King George V with his granddaughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose (above) has been loaned from the Royal Collection for the show—George’s daughter, Maud Earl, and later descendants Jack Earl and Maris Earl Tomaszewski.

‘We are particularly excited that this display will be going beyond the artwork; the exhibition will provide intimate insights into the lives of the family behind the masterpieces, including paintings, private correspondence and photographs, all from descendants of the Earl family,’ explains curator Marianne Walker. ‘This historical context creates an immersive experience where visitors are completely transported to live through the Earl family.’ The exhibition will run at 10, Clarges Street, Mayfair, London W1, until January 20, 2023.

Go west, young man

June 20 Badminton House in Gloucestershire, home of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, with superb gardens created by Russell Page and François Goffinet

A

S well as the traditional garden openings that take place up and down the country through the summer, the National Garden Scheme organises a small number of special events at outstanding gardens where access is normally very limited. Typically, these events include a welcome talk from the owners or head gardener and a guided tour of the garden, as well as refreshments. Openings of this kind coming up in the South-West of England over the next few weeks include: 68 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

OLLOWING the success of her YouTube Channel and a television series for the Smithsonian Channel (An American Aristocrat’s Guide to Great Estates), Julie Montagu, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, has launched a podcast aptly titled American Viscountess. The first four episodes focus on the family’s lost ancestral home, Hinchingbrooke House in Cambridgeshire (now a school), examining its monastic roots and including interviews with her father-in-law, the 11th Earl of Sandwich, and one of his sisters, Lady Kate Hunloke.

‘My father-in-law and I chatted about the tragedy after the Second World War when so many historic houses were lost and our family home, Hinchingbrooke House, was one of those casualties,’ explains the yoga instructor, author and presenter, who works with her husband, Luke, managing their Dorset estate, Mapperton (page 82). ‘I decided we needed to have a podcast, too, so others can be moved by these historichouse stories of past and present.’

July 7 Lulworth Castle House in Dorset, home of James and Sara Weld, where the glorious, secluded seaside position provides a memorable setting for extensive gardens that have been recently rejuvenated June 30 Ferne Park in Wiltshire (above), home of Lord and Lady Rothermere, where spectacular gardens have been created in the past 20 years to complement the Palladian house

Tickets must be booked in advance and numbers are limited; visit www. ngs.org.uk and click ‘Special Events’ on the home page. George Plumptre

Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022; Andrew Lawson; The Historic England Archive, Historic England; Yorkshire Pics/Alamy

F

Country Mouse

I

Cabmen, take cover Y

OU may have seen these little green cabins on the side of the road and wondered what they were.

London’s charming, but scarce cabmen’s shelters celebrated a victory last week as two were given Grade IIlisted status by Historic England— on Pont Street, SW1, and the Chelsea Embankment, SW3 (above). They join 10 others that are already on the National Heritage List.

London’s cabbie shelters exist thanks to a Capt George C. Armstrong, editor of The Globe, who was inspired to create them after he was stranded in a storm due to hansom-cab drivers taking refuge in pubs. In 1875, he and other philanthropists established The Cabmen’s Shelter Fund, which arranged for the construction of 61 shelters between then and 1951. Often, local residents would club together to fund one for the neighbourhood; indeed, the first shelter, built in 1875, was in St John’s Wood, right outside Armstrong’s house.

Each one contained a tiny café with room for about 10 cabbies to sit, eat and stay warm (although not drink,

gamble or swear). Only 13 now survive, but most of them are still in use.

‘They are London icons as much as the red bus or black cab and reminders of how our transport systems have changed over time,’ enthuses Historic England’s Emily Gee. ‘We proposed the listing of the cabmen’s shelters in Chelsea because they are a tangible reminder of our history, when taxicabs were drawn by horses,’ adds Dr James Thompson, chairman of the Chelsea Society.

‘It is marvellous that the shelters have been listed, thus preserving these emblems of the cabbies who serve London to this day. They learn The Knowledge, and Historic England has preserved it.’

Today, an exclusive café for blackcab drivers operates at the Pont Street shelter (the general public can be served through a hatch) and the newly restored Chelsea shelter, close to Cadogan Pier, is visited by local schoolchildren and houses a public ‘micro café’. The last remaining unlisted cabmen’s shelter stands at Wellington Place, NW8.

Two markers showing the Red Rose of the House of Lancaster (pictured) and the White Rose of the House of York at the county boundary of the M62 are among six new listings announced to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, which have been chosen

by Historic England to highlight the important places and changes of The Queen’s 70-year reign.

She officially opened the country’s highest motorway, which crosses the Pennines at 1,220ft, in 1971

Britain at its best

T was all of us at our best. The past week has been a great festival of Britishness, led by the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Mostly, these celebrations took place in villages, towns and city streets across the land and it proved that a lot of bunting, a slice of cake and a cup of tea shared with your neighbours is just about the best tonic the nation could ever have and, goodness, we all needed it.

In our Hampshire village, several gardens had been clipped and cultivated to perfection and the owners were only too happy to share their pride and joys with the rest of us, as well as to offer their advice and knowledge to interested and aspiring gardeners, such as myself.

Afterwards, we all retreated to yet another garden, where tea pots of every shape and form were filled with proper tea, alongside a vast array of homemade sponge cakes, scones, brownies and flapjacks. People met people for the first time, as other friends gently chided each other in that very British way. All of this was to honour The Queen for her remarkable 70 years on the throne.

In the end, her subjects honoured each other with kindness, fun and joy. I suspect that would make her very pleased. MH

Town Mouse

Platinum moments

T

HE bunting went up, the flags came out and so did the people. The Platinum Jubilee has come… and gone. For a brief moment, London in all its variety and diversity flowered in celebration of the remarkable figure of The Queen. There were holiday crowds in the central parks and—no less important—parties in streets and squares across the capital. The recent experience of the pandemic perhaps added to the spirit of cheerful neighbourliness that these gatherings so clearly expressed.

Some parts of the wider world understand the importance of these celebrations, but, Town Mouse suspects, others looked on with a mixture of bewilderment and amusement. Yet, hopefully, there was a touch of admiration as well. What other living figure could command such a response? Who else could acknowledge it with such dignity? And what other nation would brave the weather—in a country famous for its rain—and seek pleasure in tea and cakes outdoors?

With the passing of this long-anticipated event, it feels as if the year as a whole has turned a corner.

At school, the exams are nearly over. That promises —at home—a welcome respite from the demands of revision. At the same time, the academic year also enters its final straight and the summer holidays loom welcomingly on the horizon. JG

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 69

Town & Country Notebook Quiz of the week

Oh, the agony!

1) Who was the mother of Edward VI? 2) The Dark Side of the Moon is a 1973 album by which band?

3) Which Shakespeare character has been played by both Mel Gibson and Sir Laurence Olivier?

4) A gall grows on a plant as a result of which type of insect?

5) Each chess player starts a game with how many pieces?

Word of the week Anabiosis (noun) A state of suspended animation; a return to life after apparent death

100 years ago in June 10, 1922

Edited by Victoria Marston

Agony aunt Mrs Hudson solves your dilemmas

How to win friends

Q

I am a single man who is nearly 35 and I don’t have many friends any more, so I am looking to increase my social circle.

Do you have any suggestions for me please?

T. P., by email My suggestion would be to enjoy the peace and quiet, but then I’m not a hugely sociable being. I am going to look on the bright(er) side and assume that you and your friends have drifted apart due to marriages and children and the like, rather than anything terrible. This, sadly, is a hazard of being single in your thirties—you can find that you have less and less in common with your contemporaries, as they pair off and lose the

A

Time to buy

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SEND you photographs of fox cubs, which I hope you will like. The vixen had, unfortunately, been caught in a rabbit trap and in crossing a stream by way of a bridge made by two fallen trees it became a prisoner again. The trap became fixed between the two trees and the vixen slipped and hung from the trees with its head in the water. Up to the present the cubs have been fed regularly by friends of mine on rabbits and milk. Though fairly tame in the presence of their benefactors, they are very shy of any stranger. One cub seemed to be the master. By snapping and growling at the rest of the family he would keep them all in the earth while he enjoyed a hearty meal. They played together at other times quite happily.

1) Jane Seymour 2) Pink Floyd 3) Hamlet 4) Wasp 5) 16 Riddle me this: Choose a matchstick

70 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

ability to engage in any conversation that doesn’t consist of wedding planners, weaning or ‘which school’?

The favoured solution seems to be to socialise with a younger set—be they colleagues or the friends of a sibling. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but do be aware that you will only get away with it for a certain number of years, at which point you become the strange older man trying to be ‘down with the kids’.

Generally speaking, it is common ground that makes for solid friendship. Into literature? Join a book club. Theatre? Am-dram.

Fitness? Sports team. You get the idea. My only word of warning is to find something that genuinely interests you—or you will only find yourself surrounded by conversation equally as tedious as that of your former friends.

In need of advice? Email your problem to mrs.hudson@futurenet.com

Hand-painted Pencil Case and Six Pencils in Circus, £15, Tinks (www.tinks products.co.uk)

‘Now that I have what I wanted, I feel somehow freed up to want more.

Free to want without hesitation. I think wanting is man’s natural state’ The New Wilderness, Diane Cook

Riddle me this

How can you make a fire with only one stick?

Glyndebourne Ottoman Silks Cravat, £125, Glyndebourne Shop (01273 815033; www. glyndebourneshop.com)

Damascene Rose Bubbly, £21.30 (12 x 270ml), Luscombe (01364 643036; www.luscombe.co.uk)

In the spotlight Hummingbird hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum)

Numerous garden flowers lure the hummingbird hawk-moth, one of the most charismatic of summer visitors. Flying by day, it may turn up anywhere in the UK, but most are in the South.

The name aptly describes the hummingbirdlike feeding habit, holding itself aloft on rapidly beating wings—70–80 beats per second—as it sips nectar lying deep in the bloom, from a long, straw-like proboscis. Such flight is energyintensive, so much of the day is spent feeding.

Favourite flowers include honeysuckle, buddleja, lavender, red valerian, lantanas and verbenas; also jasmines, petunias,

phlox, acanthus, salvias, thistles, echiums and scabious. Macroglossum stellatarum is common in the Mediterranean, but perhaps finds it worthwhile to cross the Channel because British gardens are reliable restaurants throughout the spring-to-autumn seasons.

With a discreet, furry cigar body, noticeably patterned in black and white at the tail end, and a flutter of rusty-orange wings visible in flight, the moth is easily overlooked when at rest under its grey cape. The caterpillars feed in July and August, especially on wild madder and bedstraws.

Country Life Picture Library; Beauty and the Beast , 1991, Peter J. Hall, Disney; Alamy; Getty

Unmissable events

media, art, environment and music, with speakers such as Justine Picardie and Maggi Hambling (www.eafestival.com)

Until June 26 Fresh Air Sculpture, The Old Rectory, Quenington, Gloucestershire.

Traditional and modern artworks in a Cotswold garden (01285 750358; www.freshairsculpture.com)

Until October 16 ‘Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts’ exhibition (pictured), The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1. Featuring Disney drawings displayed alongside 18th-century art (020–7563 9500; www. wallacecollection.org)

June 20 Summer Roses Day, Dorset Walled Garden, Upper Sydling House, Up Sydling, Dorset. Join Troy Scott Smith, head gardener at Sissinghurst, for a tour of more than 100 rose varieties (www.dorset walledgarden.co.uk)

June 11–12 EA Festival, Hedingham Castle, Halstead, Essex. Showcase of literature,

July 6 Introduction to DeerStalking Course, West London Shooting School, Northolt, Greater London (020–8845 1377; www.shootingschool.co.uk)

Chadlington Village Gardens, near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

June 12, 1pm–5pm

Groups of gardens are opening all over the country this weekend and a good example is this selection of five opening for the first time in the Evenlode Valley.

Gardens large and small offer a variety of planting treats and the chance for exploration as you wander from one to another (www.ngs.org.uk)

Wines of the week Minty fresh Ringbolt, Cabernet Sauvignon, Margaret River, South Australia 2020. £10, Tesco, alc 14% Punching above its weight, this is minty fresh, with cedar oak, eucalypt-tinged cherry, blackcurrant compote and red liquorice flavours. Elegant and juicy with inky tannins, a creamy texture and long finish. Fire up the barbecue!

Great with grilled prawns Jean Leon, 3055 Rosé, Penedès, Spain 2019. £15, Ibérica, alc 12% From organically cultivated vineyards in Penedès, this lively Pinot Noir rosé is pale in colour, but packed with strawberry, raspberry and redcurrant fruit. With crisp citrus acidity, it’s a great match for grilled prawns and sunny days.

Exotic-fruit tang Günther Steinmetz, Brauneberger Juffer Riesling Kabinett, Mosel, Germany 2020. £19.95, Jeroboams, alc 9% A thoroughly enjoyable white, perfect as an aperitif. A fresh, exotic-fruit tang on the palate, filled with pear, apple and peach flavours. Really lovely clarity and expression.

Touches of sweet pineapple give a pleasant and balanced, soft sugary hit.

Soft spice Domaine Trapet Père & Fils, Marsannay, Burgundy, France 2018. £38.95, Champagnes & Châteaux, alc 13% Produced with grapes from two lieux-dits, this Pinot Noir ferments in open-top vats using natural yeasts before spending 15–18 months in barrel. The wine is unfined, with only 10% filtered. Soft spice, light oak framing and perfumed red plum, cherry and forest fruit.

For more, visit www.decanter.com

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 71

Letters to the Editor

On the buses

M

ANY rural bus services are being totally withdrawn, leaving residents with no access to essential services. Surely this is sealing the fate of town-centre businesses already struggling to compete with online retailers? Since the pandemic, concern has been expressed about mental health and pressure on the NHS and carers. Without transport, those living alone face total isolation from social activities, health centres and their families. People without cars will no longer be able to offer support to those living alone and there aren’t enough carers to go around. We are all being urged to be aware of climate change and the impact our activities have on it, to use public transport instead of private cars—but how can we if there is none available?

Jacqueline Mann, by email

The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne

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Dressed to impress

W

ITH regards to the gold knots on ceremonial dress uniform (‘To honour our Queen’, May 25), military lore tells us these were added to stop troops using their sleeves as cleaning cloths for eyes, mouths, noses and even wounds and that it was ‘The Queen’ who requested this of her Household Cavalry Musicians. Which ‘Queen’ is where the contention comes in. I have heard that it was our current monarch, Queen Alexandra, even Queen Victoria.

Empty-nest syndrome

O

VER the past 30 years, we have had house martins nesting in the eaves of our row of cottages in abundance—that is, until recent years. This time, my husband put up nesting boxes to encourage them and even filled a wheelbarrow with wet mud, to make sure they were well provided with nesting material.

We waited patiently and about a dozen of the birds arrived in May. They took to the boxes immediately and we enjoyed being wakened by their delightful song. Three days later, we awoke to silence—every house martin had disappeared.

Where have they gone and why?

Will they come back? Does anyone know? This has never happened before and we are really missing our tiny visitors.

Rhona McKeown, Wiltshire

However, in our Windsor Archive, we store a George III-era Musician Gold Coat that clearly displays these beautiful buttons (left). As such, the tradition must go back to at least the third Hanoverian king and his wife, Queen Charlotte (1761– 1818). Other regiments claim that similar buttons were a Napoleonic rule in the early 1800s. Readers can learn more about our uniforms in a special exhibition this winter.

Alice Pearson, director of the Household Cavalry Museum, London

Never forgotten

J

OE GIBBS’S Spectator (May 11) reminded me of a wet and wild time in Glenelg, where my colleague and I spent two weeks in 2018, conserving the magnificent war memorial. Notwithstanding the fact that the first name on the bronze plaque is that of Ian Fleming’s father, Maj Valentine Fleming, perhaps the most moving aspect of this tribute to the fallen is that the scattered population of Glenelg turned down the offer of a new pier in order to build it—the owner of the local estate, Lady Scott of Eileanreach, whose own son (Capt George Henry Hall Scott) is remembered, had offered to fund one or the other. This was a remarkable decision considering the recession that was affecting all communities after the war and the importance of fishing to the local economy.

Derek Cunningham (sculptor and conservator), East Lothian

Country Life, ISSN 0045-8856, is published weekly by Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA, United Kingdom. Country Life Subscriptions: For enquiries and orders, please email: help@magazinesdirect.com, alternatively from the UK call: 0330 333 1120, overseas call: + 44 330 333 1120 (Lines are open Monday–Saturday, 8am- 6pm GMT excluding Bank Holidays). One year full subscription rates: 1 Year (51) issues. UK £213.70; Europe/Eire €380 (delivery 3–5 days); USA $460 (delivery 5–12 days); Rest of World £359 (delivery 5–7 days). Periodicals postage paid at Brooklyn NY 11256. US Postmaster: Send address changes to Country Life, Airfreight and mailing in the USA by agent named WN Shipping USA, 165–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Subscription records are maintained at Future Publishing Ltd, Rockwood House, 9–16, Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, RH16 3DH. Air Business Ltd is acting as our mailing agent. BACK NUMBERS Subject to availability, issues from the past three weeks are available from www.magazinesdirect.com. Subscriptions queries: 0330 333 1120. If you have difficulty in obtaining Country Life from your newsagent, please contact us on 0330 390 6591. We regret we cannot be liable for the safe custody or return of any solicited or unsolicited material, whether typescripts, photographs, transparencies, artwork or computer discs. COUNTRY LIFE PICTURE LIBRARY: Articles and images published in this and previous issues are available, subject to copyright, from the Country Life Picture Library: 01252 555090/2/3.

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72 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

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Letter of the week

Mark Hedges

HRH’s highway

F

URTHER to the piece listing places and objects named in honour of The Queen (May 25), I think Elizabeth, a South Australia suburb, is worthy of mention. My late father was one of the public architects employed to oversee devel- The Queen at opment of this Government new ‘satellite city’ House, Adelaide in the mid 1950s, providing housing and amenities for thousands of UK immigrant families.

As Adelaide’s main north-south road had been named King William Street in the 1830s, in honour of Queen Adelaide’s husband, so the thoroughfare bisecting Elizabeth is Philip Highway.

Helen Richardson, South Australia

King of beasts

I

MUCH enjoyed the article about Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square (Masterpiece, May 18), but would caution against climbing onto them.

When I was an orthopaedic surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital, London SE1, it was not unusual to see visitors to the capital who had got on a lion’s back, but on dismounting had missed the plinth and plummeted to the ground, sustaining fractures. Like the real thing, the bronze animals need to be treated with respect. David Nunn, Kent

JUNE 15

Forget-me-not, a flower full of stories, the long history of Hadrian’s Wall, perfect peas, lockdown labradors and the return of Masterpiece Make your week, every week, with a Country Life subscription 0330 333 1120

Beautiful and useful

S

USTAINABILITY is not about trashing the countryside, but this is precisely what the unthinking National Grid and some parts of the Government are poised to do. The offshorewind programme has been a triumph, being one of the cheapest ways we have of generating electricity. It’s far less expensive than gas or nuclear. George Osborne’s foresight in providing the money to create our offshore wind market has made a huge difference. Yet, instead of crowning that success with a longterm policy for bringing energy on shore, the Government is fixed on a mend and make-do system that will mean country villages all around the coast are disfigured by huge transmission stations. This is a barmy way of proceeding, when we could have ring mains running under the sea into which the offshore arrays could link and that could come on shore where there are already pylons to take the electricity to businesses and consumers.

The pylons we already have need restringing and updating to carry greater loads of electricity. This would obviate the new schemes, which plan long lines of pylons marching across Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex.

They will run all the way from Norwich in Norfolk to Tilbury in Essex, disfiguring some of the loveliest scenery in Britain. Their design may have been improved to make them less intrusive, but that is merely cosmetic.

Renewable fuel is designed to give us the energy we need without damaging the planet, but that necessary aim doesn’t excuse damaging the landscape. It would only repeat what happened with mining fossil fuels, when coal mines dumped their spoil in huge slag heaps and left them for future generations to clean up. It was only the terrible disaster of Aberfan that made the nation fully aware of the ugly and dangerous legacy that they left behind.

Surely, we have learned there is no acceptable short cut to energy security. Wind energy, on-shore and off-shore, photovoltaic cells and nuclear will deliver that security. But they must carry the full cost of connection and the national grid must undergo systemic change to make that happen. It is costly, but necessary if Britain is to be self-sufficient and not dependent on Russia, Saudi Arabia and other such regimes. However, that vital change must respect the environment and our landscape.

We cannot have today’s version of slag heaps all over the countryside. Pylons and transmission stations may not mean huge piles of waste, but they are intrusive and ugly. We must insist on the alternative methods of transmission by underground and undersea cables.

That is all part of sustainability and, only very recently, the Government recognised its importance by providing grants for landscape protection in the Environment Act. Now, only a few months later, that Government is proposing to trash swathes of the countryside, citing the excuse that it is necessary if we’re to produce energy in a way that doesn’t make us reliant on Vladimir Putin. That’s factually not true. We can combine utility with beauty.

This approach is also politically flawed.

A real free market demands we pay the proper cost of what we buy. The Victorians bucked that market by passing on the clean-up costs of coal to future generations. We must not repeat that folly. Governments can choose to subsidise cost through taxation, but should never push it off to future generations. Only populist politicians, focused solely on the present, do that. They are careless of the legacy they leave. It is, therefore, a defining issue, which will determine whether this Government is truly a Conservative administration that wants to hand on to their children something better than they inherited themselves.

The Victorians bucked the market by passing on the clean-up costs of coal. We must not repeat that folly

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 73

Athena

Cultural Crusader

The power of the bigger picture

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NE positive outcome of the past two years of lockdown has been an unusual outpouring of books, as people have turned enforced time at home to account.

Among them is one very unusual publication that richly deserves attention, but which might escape general notice. It addresses the subject of wall paintings and rood screens—the screen dividing the nave and chancel that takes its name from the rood or crucifixion carved above it—in Welsh churches from 1200 to 1800. Painted Temples

by Richard Suggett (with contributions by Anthony Parkinson and Jane Rutherfoord) is ostensibly a specialist production of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, with parallel texts throughout in Welsh and English.

The book authoritatively introduces the subject of church building and furnishing in late-medieval Wales. It also traces the story of wall painting in these buildings right up to the Regency. Interspersed within it are two case studies, one examining the spectacular recent discovery of wall paintings at St Cadoc’s, Llancarfan, and the other the study and conservation of paintings at St Teilo’s Church, Llandeilo Talybont, now re-created at St Fagans National Museum of History (COUNTRY L IFE , October 20, 2021). These two buildings respectively illustrate what treasures might still await discovery in the parish churches of Wales and the kinds of neglect they can suffer.

What might seem a catalogue of fragments leaps off the page, a collection of astonishing things The text, valuable and full of new insights as it is, however, is not really the thing that makes this book so remarkable. Rather, it is the bold decision to produce it on a huge

scale with large, high-quality illustrations.

Athena has no idea about the commercial viability of this approach, but she can testify that it makes the material it presents pack an incredible punch. What might seem in a smaller publication like a catalogue of unremarkable fragments—not to mention historic views and reconstructions— leaps off the page, as a collection of astonishing and fascinating things.

It adds to the interest of this volume that so much of what it presents is unfamiliar.

On her next visit to Wales, for example, Athena will be seeking out the effigies of Saints Iestyn and Pabo at Llaniestyn and Llanbabo on Anglesey, as well as the painted canopy of St Benedict’s Church, Gyffin.

The Church in Wales really needs a book such as this to highlight the interest of its historic buildings and their contents. More than any other part of the British Isles, the cumulative decline in church attendance, the damage wrought by Covid and the relative poverty of large areas of the countryside have put many of these buildings at extreme risk (although the heroic work of the Friends of Friendless Churches should not go unacknowledged). This book is a reminder of why these buildings matter and also that, lavishly presented, art can advocate itself.

The way we were Photographs from the Country Life archive

1935

Unpublished

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

74 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Country Life Picture Library

Immaculately dressed cooks at work in the kitchen of Christ’s Hospital, West Sussex. With white tiles on the walls to reflect the light, the photograph did not need to be posed. The clock on the wall shows the time as 10.07 and this picture presumably shows, therefore, preparations for lunch. Note the duckboards on the floor.

My favourite painting Xanthe Arvanitakis

The Ambassador of Morocco by Jan Wyck and Godfrey Kneller

Xanthe Arvanitakis is the director of Chiswick House and Gardens Trust

Since I joined Chiswick in 2020, this painting, in an octagonal domed saloon on the first floor, has always stopped me in my tracks. It is a portrait of Mohammed bin al Attar, who was sent as an ambassador from Morocco to the Court of Charles II in 1681. He caused a sensation in London and became famous for his displays of horsemanship in Hyde Park. The painting forms an important part of the Black Chiswick through History community research project

The Ambassador of Morocco, 1684, by Jan Wyck (1652–1700) and Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), oil on canvas, 123¼in by 91in, Chiswick House, London W4

N 1684, Godfrey Kneller and Jan Wyck collaborated on an equestrian portrait of the Moroccan Ambassador Mohammed bin al Attar, who had visited England in 1681–82 to promote an anti-Spanish alliance between Morocco and England and had been welcomed into aristocratic society, attending parties and touring estates. Crowds gathered when he went riding in Hyde Park to admire his horsemanship.

Here, al Attar sits confidently on a rearing horse, wearing Moroccan military dress 76 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

with a flourish of classical drapery. He looks out calmly, his beard neatly clipped, his dark hair curling from beneath his white turban.

In his right hand, he wields an exceptionally long spear that stretches across the painting diagonally. It is echoed by the stance of the horse and countered by his yellow sash, which gives the work great dynamism.

Two years before al Attar’s portrait was painted, Kneller became a naturalised Briton.

He had been born in Germany and spent time studying art in The Netherlands and

Italy before settling in England. By 1684, he was regarded as the leading portrait painter in the land. Dutchman Jan Wyck worked in Britain for 25 years. He was a successful military and maritime artist who collaborated with Kneller and John Wootton, painting the horses and scenery in several of their works. Wyck was known for studying horses from life and for his attention to detail. This painting belonged to the 3rd Earl of Burlington, the architect of Chiswick House, and it still hangs in his former home.

Historic England/Bridgeman Images

I

Charlotte Mullins comments on The Ambassador of Morocco

A walking life

Fiona Reynolds

The brilliance of Thomas Telford His legacy is the Shropshire Union Canal, a feat of engineering and a delight to walk beside

T

It’s an extraordinary feeling, walking below modern roads, yet surrounded by wildlife It takes a while to navigate from the station to the canalside, skirting roundabouts and negotiating a vast main road, but, once there, I enter another world of charming canal cottages, beautiful brick setts marked with the scrape of horses’ hooves, and an elegant flight of 21 locks down to Aldersley Junction, where the Birmingham Canal meets the Staffordshire & Worcestershire.

It’s an extraordinary feeling, walking below huge railway arches and modern roads, gazing at the backs of factory buildings, yet surrounded by wildlife and detached from the hustle of the city. It’s beautiful.

At Aldersley, I walk the short distance to Autherley Junction, where the Shropshire Union Canal branches west with a big sign saying ‘Chester’. I’m out of the city almost 78 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Gliding through a peaceful world: Ovaltine Boat at Gnossal by Harley Crossley

immediately and into the fresh green, gold and blossom-flecked world that will characterise my day. The canal is now wider, with trees arching above old stone bridges, numbered from Autherley.

I make progress astonishingly quickly.

I’m soon past Codsall and under the M54 (a horrid modern bridge). Mostly, I’m alone, with only an occasional narrowboat for company, but, at intervals, there are mooring sites and, at Brewood, a pub that brings people to the canal. Pressing on, I cross the A5 on an elevated aqueduct with impressive pillars, designed in 1832 by the great engineer Thomas Telford, who had more than a hand in both the canal and the A5.

The canal had a convoluted history, with the Ellesmere end finished in the 1790s to great commercial success. However, by the time the rest was ready to be built, in the 1830s, railways were already threatening its viability. Telford cleverly engineered it so that, for great stretches, it needed no locks, driving like a railway through cuttings and on embankments. It was difficult to construct, with landslips causing repeated problems, and Telford did not live to see it open.

Within 10 years, competition forced a plan to convert much of the canal into a railway, but, somehow, it survived, carrying coal,

iron, timber, milk and grain in and out of the West Midlands, vying with the railways until the First World War brought business crashing to a halt. Commercial traffic ceased, the canal deteriorated, and its future was only secured when it was finally classified as a cruising waterway in 1968.

North of the A5 is a long stretch past Wheaton Aston (providing a welcome pub stop) to Gnosall Heath. I count the bridges and iron milestones that mark my progress towards Nantwich. I know my destination isn’t far beyond Norbury Junction and it’s this stretch, from Norbury to Shebdon, where the most spectacular evidence of Telford’s ingenuity can be seen. The canal veers from being high on a vast embankment to plunging deep into a cutting with a fantastic double-height bridge (no 39).

When I reach Shebdon I’m tired, but exhilarated by the beauty of the day and the achievement of long-distance walking.

Thank goodness for those with the foresight to hang on to our canals when their original purpose fell away; we almost don’t deserve the joy they bring.

Fiona Reynolds is the author of ‘The Fight for Beauty’ and chair of the Royal Agricultural University governing council

Harley Crossley. All Rights Reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images

HE great canal-building age of Britain left a legacy we all enjoy. We trundle happily along these quiet waterways by narrowboat, foot or bicycle, scarcely appreciating their tempestuous history and miraculous survival.

My walk (a nice long one) is along the Shropshire Union Canal, which stretches from the industrial West Midlands to the River Dee. Everything is idyllic—sunshine, mounds of hawthorn blossom, flowering webs of cow parsley, sitting swans and bundles of newly hatched ducklings, skidding giddily on the water’s surface—but only as I walk do I appreciate the complexity of the canal’s construction and its chequered history.

I start at Wolverhampton station, a confused mass of buildings and roads above the calm, deep water of the canal. I’ll finish at Shebdon on the Staffordshire/Shropshire border, where my daughter lives and where, after 21 miles, I think I’ll be done.

Britain’s greatest masterpieces

Adlestrop

by Edward Thomas

That peaceful station with its soundtrack of birdsong may no longer exist, but the feeling of old England remains in Thomas’s words

E

XASPERATED publishers of Edward Thomas’s travel books complained that he showed scant interest in describing crowd-pleasing beauty spots or recognisable topographical features, preferring to digress into what biographer R. George Thomas called ‘the half-world that lies behind’. It’s perhaps fitting, therefore, that his most famous poem alights on a north Cotswolds village of which few would otherwise have heard.

Adlestrop was one of 16 poems Thomas wrote during a hot streak when immobilised by a sprained ankle in January 1915, several months before his army enlistment, but it was only published shortly after his death, from a shell at Arras in 1917.

Thomas had recorded in his field notebook how a train from London Paddington to Worcester had briefly stopped at Adlestrop the previous summer, when he was travelling 80 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Also present is his air of detachment, as if travelling through life in a dream-like state to visit his friend, the American poet Robert Frost, who was then living at Leddington on the Gloucestershire border. For years, Thomas had laboured over what he regarded as hack work, including book reviews, biographies, travel books, essays of the imagination and a single novel, without finding creative satisfaction. Although respected as a literary critic, he suffered from depression and had attempted suicide. His friends, including the Nature writer W. H. Hudson and the leading Georgian poet Gordon Bottomley,

had already spotted that his writing often resembled prose poetry, but it was Frost who encouraged him to consider concentrating on verse full time.

Assiduous researchers of Victorian train timetables have shown that the train Thomas took was not an express and neither did it make an ‘unwonted’ (unscheduled) stop at Adlestrop, but it doesn’t matter. (The station itself no longer exists, but a sign and railway bench have been relocated to a bus shelter in the village and listed Grade II in tribute to the poem and the poet’s work and sacrifice in the First World War.) Thomas was simply doing what writers and dramatists have always done. He was inserting a made-up detail to create an impression, in this case the familiar moment when a train inexplicably draws to a halt at a deserted country railway station. The occupant of the carriage, silently awaiting the resumption

Reading Adlestrop is to be transported to that ‘bare platform’ in the heat of June

What they said Nebulously intangibly beautiful Ivor Gurney When… Edward Thomas was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered Walter de la Mare

Alamy; Getty

The most authoritative poetry critic of his time, the innovator of new forms and approaches in a number of prose genres and among a handful of poets who helped reshape English verse in the early 20th century of their journey, suddenly feels a heightened awareness of the immediate surroundings.

Thomas was writing in the age of steam, but the experience remains universal.

Similarly timeless is the atmosphere.

Although written when Thomas was pondering whether to enlist, thus adding a nostalgic element to the peace of the remembered moment, the air of reverie and the evocation of a warm, still summer’s day, of willows and meadowsweet, blackbirds singing and ‘high cloudlets in the sky’, is transferable to a later era. As Margaret Drabble noted in A Writer’s Britain: ‘This is England, seen so briefly, so accidentally, so lastingly, from a passing train: who has not seen it so?’

If Adlestrop reflects Thomas’s sensitivity to the English countryside and its flora and fauna, also present is his air of detachment, as if travelling through life in a dream-like state. More uneasy than the Georgian poets, many of whom were his friends and shared his love of the pastoral, Thomas would write sadder poems than Adlestrop, but none came closer to capturing the public imagination.

Between 1914 and 1916, he wrote 140 poems.

Sadly, apart from a handful that came out under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway, Thomas did not live to see any of them published in book form. It was left to a later generation to recognise him, in the words of his most recent biographer Jean Moorcroft

Wilson, as a bridge between the Georgians and fully fledged Modernists such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Jack Watkins

The prose poet

Interest in the life and work of Edward Thomas (1878–1917) continues to grow. The past decade has brought Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras (2015), the most substantial biography to date. It followed on from Matthew Hollis’s account of Thomas’s friendship with Robert Frost, Now All Roads Lead To France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2012).

Never a poet to be declaimed from the hilltops, like Frost, Thomas sought to bring common speech patterns to verse.

There has been much conjecture as to the extent of Frost’s influence. Thomas was already an established critic when the pair first met and among the first to review the American’s first published book of poems A Boy’s Will (1913). Frost wrote of their relationship that ‘what we had in common we had before we were

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

born,’ considering it, in Dr Moorcroft Wilson’s words, ‘a process of mutual discovery’. W. H. Hudson had seen the essentially poetic quality of Thomas after reading the poet’s semiautobiographical novel, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913). ‘He is essentially a poet… every person described in it… are one and all just Edward Thomas,’ he commented.

‘A poet trying to write prose fiction often does this.’ Certainly, no one but Thomas could have written books such as The South Country (1909) and In Pursuit of Spring (1914), atmospheric, idiosyncratic accounts of his journeys through the southern counties. Essential countryside poems that capture his distinctive tone include The Manor Farm, The Owl, As the Team’s Head Brass, The Combe, Lob, The Cuckoo and The Barn.

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 81

An ideal manor house

Mapperton House, Dorset The home of the Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke

Fresh research reveals more about the history of one of our most celebrated manor houses and its magnificent gardens, finds Timothy Connor Photographs by Paul Highnam

M

APPERTON HOUSE answers the popular ideal of a time-worn English manor house, with its rambling outline and mellow stonework. The property and associated estate have been owned since the Middle Ages by minor gentry families and, until 1919, had never been sold, but descended by marriage or inheritance. The story of the present building, almost certainly erected near or on the site of a yet more ancient house, begins with one Robert Morgan (d. 1567). His family had been in possession of the manor since the 15th century, but his father had resided in Worcestershire. Morgan’s initiative to rebuild perhaps followed his marriage to Mary Wogan, who came from just over the Somerset border.

It must have been in the 1540s that Morgan built both a hall—elements of which are now subsumed within the remodelled central block of the house—and the north wing to its left.

A lost inscription that proudly commemorated the work was visible in the hall in the 1760s. The north wing is closely dateable, sharing with a well-known group of local houses characteristic angle pilasters terminating in spiral finials. Parallels are to be found at Melbury, built by 1542 for Sir Giles Strangways, Clifton Maybank of 1545–50 (fragments survive on the north front at Montacute) and the north wing of Athelhampton.

Fig 1: The main front and gates, with eagle-topped piers, of the manor house June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 83

Fig 2: The pendant ceiling of what was probably the Great Chamber, now a bedroom At Mapperton, the corner pilasters are topped with heraldic beasts carrying shields of arms, a detail also formerly found at Milton Abbey. These beasts are certainly original, because the griffin holding the family shield can be seen in an etching of 1816, before the house underwent antiquarian restoration.

The display of beasts is only one element of a wider heraldic display that formerly extended into the stained glass and furnishings of the house. Morgan went to some trouble in this to proclaim his lineage from the Bryts, the family from which his own had inherited the manor. He also celebrated his remote connections with two Midland families, whose arms his Dorset neighbours would have been unlikely to recognise.

Work to the north wing must have been prolonged, as there is plasterwork of two distinct periods within it. From the mid century is an overmantel in the north-west bedroom that includes profile heads and candelabra-like 84 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

forms (Fig 6), a detail that is also found at the manor house at Winterborne Clenston.

The heads reappear in the cornice of the principal bedroom, presumably the former great chamber. Profile heads are a commonplace of Tudor decoration in panelling and plasterwork, but the male head in particular may share a common source with one of the wooden roundels above the choir stalls at St Cross, Winchester, erected in about 1520.

Apparently rather later than these features, however, is the magnificent pendant ceiling of the great chamber (Fig 2). Its pattern is identical to that of the great chamber ceiling at Gilling Castle, North Yorkshire (COUNTRY L IFE , November 10, 2021), a quite unrelated work of 1585. Presumably, it was completed after Morgan’s death, by his sons, John (executed for the murder of his brotherin-law in 1580) or Christopher (d. 1591).

Mapperton stands on the edge of a steep scarp and the north wing formerly possessed

an elaborate two-storey oriel window that overlooked the narrow valley below the house.

This window, similar perhaps to one surviving at Melbury, stood in 1775 and its foundations were said to be visible in the 1880s. The existence of the windows implies that the area now covered by modern gardens may have been the site of a Tudor predecessor and it’s possible that the two long rectangular pools in the present garden, as well as the square tower above them, survive from this period.

The great hall range of Morgan’s Tudor house was completely recast by the Brodrepp

Fig 3: The hall with its overmantel, introduced after 1906. The heavily moulded arch is similar to those at Wolfeton and Herringston family, who succeeded the Morgans by marriage and lived at Mapperton from 1607 to 1774 (Fig 1). All the Brodrepp owners were, confusingly, called Richard. Their work to the range seems to have fallen into two distinct phases. The arch leading from the north-west corner of the hall has thick semicircular mouldings and a heavy keystone, very close to a similar arch into the hall at Herringston, south of Dorchester (COUNTRY L IFE , January 29, 2020), and probably built before 1625. Both appear to relate to work

at Wolfeton House in Dorset associated with the West Country mason William Arnold.

At the other end of the hall, a wooden screen with unusual bulging uprights forms one side of a passage leading to the porch (Fig 5). This porch contains paired niches with the distinctive inverted scallop heads recalling identical niches designed by Arnold at his documented works at Montacute and Cranborne Lodge. It is perhaps no coincidence that, between 1592 and at least 1607, and probably until he died in 1620, that

Mapperton was occupied by John Luttrell, stepfather of the Morgan heiresses and younger brother of George Luttrell, who employed Arnold at Dunster Castle.

Succeeding to the estate at the end of the Interregnum, Richard Brodrepp II (1639– 1707) initiated various improvements. Most importantly, the west-facing hall wing was rebuilt to create the present entrance front of the house. Traditionally dated to the 1660s, its two-storey elevation with crossmullioned windows below a substantial June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 85

Fig 4: The main stair. The swelling of the rail over the terminating newel post is characteristic of joinery by John Bastard cornice resembles a humbler version of Sir Roger Pratt’s design for Kingston Lacy, also in Dorset, of 1663.

The main settlement at Mapperton, no doubt clustered around the manor house and church, was devastated by the plague in the late 1660s, after which the tenants’ houses were pulled down for lack of occupants. In their place, Richard Brodrepp II built a dovehouse—dated 1665—and the two stable blocks that do so much to frame and dignify his rebuilt house. The southern stable has a keystone of 1670. Unlike the design of the hall, however, the stables appear to have been the work of local masons; a similar stable design can be found at the Manor House down the hill in Beaminster, built for a local lawyer. The door frames of both derive from a plate in Godfrey Richards’s adaptation of a French version of Palladio’s 86 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

celebrated architectural treatise The Four Books of Architecture, published in 1663.

At the end of his life, Brodrepp II also rebuilt the nave of the little church of All Saints, Mapperton, that lies immediately south of the hall (but was not then connected to it). With its paired semicircular headed windows this was, as Hutchins’s History of Dorset noted in 1863, ‘as much like the house as the nature of such a structure would admit’, although this resemblance has been more obvious since the dismantling of its embattled and pinnacled west tower in 1766.

The interior of the church today owes much to the 18th-century Brodrepps and only the 12th-century font recalls the building’s medieval origins. In the chancel stands a fine monument to Richard Brodrepp III (d.1737) by Peter Scheemakers, modified, between the sculptor’s initial design and the

completed monument, by the addition in the grey obelisk above the profile relief of the subject of the monument, of a bust of his only son, George (d. 1739). The monument was erected by Brodrepp’s widow, Hester, who may well have influenced her second husband when he came to employ the same sculptor for the grand monument to his brother George Strode in Beaminster church in 1753.

Brodrepp III was succeeded by his nephew Richard Brodrepp IV, who was responsible for the introduction into the nave windows of a fine collection of 16th-century French and Netherlandish stained-glass panels, bought in London in 1768. These were supplemented, probably during the unobtrusive restoration that took place in the late 1840s, with 12 roundels of 16th-century English armorial glass, drawn from various local houses, but including at least three that must

have come from the lavish heraldic display in the windows of Morgan’s mid-Tudor hall.

In the years after he inherited the house, Brodrepp IV also considerably remodelled the north front. Tudor mullions were replaced by tall, sashed windows either side of the rather under-emphasised central doorway.

Behind this, an elegant staircase hall was constructed. The form of this was carefully contrived to avoid damage to the later-16thcentury plaster ceilings of the drawing room and principal bedroom.

The display of beasts is only one element of a wider heraldic display that formerly exended into the furnishings For this work, he may have employed a member of the Bastard family, then operating from Sherborne, as well as Blandford.

Certainly, the scroll ending to the staircase rail (Fig 4), for example, can be found, more elaborately, on the main staircase at Chettle rebuilt by John Bastard in the mid 1740s.

Parterres were laid out on the level north garden and a short-lived avenue planted to the west. On Brodrepp’s death in 1774, the estate passed, via an 18-year-old great-niece, to the Comptons of Minstead, Hampshire.

For a century or more thereafter, the house was let when possible to tenants, whether family members, military men on leave or clergymen. Nothing is securely known of these occupants and for periods the house stood empty. Only with the succession five generations later of Henry Francis Compton (1872–1943) was a concerted effort made to put Mapperton in order.

From 1906, Compton brought the house up to date with the installation of gas lighting and bathrooms, at the same time taking its decoration back to its ‘Jacobethan’ origins.

Windows on the north wing were restored to more or less their original form, two elaborate Jacobean fireplaces were brought from his other Dorset house at Melplash and 18thcentury panelling removed to expose earlyRenaissance fireplace overmantels in situ.

In pursuing these changes, Compton was following the fashion set locally by the restoration of Athelhampton by Alfred Cart de Lafontaine after 1891 (COUNTRY LIFE, May 26, 2021). What is unusual about Compton is that, unlike the restorers at Athelhampton, Montacute or Barrington, he was the inheritor

Fig 5 top: The hall passage with its turned posts. Fig 6 above: The north-west bedroom fireplace with its roundels of male and female heads and the Bryt arms of the property, rather than a purchaser or tenant. The outbreak of the First World War stopped his schemes and the estate was sold immediately after hostilities ceased.

It was left to the purchaser, Ethel Labouchere, to install new plaster ceilings in the hall (Fig 3), passage and dining room and to re-roof the entire building. Her lasting memorial is to have realised the potential of the steep-sided valleys unique to this part of Dorset (and first remarked upon by the 18th-century traveller Arthur Young), to create the elaborate Italianate garden that the ensuing years and the expert care of her successors have brought to maturity.

Following her death in 1955, the estate was bought by Lord Hinchingbrooke, or Victor

Montagu, as he was known after renouncing the Earldom of Sandwich in 1964, who was moving nearer his parliamentary constituency of South Dorset and downsizing from the ancestral home in Huntingdonshire.

Thereby, the house has been transformed by the installation of an aristocratic collection, the gardens have been extended and the estate imaginatively reinvigorated by three generations of his family.

In 2006, Mapperton was crowned the Nation’s Finest Manor House by COUNTRY L IFE and, in 2020, it won the Historic Houses ‘Garden of the Year Award’. To the modern visitor, it feels once more like a cherished home.

For more information and opening hours, visit www.mapperton.com June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 87

‘A partly real, partly dream country’

W

E feel a frisson when a real place plays a key part in a novel.

The Cobb at Lyme Regis will always be associated with silly Louisa Musgrove and her tumble in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Knole in Kent with Virginia Woolf’s hero-heroine Orlando. Thomas Hardy, however, took the use of known locations to another level. He may have invented the characters in his novels, but he made them walk along actual roads, look across valleys at real views and live in recognisable villages and towns—sometimes, even in identifiable buildings.

As a result, fact and fiction can shade disconcertingly into each other. A blue plaque now on the wall of a handsome building in the centre of Dorchester—the model for Hardy’s Casterbridge—reads: ‘This house is reputed to have been lived in by the MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE in THOMAS HARDY’s story of that name written in 1885.’ The word ‘reputed’ pokes a hole in the partition separating history from invention and lets through an unsettling draught.

Needing a name for the large region, including his native Dorset, in which his characters lived, worked, loved and died, Hardy revived that of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that covered south-west England: Wessex. He kept some place names almost intact—the Blackmoor Vale, for instance, Giant’s Hill and Stonehenge—but, for others, he invented an equivalent, often with an echo of the original:

Countryman-writer Thomas Hardy at home

The word “reputed” pokes a hole in the partition separating history from invention

Cerne Abbas became Abbot’s-Cernel; Weymouth, Budmouth; and Bere Regis, Kingsbere.

Although Hardy was intensely concerned with place, he did not intend the towns and villages in his novels to be exact reflections of reality and admitted that his portraiture of individual sites ‘wantonly wanders from inventorial descriptions of them’. His characters inhabit an inbetween place, what he called ‘a partly real, partly dream country’.

Where this countryman-writer was exact, however, to the last stile and stream, was in his depictions of the land and those who lived and worked on it.

Hardy was born in the small village of Higher Bockhampton, in a rambling building that stood between woodland and heath.

It is this family home, built by his great-grandfather in about 1800, that he describes near the beginning of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) as ‘a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the middle of the ridge and another at each end’.

From the age of 10, the young Hardy was sent to school in Dorchester, walking the three miles there and back every day in all seasons and weathers, getting to know Puddletown Heath and its inhabitants in intimate detail, whether bird, animal, insect or human.

Later, he channelled his boy’s-eye view into an episode of The Return of the Native (1878), a novel dominated by the vast stretch of Egdon Heath, which Hardy admitted to

Alamy; Bridgeman Images

Thomas Hardy’s depictions of a fictional Wessex and his own dear Dorset are more accurate than they may at first appear, says Susan Owens

Above: Hardy’s birthplace, as described in Under the Greenwood Tree. Below: Dawn in the Blackmore Vale, Blackmoor in Hardy’s world having composed from his knowledge of at least a dozen smaller patches of waste land.

When Clym Yeobright cuts the furze in July, the heath—usually brown and forbidding— bursts into vivid life around him. Bees hum about his ears, amber-coloured butterflies land on his back, emerald-green grasshoppers leap over his feet and brilliant blue-andyellow grass snakes glide in and out of fern dells. It’s easy to picture the young Hardy

on his hands and knees, eagerly observing these creatures. Or lying down in the middle of the heath, so that nothing was visible beyond its borders, to immerse himself in its atmosphere of ancientness and to feel ‘that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead’, as he was later to write.

As a walker, Hardy knew the feel of his native roads underfoot—how the dust of

late summer deadened footfalls like a carpet and a hard frost made them ring. People do a lot of walking in his novels—it brings characters together on the road to exchange information, as well as deepening their connection with the landscapes through which they move. It also reveals character. Hardy was a connoisseur of gait.

Michael Henchard approaches WeydonPriors at the beginning of The Mayor of

92 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Casterbridge (1886) with a ‘measured, springless walk’, which, Hardy tells us, ‘was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; although, in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself’. Weydon-Priors was Hardy’s name for Weyhill near Andover in Hampshire, a place famous since the medieval period for its fair—where, within an hour or two, this possessor of a chillingly efficient walk will have auctioned off his wife.

Tess Durbeyfield’s foolish father shuffles along, his poor rickety legs causing him constantly to veer off the path, whereas she herself moves with a ‘quiescent glide… of a piece with the element she moved in’. Hardy’s Tess is so much a part of her environment that the landscape surrounding her reflects each phase of her story. She grows up in the gentle, somewhat isolated Vale of Blackmoor and is seduced by Alec d’Urberville in the Chase, the oldest wood in England. After Angel Clare’s rejection, she labours in the starveacre fields of Flintcomb-Ash, a place that echoes her own emotional desolation. And, at the end, the authorities find her lying on the altar stone of Stonehenge.

Walking deepens the connection with the landscape and reveals character. Hardy was a connoisseur of gait For all its operatic symbolism, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is a novel in which practical footwear matters. Among its heartbreaking moments is when Tess’s walking boots are discovered stuffed in a hedge where she had hidden them, mistaken for a tramp’s pair and taken away, forcing her to walk many miles back home along a rough road in pretty, but thin-soled, patent-leather ones.

Those who live in the country come to know land by ear as much as by eye. Hardy’s characters are expert in this—even in the dark and when drunk, as in Desperate Remedies (1871): ‘Sometimes a soaking hiss proclaimed that they were passing by a pasture, then a patter would show that the rain fell on some large-leafed root crop, then a paddling plash announced the naked arable.’

Magically, Under the Greenwood Tree begins: ‘To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its A map depicting Hardy’s Wessex by Emery Walker, drawn for Tess of the d’Urbervilles

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 93

most of the thatched and dormered cottages were demolished. More profoundly, time-honoured traditions were becoming obsolete. ‘The practice of divination

by Bible and key,’ Hardy wrote sadly in his preface to the new edition, ‘the regarding of valentines as things of serious import, the shearing-supper, the long smock-frocks, and the harvest-home have, too, nearly disappeared in the wake of the old houses.’

There was cause, he thought, to lament the passing of the old days and the old ways Eddie Redmayne (Angel Clare) and Gemma Arterton (Tess) in the BBC’s 2008 adaptation

feature. At the passing of the breeze the firtrees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.’ These are the sounds that guide members of the Mellstock parish choir, who meet on the road on a winter’s evening, each recognisable by his silhouette or the pale glimmer of a pair of spectacles. None of them bothers to carry a light, so familiar is the terrain to their ears and feet.

From his study at Max Gate, the house built to his own design just outside Dorchester,

Hardy oversaw the first collected edition of his fiction, published in 1895–97. It gave him a chance to look back, not only over his novels, but also the ‘Wessex’ about which he had been writing for 25 years, as well as the occupations, beliefs and superstitions of its people.

Over that time, the modern world had intruded into all aspects of country life and there was cause, he thought, to lament the passing of the old days and the old ways.

Hardy set Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) in Weatherbury, a place, he claimed, so closely based on Puddletown that many locations were once recognisable—until

At the same time, ‘Wessex’ was, Hardy realised, becoming disconcertingly real— by degrees, his dream country had, as he put it, ‘solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from’. Poignantly, over succeeding years, both the novels themselves and popular guidebooks to Hardy’s Wessex brought tourists into the region by the train-load, eager to discover these enchanted locations —at the very point when many of them were being swallowed up by progress.

Exploring Hardy’s Wessex today

Despite great changes, much remains of Hardy’s Wessex. Today, it’s possible to visit his birthplace at Stinsford and his later home Max Gate, both National Trust properties, and to have lunch at the King’s Arms in nearby Dorchester (right), where Henchard’s bankruptcy hearing takes place in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

We can even follow the route of the Mellstock Quire each Christmas with the Thomas Hardy Society. Hardy tourism is nothing new, however—since the 1890s, a map of ‘Hardy’s Wessex’ has been included in each of the novels. Generations of readers have gazed at the original of Bathsheba Everdene’s house in Puddletown and those of a macabre tendency have even lain down in the empty stone coffin at Bindon Abbey, to which the sleepwalking Angel carries Tess on their ill-fated honeymoon.

Yet Hardy himself did not always take it so seriously. When asked about the original of Little Hintock in The Woodlanders (1887),

94 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

he replied: ‘To oblige readers, I once spent several hours on a bicycle with a friend in a serious attempt to discover the real spot; but the search ended in failure; though

tourists assure me positively that they have found it without trouble, and that it answers in every particular to the description given in this volume.’

Fishing in troubled waters Few of us give much thought to how our fish gets to the supermarket, but the life of a small-scale fisherman is becoming ever more unpredictable and dangerous, finds Ben Lerwill Photographs by Millie Pilkington

96 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

A

T 4.30am, in darkness, skipper Darren Passmore fires up the engine on Resolute and sails out of Brixham Harbour in Devon.

The vessel is a small trawler, a minnow’s width under 32ft 9in from bow to stern, with a crew of two. An hour later, it’s being pitched on the sea like a toy, thick with the smell of grease and diesel, ankle-deep water sloshing around the deck. Mr Passmore and his crewmate, Dan Ready, release the net for the first of two five-hour trawls. Chains clank, shackles rattle, ropes are swallowed into the deep. Daylight arrives, bringing grey sky and a choppy sea. The waves eventually abate— mercifully—but it will be 5.30pm before we chug back into port, damp and dogged, bearing three red boxes of squid and lemon sole.

Small-scale fishing is not for the faint of constitution. The seafood being hoisted

by Resolute’s trawl is premium produce, perhaps bound for arty restaurants where the Sauvignon Blanc is perfectly chilled and piano music tinkles in the background. As a profession, however, fishing on a small boat can be isolating, exhausting, unpredictable and dangerous—both physically and financially. It’s also a way of life that tends to exist in the margins. ‘Unless you live in a coastal port, you don’t really think about how your fish gets to the supermarket,’ points out Tina Barnes of The Seafarers’ Charity, which aims to improve the lives and livelihoods of those who work at sea.

Fishing is a way of life that tends to exist in the margins It’s partly for this reason that the UN has named 2022 the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture. Although the organisation states that ‘there is no universal definition of artisanal or small-scale fisheries’, in the UK, the terms generally refer to operations, often family owned, that use boats less than 10 metres (about 33ft) in length. These ‘under 10s’ are at the more sustainable end of the fishing industry and represent close to 80% of the UK fleet—but they’re not having an easy time.

Many vessels use passive gear, such as nets, pots and lines, but for those that use trawls, fuel costs have predictably become punitive—and that’s only the start. The pandemic left many fishermen with nowhere left to sell, although some ended up marketing directly to consumers thanks to the Resolute by nature: Darren Passmore sorts the nets on his well-named trawler

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 97

Out in all weathers, gathering their slippery catch under grey skies or in bright sunshine, small-scale fishermen face a precarious future

still-running Call4Fish initiative. Overfishing has also had a catastrophic effect on smaller boats. ‘The lack of fish on the inshore grounds in almost every area of the coastline is an existential threat to our livelihoods,’ says Jeremy Percy of the New Under Ten Fishermen’s Association. ‘We lost 700 catching jobs between 2019 and 2020 and the trend is continuing.

‘The majority of calls to this office from smaller-scale fishermen used to be about a lack of quota,’ he continues—meaning they

A helping hand

were unable to keep everything they caught —‘but, now, members are complaining at the lack of fish. Of course, Brexit had a massive impact and continues to do so, especially with regard to export challenges.’ One fireside story tells of a fisherman who was catching so little and found himself in such financial strife that he resorted to eating his bait.

Hampshire fishing couple Chantelle and Peter Williams faced equally tough times after their boat, Tia Maria, was savaged by Storm Eunice in February. The vessel was

Originally known as King George’s Fund for Sailors when it was formed in 1917, The Seafarers’ Charity supports better lives for all seafarers and particularly works to improve life for traditional small-scale fishers, making a career in fishing more attractive, whether through training, better safety-management systems or business-support funding. In October 2021, the charity launched The Safety Net for UK fishing families, with access to a Credit Union and an emphasis on financial security. This initiative also aims to raise awareness about the advice and support available from dedicated organisations such as the Fishermen’s Mission, Seafarers Hospital Society, the Sailors’ Children’s Society, Fishing Animateur, the Fathom Podcast and the Safety Folder (020–7932 0000; www.theseafarerscharity.org).

98 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

at the heart of their business, Fresh from the Boat, which has sold locally caught, sustainable fresh fish for 15 years. It’s testament to the business’s importance in the community that, by mid April, a GoFundMe page created to help it recover had secured almost £24,000.

Lack of security is affecting fishing on the Yorkshire coast, too. ‘One of the main challenges being faced is uncertainty around the health of our oceans and fish stocks,’ explains Joe Redfern of the Whitby District Commercial Fishermen’s Association. An independent study into dead crustaceans found on local beaches suggested pollution might be to blame. ‘With events such as this, we’re unsure if our livelihoods will still be there next month, never mind planning for years to come.’

In addition to this, there’s the issue of new recruits coming into the industry—or, rather, the lack of them. ‘We need more young people who want to learn to fish and inherit the way of life of a fisher,’ believes Mr Redfern. ‘Smallscale fishers require more support to stand a chance against the larger boats—there’s so much competition and gear in the water, it’s difficult to get a foot in the door.’

The likes of Resolute are an ocean away from the damaging boats of big operations, which hoover everything up from the seafloor

Back down in Devon, as Resolute sways in the waves and gannets flap past, Mr Passmore outlines some of the realities of his job.

‘People see pictures of boats in the sunshine,’ he smiles. ‘It’s not like that. People don’t see the bad weather—or when things snap. The maintenance is all down to me and, if I catch nothing, I get nothing.’

Now in his late thirties, he first worked on a trawler in his mid teens. Today, he has photos of his two young children pinned up in the cabin. ‘In this game, if I’m clothing, feeding and watering the kids, that’s enough,’ he admits. We’re now far from shore, with no land visible. ‘But, even in bad times, I love it.

I love the freedom.’

Mr Passmore is at pains to point out that the nets he uses ‘bounce’ off the bottom, rather than dredging the sea floor. ‘I don’t catch corals, stones or shells—it’s only clean fish,’ he says. ‘The bigger boats have far more horsepower and simply hoover everything up. They hammer it until there’s nothing left.’

Also based in Brixham is Dan’s mother Sarah Ready, who represents the polar opposite of indiscriminate fishing. She specialises 100 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

in catching crab and lobster using her own, handmade willow withy pots (and is so tied to her trade that she ends her texts and emails with ‘best fishes’). ‘Fishing heritage has always really fascinated me,’ she reflects. ‘I’ve been reading Fishing News for 30-odd years—it gets under your skin. But there’s only about six of us withy pot-makers left.’

I’ve had to go through the same regulatory process as a trawler three times the size Mrs Ready is far from content with the way the fishing industry is being managed.

‘In my view, the main challenge at the moment is the sheer level of regulation,’ she confesses. ‘I’m out at least every other day in my little 16ft boat, but I’ve pretty much had to go through the same regulatory process as a trawler three times the size. It doesn’t seem to be well thought out.’

Various other issues are stacked against small-scale fisheries, from climate change to the cost of coastal property. Up in Scotland, Elaine Whyte of the Clyde Fishermen’s Trust sees the situation as a deeply concerning one —but feels there is hope. ‘If we’re not able to recognise the situation, we risk losing active fishing communities in some areas. It’s absolutely tragic,’ she notes. ‘For fishing to have a future, we need the Government to work with us and have genuine dialogue and understanding. If we look to Norway, for example, we can see how they have supportive policies and good management and science, which allows fishing across the different fleet types to survive. There are wonderful sustainable opportunities for fishing and fishing communities to thrive if they are permitted to.’

As Resolute chugs her way home to Brixham for the night, Mr Passmore and Mr Ready sort the day’s catch. Weather permitting, the boat will be back out to sea before dawn tomorrow.

‘The future could be really good,’ believes Mr Passmore. ‘But as soon as you leave the harbour each morning and you’re around the breakwater, the rest is destiny.’

The finished product: a Devon open-stave basket handmade

by John Williamson

rot-proof elm (for the base) and softwood (for the side splints or staves—Mr Williamson uses larch or Douglas fir), these sturdy baskets were once a common sight on Devon farms, where they were used for apple and potato harvests, as well as for carrying livestock feed. ‘I remember them from my childhood, but, nowadays, you only ever really see them in antique shops,’ the maker laments.

Mr Williamson makes the baskets alone, with only the resident robins and wrens for company

To have and to hold Finding himself at a loose end, woodsman John Williamson decided to revive the lost art of Devon stave-basket-making using old museum transcripts, discovers Natasha Goodfellow

I

T was the supermarkets that did for stave baskets,’ says maker and forester John Williamson from his open-sided barn high above the Teign Valley, on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. Not because they started selling cheaper plastic versions, but ‘because the potato pickers used to pinch their wire baskets to use instead’. This little nugget —gleaned from one of Mr Williamson’s customers, herself a former farmworker—is one of the fascinating pieces of social history that he has unearthed in his quest to revive the making of these beautiful wooden baskets.

The son of a woodsman, Mr Williamson grew up in Devon and has a keen appreciation for rural crafts and traditions, but he never set out to make baskets. After studying product design at university in Exeter, he looked for work locally, but the options were limited. ‘There’s really only farming, which barely employs anyone any more, or pub work around here—but we do have the woodlands,’ he reflects. Many owners of native broadleaf woodlands consider them 102 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

unviable, but Mr Williamson begs to differ.

‘They don’t know what they’ve got.’

Indeed, he has made his living entirely from the woods, managing them both for others and, since 2016, when he was able to buy 10 acres of ancient semi-natural woodland of his own, for himself. As elsewhere in the UK, his woods hadn’t been managed for some 50 to 60 years; he is now regenerating them in order to coppice them for charcoal, as well as coppicing the oak for cleft gates, the birch for besom brooms and the hazel for hurdles.

Traditionally, these are made in late winter and early spring before the charcoal-burning season starts, but the shortfall in coppicing means hazel poles are currently in such limited supply throughout Devon that Mr Williamson barely has enough to demonstrate with at fairs and workshops, let alone to make to sell. Scouting around for something else he could usefully do in the leaner months, he hit on the idea of stave baskets.

Historically made of supple green ash (for the handle and rims or ‘bonds’), tough,

Via the Heritage Crafts Association (which lists stave-basket-making as an endangered craft), he discovered that the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, Berkshire, held a transcript of an interview with Jack Rowsell, the last known maker, who died in 1997. ‘I read about how Jack, who had been a farmer in Tiverton, had made them on wet days when nothing else could be done and it really resonated with me. I thought: “Why can’t I do that?”’

Using the museum transcript, Mr Williamson has been able to piece together how the baskets are made and not only the most common ‘size 2’ (about the same dimensions as a Sussex trug), but the full range of nine different sizes.

‘I became obsessed,’ he laughs.

Further help has come from Mark Snellgrove, a saw-mill owner who had bought Rowsell’s original set of formers (or templates) and allowed Mr Williamson to copy them. The formers, however, only give the measurements for the top bond of the basket and the handles. Everything else—the height, the size of the base, the angle of the staves—the woodsman had to figure out for himself, helped in part by the work of photographer James Ravilious, who famously documented rural life in the area in the 1970s and 1980s: ‘I worked out the width of the gaps in the openstaved baskets by looking at his pictures.’

Mr Williamson’s research has not only uncovered how the baskets were made, but why. The gaps in the open-staved models meant the baskets could simply be dunked in a stream or waterfall to rinse the mud off potatoes, but the bottom bond stands slightly proud of the base, keeping it dry. ‘The most likely thing to be damaged, it is also the last thing to Mr Williamson in his workshop above the Teign Valley in Dartmoor, Devon

be attached to the basket—and, therefore, the easiest thing to replace,’ he explains.

Customers have helped to shed light on the baskets’ past, too. ‘One lady told me that it was her job to throw the baskets up the rows for the pickers to toss the potatoes into. It made me wonder—did they make this “bomb-proof” basket with bumpers all around it because they needed a basket they could throw around or did the basket inform the use?’

Either way, the baskets elicit memories, both good and bad. ‘On the one hand, people

who used them always tell me what hard work the potato harvest was and how they loved it when the tractor came in, but, at the same time, there’s nostalgia—for the camaraderie of working together with family and friends.’

Mr Williamson, by contrast, makes the baskets alone, with only the resident robins and wrens (which nest in the hay racks in his barn) for company. Although much of the work is physical—splitting the ash with a froe (so it splits down the grain), slimming and shaping the bonds on the shave horse and trimming

Craft coming back to life: Mr Williamson shaves the ash (left) before bending the pieces to create the bonds and handle (right)

104 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Eddie Esdale; Dan Fontanelli

Ash dieback and Dutch elm disease mean Mr Williamson can only make 50 baskets a year

the edges with a tenon saw—on really cold days, he admits he’ll have a hot-water bottle tucked up his jumper. Not that he minds: ‘With all crafts, you walk in the footsteps of the people who went before you. There are moments when you’re struggling with something or holding something in a particular way and you know they would have done so, too.’

Above all, the craftsman relishes the sense of place this endeavour has given him.

Although he grows a small amount of the wood himself, the remainder is sourced from friends within a five-mile radius. ‘You start to develop a mental map of your area, but it’s not a map of roads, it’s a map of materials,’ he says.

‘Where is there good ash where the ground is boggy so it bends well? Where is there a good standing deadwood elm? It gives you a different relationship with the land.’

Ironically perhaps, given that Mr Williamson started making the baskets in part because he could not source enough hazel poles, all the woods in the stave baskets are themselves becoming rarer, threatened or already devastated by ash dieback, Phytophthora and Dutch elm disease. As it stands, he can only make about 50 baskets a year and has already started looking for alternatives, rejecting chestnut as it’s not typical of Devon and worrying that hazel—when his coppicing provides a ready supply—tends to twist and split. ‘It’s harder to work with, but it does make a lovely basket.

The bark has a mother-of-pearl shimmer.’

Rather than feeling gloomy, he is instead optimistic, seeing the baskets as a useful vehicle for talking about tree health, how we manage our woodlands and the benefits of coppicing—something he is understandably passionate about. ‘I can’t think of another resource that, by removing it, we are both increasing biodiversity and replenishing the resource itself,’ Mr Williamson admits.

‘I like to think of it as the woodland taking advantage of us.’

Visit www.dartmoorwoodcraft.co.uk

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Shore Regatta single lilo, £835, Oliver James (www.oliverjameslilos.com) Little Jemima frilly bib shorts, £46, Trotters (www.trotters.com)

Furniture with a future Antique shops, auctioneers and historic houses are full of furniture that is hundreds of years old. Yet much of what is made today won’t last for more than a decade or two. Arabella Youens asks five designers what they regard as the secret to creating designs that will last for generations Photograph by Alun Callender

It takes more time and imagination to make furniture that lasts a lifetime. Custom pieces help to promote longevity because clients are involved in the story from the start. The piece has an inbuilt attraction that, I think, helps to ensure it’s loved and looked after. That’s the difference between bespoke and the click-and-collect nature of buying today; having something made for you is an experience and the result is something to cherish forever.

As these pieces grow old, they show their age and improve, become part of someone’s life and gather an identity. Clients are sometimes alarmed when they see their new piece of furniture, but I explain to them that, like a new leather jacket that might be stiff and uncomfortable, furniture needs to settle before it fits in. That’s why we use historical finishes, such as wax and natural oil, Designers Alfred and Tess Newall

108 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Credit goes in here, credit goes in here

Alfred Newall Furniture designer and maker, based in Sussex

February 16, 2022 | Country Life | 109

and the price of the finished pieces. These elements have got to stop being the primary drivers when it comes to design.

Maker & Son (0800 024 6100; www.makerandson.com)

Like a book, part of the charm of old furniture is that it holds a story Bruce Hodgson Furniture designer and founder of Artichoke

‘The designer has a responsibility to ensure longevity,’ says Maker & Son’s Felix Conran

which allow for the surface to change over time. Modern finishes look spick and span at first, but they don’t allow for an elegant ageing process and a piece will start to devalue in the same way as a new car. Good furniture, made to last a lifetime, is the opposite—it gets better with age.

What I think has been lost along the way is the deep knowledge of the property of timbers that, in the past, would be used for different purposes in the formation of a piece of furniture. For instance, a Windsor chair would be made using three or four types of wood to create strength. Once, this knowledge would have been universal among cabinetmakers, passed down from father to son or maker to apprentice. I’ve had to take a different route to acquire this knowledge and surrounded myself with the elder generation of cabinetmakers to learn from them directly.

My wife, Tess, and I are instinctively drawn to pieces of furniture that have had a previous life because they often tell a story. The design of our Orkney chair, for example, stemmed from the need of the islanders to protect themselves from the cold and the wind—we love that. Old pieces inform how I design my work—I often go to auction houses to look at items in order to get a greater understanding of how things were made in the past. Really good-quality things have an inherent timelessness of their own.

Alfred Newall (020–7846 7314; www.alfrednewall.com) 110 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Felix Conran Furniture designer and co-founder of Maker & Son For furniture to last a lifetime—or several lifetimes—is, I believe, down to the design. The timelessness of great design means it can adapt and evolve as needs change. It’s like finding a house with great bones: there’s no need to tear it down, instead, you live in the space and adapt around it. The designer has a responsibility to ensure longevity is built into the pieces.

I’d rather that things weren’t made in the first place than bemade without thought. He or she needs to acknowledge that the objects they design and release into the world are the instruments with which people will live their lives. As a result, they need to think about how they perform now and also how they will age to ensure that they will not only last, but be adaptable.

Longevity is built into our designs at Maker & Son—we don’t hold any store by the belief that sofas or chairs need replacing every so many years. We use solid hardwood beech to make the frames of our furniture, which are expertly jointed. You’d be blown away by some modern sofas that have frames made out of cardboard. Our sofas are designed with slip covers that can be changed as tastes or seasons do. The seat cushions are made like a duvet folded around a natural latex core with no glue, which means they can be easily replaced if they start to deteriorate.

Where the world of furniture has gone wrong is in its fixation with the silhouette

In our market, it’s the artistry of our creative process that is exciting to our clients. This is probably no different to those who commissioned exquisite furniture in the past. What follows is a desire to preserve and cherish something rare and beautiful. That’s why pieces survive and become part of our interior architectural heritage. A chair that has survived several hundred years is likely to have been well engineered and made of good materials to exist today. Think of all the bottoms that have used it—large and small—and the abuse it may have suffered being rocked and bashed about. A piece of furniture that has many hours lavished on it in its making has perceived value and, therefore, gets looked after—the culture of the family will protect it.

I’ve recently bought an elm dresser for our dining room that is more than 400 years

Artichoke’s founder Bruce Hodgson

Simon Burvill, co-founder of Gaze Burvill

old. The dresser is used today in the same way as it was originally used and has a purpose as relevant to a modern household as to a 17th-century one. You can read furniture like a book, picking up clues. Like a book, part of the charm of old furniture is that it holds a story—consider how much the furniture has witnessed, including births, deaths and marriages. Previous generations have touched and used pieces that are still in circulation and that connection is somehow magical.

Making furniture that lasts takes time. Much modern furniture is produced quickly using glue, meaning it can only be put together once and, if something gets broken, can rarely be fixed. Modern living environments—the dry atmosphere of houses—can be a challenge when it comes to wood, which dries out causing shrinkage and cracks. In order to mitigate this problem, we have designed a dry workshop environment that mimics the modern home. Because of the nature and volume of their stock, timber merchants tend to store their timber outside, which means it’s full of moisture. Our approach is, therefore, to invest time and money into conditioning wood before we start the making process. We part-machine it to a dimension that is not its finished size and then let it sit in a temperature and humiditycontrolled environment. We only start using it to make furniture when it is at the correct dryness that will limit future movement.

This takes time and goes back to the idea of slow making. You can’t rush good things.

Artichoke (01934 745270; www.artichoke-ltd.com)

If a piece of furniture produces positive feelings and is aesthetically pleasing, we’re more likely to look after it For me, the single most important thing is that the furniture must be loved and enjoyed as much as possible. Nothing keeps furniture as clean as when it is constantly being used; neglect leads to a build of dirt that, in turn, traps moisture, which is the enemy of longevity.

Gaze Burvill (01420 588444; www.gazeburvill.com)

Simon Burvill Furniture designer and co-founder of Gaze Burvill In my mind, the order of priority for well-made furniture is as follows: design, craftsmanship, materials and—once the piece has been 112 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Neptune co-founder John Sims-Hilditch

John Sims-Hilditch Designer and co-founder of Neptune As humans, we’re naturally drawn to beauty in all forms, so we have an inbuilt response to save and protect beautiful things. Objects should be both useful and beautiful, but when it comes down to which is the most important, we believe that beauty is the fundamental element to ensure longevity. Over time, utility changes. Take, for example, a candlestick.

It was once a utility item—providing light in a room—but, today, it’s only a thing of beauty.

Old candlesticks that weren’t beautiful aren’t preserved, but those that were can now be decorative items.

I’d argue that a piece can’t be beautiful unless it’s well built. The construction of an object, the quality of the materials it’s made from, how it feels to handle, all these things contribute to your experience as much as the way it looks. In the applied arts, unlike fine art, design and engineering are completely intertwined in the making of a beautiful object.

The impact materials have on how long lasting something will be is not only about how well they’ll physically stand up to the test of time.

Plastic is strong, but it doesn’t look or feel as good as oak or linen. If a piece of furniture produces positive feelings and is aesthetically appealing, we’re more likely to take care of it.

The same goes for how we finish materials.

We made an early decision, for instance, to retain as much of the natural grains of the woods as we could. We have to protect the surface, but we also need to connect with the pure beauty of the wood as well. It’s why we devised our subtle IsoGuard finish. A wooden table contains the story of its journey as a living thing.

We use the best joints and internal mechanics —they may not be visible, but, because they are made with care, they make a difference.

We favour traditional joinery techniques—they are still in use for a reason—but we’re equally willing to embrace the evolution of using modern production methods. It’s really about whatever’s right for the piece, the material, and the person whose home it’ll live in.

Traditional ways of working with timber take into account that wood moves over time with temperature and humidity changes.

Mortice and tenon joints in cabinet frames or breadboard ends on tables allow for this movement, so the risk of warping and cracking are kept to a minimum. But modernity has its uses: almost all our timber is cut by a machine rather than by hand. Machines produce consistent cuts every single time, meaning there is much less waste. We do use glue, but only alongside traditional joints, mechanical fixings, and timber-locking methods. For us, it all forms part of a belts-and-braces approach to ensure our pieces last.

Neptune (01793 934011; www.neptune.com)

Simon Brown; Alun Callender/Country Life Picture Library; Gemma Klein Photography

bought by its owner, love. The choice and quality of the materials is essential (far more so for exterior than for interior pieces as they have to put up with so much), woods must be durable and of the highest quality and fixings, where used, in high-quality stainless steel. The design will determine if there are water traps, which must be avoided, and the craftsmanship will lead to the materials being not only selected for their purpose, but orientated correctly. Wood moves differently in three directions as it takes on moisture in winter and dries out again in summer and, if the grain orientation is wrong, it can literally pull itself apart. These are all important factors, but, really, should be a given for any high-quality producer.

Property market

Penny Churchill

Grade II*-listed Langford Manor is an ‘impeccably restored’ Elizabethan house set in 7½ acres of gardens and grounds. £5m

Et in Arcadia ego Manors in and around ‘the great paradise of England’– Somerset’s Vale of Taunton Deane

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HE fertile Vale of Taunton Deane, bounded by west Somerset’s three hill ranges—the Brendons in the west, Quantocks in the east and Blackdowns in the south—is an area of rich soil and plentiful water, described in 1609 by cartographer and antiquary John Norden as ‘the great paradise of England’. According to the Victoria County History, the manor of Taunton Deane provided ‘a princely income’ for its powerful manorial landowners, among them the bishops of Winchester, who owned 116 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

it from the 10th century and built the great castle at Taunton.

The parish of Fivehead, nine miles east of Taunton, lies on a ridge of reclaimed land that stretches from the small town of Langport to the Blackdown Hills, and overlooks Sedgemoor, part of the Somerset Levels and the Vale of the Isles. Fresh to the market through Strutt & Parker comes Grade II*-listed Langford Manor at Fivehead, an impeccably restored Elizabethan manor house built around a 15th-century core and

set in 7½ acres of immaculate gardens and grounds with views over open countryside.

Selling agent Oliver Custance Baker (01392 229405) quotes a guide price of £5 million.

According to its Historic England listing, there has been a house on the site since at least the 13th century. The present house is built on a double E-plan with a central 15thcentury, east-west range; it was enlarged and remodelled in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, substantially restored in 1905 and again in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Find the best properties at countrylife.co.uk In 1518, the manor was left to the Dean and Canons of Exeter Cathedral, who owned it until about 1860, during which time it was mainly occupied by tenant farmers.

During the latter part of the 19th century, Langford Farm, as it was then known, was left to deteriorate and became largely uninhabitable. In 1904, the estate was acquired by the Matterson family, who commissioned London architect Rupert Austin to renovate the house.

In the mid 20th century, the house was split into two, but later reverted to a single dwelling and, more recently, an upmarket B&B.

The manor of Taunton Deane provided a “princely income” for its powerful manorial landowners The present owners have updated and refurbished the manor, which now offers more than 8,000sq ft of living space on three floors, including four main reception rooms, a study, library and kitchen/breakfast room, with the principal bedroom suite and four further bedrooms on the first floor and a self-contained apartment on the floor above. It comes with a lodge and a three-bedroom cottage.

Approached through wooded parkland along a sweeping driveway, Langford Manor is wonderfully secluded and private. A range of stone outbuildings provides garaging and storage, whereas a large courtyard behind the house is perfect for outdoor dining. Also within the grounds is a tennis court, croquet lawn and Victorian greenhouse rebuilt to its original design.

If The Good Life is the dream, you’ll find it in spades at eco-friendly Manor Farm at Thornfalcon, five miles east of Taunton.

A beautifully restored manor farmhouse, listed Grade II, with a coach house, traditional barns and lake, the whole is set in 30 acres of fields and orchards between the Blackdowns and the Quantock Hills.

Brian Bishop of Jackson-Stops in Taunton (01823 325144) quotes a guide price of ‘excess £3m’ for the delightfully quirky 18th-century farmhouse built on an L-plan on the site of an earlier building, re-roofed and altered internally in the early 19th century, when large, leaded light windows were installed.

During their tenure, the present owners have carried out an intensive 10-year renovation

Top and above: Manor Farm comes with 30 acres of land and a wildlife-rich lake. £3m of the entire property, using only traditional materials and building methods.

Historically, Manor Farm was part of the Thorne Prior Manor estate owned by Montacute Priory, whose Taunton property was administered by Taunton Priory. After the Dissolution, the manor of Thorne Prior was divided into a number of small leasehold farms until the mid 18th century, when the Napper family acquired the manor estate and increased their farmland holdings.

In 1785, John Napper sold the land and manor house to the Revd T. H. Pearson, whose kinsman Capt Charles Pearson owned Thorn House by 1839 and, by 1843, also held Manor Farm—at 130 acres, the largest single unit of Napper’s Thorn Prior estate. The Pearsons expanded their holdings before selling to Judge J. J. Hooper, who purchased further lands to create what became known

as the manor of Thorne. After the Second World War, the Thorne Manor estate was sold, mainly to the tenants.

Manor Farm has been a working farm throughout its long history and the tenants who farmed it have always earned a good living. During their tenure, the present owners have cherished the land, orchards, gardens and grounds as much as the thatched farmhouse, coach house, barns and outbuildings.

The house, which is awash with character, offers 5,350sq ft of light and cheerful accommodation on three floors, including three reception rooms, a kitchen/breakfast room with Aga, six bedrooms and four bathrooms.

Manor Farm stands in 30 well-managed acres of land on the edge of the Somerset Levels, the nature reserves of which obligingly supply the two-acre lake (wild-swimming heaven!) with mallard, teal, gadwall and June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 117

Property market

Above and right: 19th-century neo-Gothic Chargot House sits in a commanding position within the Brendon Hills. £3.25m tufted duck. Outbuildings include a stableyard, listed red-brick barn, a modern barn with solar panels that offset much of the farm’s energy costs, large lambing shed and restored cider barn, now used as a workshop.

On the other hand, if splendid isolation is the aim, George Nares of Savills (020–7016 3822) is handling the sale, at a guide price of ‘excess £3.25m’, of handsome Grade II*listed Chargot House near the pretty village of Luxborough, 20 miles from Taunton and eight miles from the coast at Minehead.

Set in 22 acres of formal gardens, pasture, parkland and woodland, the house sits in a commanding position within the Brendon Hills, at the eastern edge of the Exmoor National Park AONB, with magnificent views over its own parkland and across the valley to the vast Chargot estate, of which it was once a part. According to its Historic England listing, Chargot House was built in 1826 as a shooting lodge on the Luxborough estate by the Lethbridge family, local landowners who already owned neighbouring Withiel.

In the later 19th century, there was a brief departure from the unchanging farming life when Sir William Lethbridge tried to revive ancient open-cast iron mines at Luxborough and Withiel. The enterprise, which operated over 10 years until his death, effectively bankrupted him and, in 1875, the Lethbridges sold 118 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Withiel and Luxborough to James Insole, a colliery owner from Cardiff, who carried on mining for another 30 years without success, after which the estates were sold again and the land returned to the hands of its farmers.

Built in a Gothic style of ashlar stone around part of an earlier dwelling, Chargot House boasts large, full-height windows and, even on a dull day, is flooded with light.

It offers 8,620sq ft of accommodation on three floors, including four good reception rooms, a family kitchen/breakfast room, 12 bedrooms and nine bathrooms, with fibre broadband

and Wi-Fi installed throughout. The house is supported by an array of stone outbuildings, including a coach house, stabling and garaging, with obvious potential for conversion to residential use, subject to planning.

The gardens provide fresh produce and flowers for the house throughout the year; one of three ponds at the bottom of the valley is stocked with trout and is a magical area for wild swimming, summer entertaining and fishing.

Country houses in Devon and Cornwall will be covered in Property market on June 15

Properties of the week

Carla Passino

The call of the West With leafy views and atmospheric interiors, these properties make the most of life in the West Country

Devon, £1.1 million Set in Witheridge, between Exmoor and Dartmoor and within easy reach of Tiverton, this traditional, thatched house is thought to date from the 17th century and is full of period charm.

The 2,175sq ft interior has plenty of exposed beams, stonework and two inglenook fireplaces (one in the dining room, the other in the sitting room). Two of the three bedrooms enjoy long views of the leafy grounds, which extend to nearly 13 acres of gardens, lake, pond, pasture and woodland. There is also a converted barn providing secondary accommodation and office space. GTH (01769 574500) 120 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Devon, £1.4 million This nine-bedroom house in Dunridge, on Dartmoor, originally dates from the 16th century, albeit with Victorian additions, and comes to the market for the first time in 27 years. The 5,853sq ft of living space could do with some updating, but many original features have been kept intact, including the longhouse’s 16th-century, granite-floored cross passage and stone-arched doorway.

There is also a cottage that provides holiday-let income and a range of traditional outbuildings.

The grounds are perhaps an even greater draw, with more than 19 acres of mature gardens, including a Victorian walled garden, plus hay meadows, fields and woodland, which are carpeted in bluebells in season and harbour birds, badgers and deer. Mansbridge Balment (01822 612345)

Properties of the week

Cornwall, £1.75 million The grounds alone are enough to lure buyers to Lower Beeny Farmhouse, which stands in about 11 acres of gardens, fields and woodland on the edge of National Trust land in an AONB near Boscastle, with access to the South West Coast Path. However, the Grade II-listed house, which comes to the market for the first time in 26 years, adds to the appeal: it has a vaulted drawing room, sitting room with inglenook fireplace, open-plan kitchen and family room with Aga and inglenook fireplace, and four bedrooms, three of which are vaulted. Ancillary accommodation is available in three-bedroom Beeny Barn. Lower Beeny Farmhouse comes with a range of outbuildings, including some large agricultural barns that have separate vehicle access. Lillicrap Chilcott (01872 273473) Devon, excess £2.25 million Grade II-listed Loxbrook Farm, in Broadclyst, stands in a perfect location in the Devon countryside, yet conveniently close to Exeter. Dating from the early 19th century, it has many delightful details, from the vaulted ceiling and exposed beams in the dining room to the fireplace with woodburning stove in the sitting room, the Aga in the kitchen and the panoramic conservatory. There are two bedrooms on the ground floor and five more upstairs, plus a range of barns with planning permission for conversion. The grounds extend to 16 acres of gardens, pond, fields and paddocks.

Strutt & Parker (01392 229405) 122 | Country Life | June 8, 2020

Walk on the wild side The garden at Kestle Barton Gallery, near Helford, Cornwall

Caroline Donald visits a garden that marries an award-winning art gallery with a landscape of creeks and fields Photographs by Mark Bolton

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EACHED along a narrow country lane or via the footpath between Helford village and Frenchman’s Creek in the western reaches of Cornwall, the farmstead at Kestle Barton served its quiet purpose for at least 400 years until vacated in 2004 by the last farmer, who had grown up there. Were it not for Karen Townsend, who had a house nearby, the buildings would have been left to continue crumbling picturesquely into the ground; instead, they have been gently restored, revived and brought into the 21st century.

Miss Townsend worked closely with the local authority’s conservation team, which was as keen as she was that the integrity of the place wouldn’t be ruined by unsympathetic development and actively encouraged business use: one of the barns opened in 2010 as a gallery, with more of the buildings later converted into holiday cottages.

The project won a RIBA award for architect Alison Bunning’s thoughtful, low-key conversion, which retained the lime plastering, scantle slate roofs and cob walls.

Although she may have a good eye for design, Miss Townsend admits she is not knowledgeable about plants and had been havering about what to do with the walled yard outside the barn, known as a ‘mowhay’, where the hay was once stacked. She did know, however, that she wanted to avoid the Cornish cliché of semi-tropical plants. ‘That would have been really inappropriate,’ she says. Nor did she want big blowsy flowers: ‘It is a barn

and the walk is directly into a meadow. You don’t want to be distracted too much.’

Her daughter Emma, at the time gardening editor of The Independent, introduced her to the designer James Alexander-Sinclair, whose then garden at Blackpitts, a converted barn in Northamptonshire, she had admired.

He quickly understood what she was after and not a palm tree or mop-headed hydrangea appeared in his plans.

It is shaggy around the edges, which makes it charming; it has not spent time putting on its mascara Nor did they want anything too formal: ‘When one finds something that still has a lot of horny-handed vernacular to it, one wants to keep it that way,’ says Mr Alexander-Sinclair, who has planted ornamental grasses and strong perennials in a rich tapestry of colour, creating hidden enclosures and opening out to grassy areas. ‘To put in box-edge beds and ‘Iceberg’ roses would have looked ridiculous. The place is shaggy around the edges, which is what makes it charming; it has not spent a lot of time putting on its mascara.’

The builders dealt with the basic structure, such as the terrace outside the gallery, paths

Preceding pages: The gallery door opens onto the old mowhay, where hay was once stacked, and which is now informally planted with perennials providing a link to the landscape beyond. Left: The award-winning gallery by Alison Bunning with white Persica polymorpha 128 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

and drainage; meanwhile, Mr AlexanderSinclair had to manage deliveries of plants —or rather the lack of deliveries. ‘You are basically driving through a green tunnel to a dead end; there isn’t anywhere to go beyond that, apart from creeks and fields.

There are passing places, but it is not an easy thing—the drivers soon realised they couldn’t get down the lane, so they had to change the size of the lorries.’ Despite the logistics, ‘it was a fun thing to do,’ although perhaps he should have consulted a map before he took on the job. ‘It was one of those crazy things when you think “Cornwall, it’s not that far away”. There was a ridiculous day when I drove to Kestle Barton, laid out all the plants and drove back again,’ a 500-mile round trip. ‘I was younger then.’

With the claggy, brashy ground improved with topsoil and ‘good Cornish muck’, the garden has evolved to be simple, but spectacular with big groups of a handful of varieties that are pretty self-sufficient. ‘We use things such as Persicaria polymorpha that are beefy and tough, but flower for a ridiculously long time.’

One might argue that Mr Alexander-Sinclair’s gorgeous palette of colour and muscular form, golden Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, the rich raspberry wands of Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’ and clouds of Verbena bonariensis, are the distraction Miss Townsend was hoping to avoid, but the way they are allowed freedom to bulk up and roam about is as much about keeping to the informal spirit of the place as it is about making sure it doesn’t create too much work.

The ground was cleared of brash and prepared with lashings of fresh topsoil and well-rotted local manure before being planted with long-flowering perennials

There are quirky details, too, such as a hedge of Acca sellowiana, with its leathery silver leaves, passion fruit-like flowers and red fruits, and a ‘wildflower bank’, where the top of the Cornish-slate garden wall has been planted with foxgloves and poppies at eye height. Mr Alexander-Sinclair takes no credit, however, for the glories of the wildflower meadow that lies beyond the walled confines of the mowhay. ‘I think quite a lot of it was done by Nature and Karen aided it in its endeavour.’ There is also an orchard of old Cornish apple varieties.

June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 129

Kestle Barton highlights

Kniphofia ‘Tawny King’ Height and spread 3ft by 2ft Charms Everybody loves a bit of zing —it is as orange as a melting lollipop, with great leaves Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’ Height and spread 2ft by 18in Charms Late-summer light always works well with strong yellows Persicaria polymorpha Height and spread 8ft by 3ft Charms A massive plant that goes from zero to about 7ft every season.

Flowers for a very long time Miscanthus sinensis ‘Gracillimus’ Height and spread 5ft by 2ft Charms Beefy grass perfect for late summer through to winter Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Bronzeschleier’ Height and spread 28in by 16in Charms A more sophisticated version of the native tufted-hair grass. Evergreen with very airy flowers Eupatorium maculatum Atropurpureum Group Height and spread 6ft by 3ft Charms Makes its presence known.

Strong grower, self-supporting and has good seedheads after flowering

Left: Verbena bonariensis and Symphyotrichum ‘Little Carlow’ complement the stone barn. Above: Bright-yellow rays of Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, with deep-pink Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’ and the paler P. amplexicaulis ‘Rosea’

From being a job, it has become a real pleasure. It’s such a gorgeous place The gallery is open from April to the end of October and, although Miss Townsend says the garden looks very pretty earlier in the season, kicking off with daffodils, it has been planted to look its most spectacular during the high days of the summer holidays, when most visitors come. Should the weather be disappointing—it is Cornwall, after all— ‘even when it is drizzly, it is still beautiful,’ says Mr Alexander-Sinclair.

130 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

These days, he returns with his family at a more leisurely pace to inspect the garden once a year in September—missing the ‘poker moment’ when the Kniphofia ‘Tawny King’ do their bit—but with the compensation of seeing the rest of the garden at the height of its seasonal glory. ‘From being a job, it has become a real pleasure and all my children like going there. It is such a gorgeous place: there’s the Helford river and the countryside with the modern art gallery in the middle, then you have this garden that is quite intense and colourful and zingy and fun. It is not a garden that is primped and perfect, but that is what people like.

It is a nice place, a good place.’

For opening hours of Kestle Barton Gallery, Cornwall, visit www.kestlebarton.co.uk

Garden

Statement piece With a diameter of 62cm (24½in), the large Astronomic polished brass spherical armillary, £800, is impressive, from British Ironwork Centre (0800 688 8386; www.britishironworkcentre.co.uk)

Site specific Artist Tim Chalk creates bespoke sundials, such as this cast-iron Penannular Brooch design, mounted on an old agricultural grinding wheel. Prices from £2,000, Chalk Works (www.chalkworks.com)

In good time

Elegant sundials that chart the movement of the sun as it crosses the sky, selected by Amelia Thorpe On the wall This vertical sundial is a bespoke design

by David Harber, available in riven or smooth slate, prices from £13,311 (01235 859300; www.davidharber.co.uk)

Time piece This traditional inscribed large Brass sundial and Gnomon, £299, is made exclusively for Haddonstone (01604 770711; www.haddonstone.com) 132 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

On a pedestal Handmade in Kent, the Obelisk Needle pedestal, £342, makes a striking focal point, topped with an armillary, from a selection, from £288, Chilstone (01892 740866; www.chilstone.com)

It’s a classic This Classic Horizontal octagonal sundial, from £225, is made from 3mm (⅛in) brass plate by Robert Foster, and can be personalised with an inscription if desired (01746 783714; www.sundialsbyrobertfoster.co.uk)

Five rings The Armillary Sphere sundial, £595, is made in England from solid wrought iron and hand painted, distressed and oxidised for an aged patina, from Ornamenti by Lapicida (01423 400100; www.ornamenti.co.uk)

Piece of history Cast in plaster from the Elizabethan carving at the Tower of London, the Hew Draper graffito tablet, £365, is incised with signs of the zodiac for the casting of horoscopes, from Lassco (01844 277188; www.lassco.co.uk)

In the garden

Time for tea

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as it degrades. If you grow potatoes, lay an early cutting of the leaves under each seed potato; they will fertilise the developing crop as they decompose.

Comfrey also acts as a powerful compost accelerator. Even if you get the mix of greens and browns right, comfrey or nettles —in shredded leaf or liquid form —added to the pile will move everything along more quickly.

Plant comfrey around the base of fruit trees

Comfrey is rich is nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium; there are a range of uses that make the most of those natural nutrients

on), cut the bottom off and fill the bottle with comfrey leaves. Place a brick or similar on top. Over the next fortnight or so, the leaves will break down under the weight of the brick and release a dark liquid. To use it, simply undo the lid, decant what you need and dilute it with about 15 parts water.

Once established, you can take three or four cuts of comfrey over the growing season, providing free nutrients and, in turn, more delicious produce.

The potassium in comfrey tea is especially good for any fruiting

Horticultural aide-mémoire Remove tomato side shoots

The tomato absorbs our attention on a daily basis with its routine tasks. One of these, for cordon plants, is the removal of side shoots.

Seek out these fruitless interlopers, run your thumb along each one to the base and apply gentle downward pressure until it breaks cleanly off. Work through all the plants, lost in your silent endeavour. By the end, you will have plenty for the compost heap and your hands will be black and glossy. Remove the muck by slicing a tomato in two and rubbing on the juice. SCD

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plants; most of mine goes on aubergines, chillis, tomatoes, courgettes and beans. I give them a good watering every fortnight from flowering, which they repay later in the season with a heftier, healthier harvest. If you have grape vines or stone fruit, you can use comfrey tea as a foliar feed, spraying it direct onto the leaves where it will be taken in readily.

For plants that need nitrogen for green growth—peas, beans, cut-and-come-again leaves and so on—you can follow exactly this method, but using nettles.

Not that it smells any better.

If you have fruit trees, you could do worse than plant comfrey around the base of the tree, leaving a foot or so from the trunk. It will mulch out any grass that competes with the root zone of the tree, the flowers bring in pollinating and naturally pestpredating insects and simply mowing or strimming the leaves will act as a cut-and-come-again mulch that releases minerals and nutrients into the tree’s root zone

Generic comfrey might suit you well in an orchard situation or if you have a little space to dedicate to it, but, for a little more control over its spread, look for Bocking 14 seedlings. These are self-sterile and hence don’t set seed, so won’t expand the patch in the way regular comfrey can.

To start or extend a patch of comfrey, you can begin with seeds or young plants. If you have some already, simply dig up a root of it in winter, slice it into £1-coin thicknesses and bury it an inch into a 3½in pot of compost and allow roots to develop, ahead of late spring planting.

Comfrey can live for 20 years or more, so choose a spot carefully; avoid chalky soil and give it at least partial sunshine and it should thrive. Although it might be tempting to dig up a little wild comfrey to get you going, it tends to be much less productive, less nutrient-rich and not as healthy as garden comfrey.

Mark Diacono grows edibles, both usual and unusual, at Otter Farm in Devon (www.otterfarm.co.uk).

His From Scratch: Ferment (Quadrille, £12.99) is out now Next week After Chelsea

Alamy

OMFREY is an upright, clump-forming perennial that looks a little like borage a couple of gins into a long weekend off. Its pointy leaves— somewhat furry and papery to the touch—are carried below drooping clusters of pinky-purple and white flowers that appear in spring through summer. It is quite beautiful in its untamed way.

It grows quickly, reaching 30in or so high and wide over a few months. Meanwhile, its roots drive deep into the soil, drawing otherwise inaccessible minerals into the plant to accumulate above ground, making it a naturally rich source of the holy trinity of plant nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium— which can bring such benefits to the rest of the garden. Its richness in potassium is particularly valuable to fruiting plants.

There are a number of ways of putting these nutrients to good use. Firstly, comfrey tea. I make this a few times a year, starting in spring. The easiest way is to fill a net bag (I use an old onion net) with torn up comfrey leaves and suspend it from a cane into your water butt. Over a month or so, it will slowly leach its minerals into the water; you’ll know when it’s ready to use, as it smells as if something with a very poor diet died a long time ago. It should be the colour of very weak tea.

Dilute it if needed, as anything stronger is a waste.

Alternatively, you can invert a large water bottle (leave the cap

Mark Diacono

Kitchen garden cook Samphire

by Melanie Johnson

More ways with Samphire

Crispy-skinned salmon with samphire, almonds and a Champagne cream sauce

Samphire and crab creme brûlée with sweet pickled cucumbers Thinly slice one cucumber, skin on, and tip into a colander.

Sprinkle with salt. In a saucepan, heat 125g of caster sugar with 175ml of water until the sugar has dissolved. Pour in 50ml of white-wine vinegar, stir and cool. Squeeze out the liquid from the cucumber and then add everything to a large glass jar. Refrigerate for two hours.

In a bowl, whisk together 150ml of double cream, 150ml of whole milk, a pinch of pepper and two eggs until smooth.

Pour into four ramekins.

Spoon 40g of white crab meat into each ramekin, together with roughly six lengths of samphire. Place the ramekins in a roasting tray and cover with foil. Pour boiling water into the tray around them and then cook in a low oven until set, about 35–40 minutes. Refrigerate.

Grate over Parmesan and use a torch to brûlée the top.

Serve with the pickled cucumbers and a thin slice of toasted sourdough.

Method

reheat your oven to 180˚C P fan/200˚C/450˚F/gas mark 6. lace the fillets in a frying P pan, skin side down, and heat until the skin has gone crispy, a few minutes.

Arrange on a baking sheet, skin side up, and roast for 12–15 minutes. o the same frying pan, add T a little olive oil and the diced shallot. Cook for a few minutes to soften. Add the grated garlic and cook for a minute

more before pouring in the stock. Bring to a rolling simmer, reduce by half, then pour in the Champagne.

Reduce by half, again, and then pour in the cream. team the samphire for five S to eight minutes. Add a drizzle of olive oil, the lemon zest and a squeeze of lemon. Stir through the flaked almonds. our the sauce onto plates P and top each with a salmon fillet. Place a spoonful of the samphire to the side, scatter with dill and serve. A few edible flowers will make this especially pretty.

Ingredients Serves 4 4 salmon fillets with skin A splash olive oil 1 shallot, diced

1 clove garlic, grated

300ml vegetable stock 150ml Champagne/ Prosecco

3tbspn double cream 180g samphire

1 lemon, zest and juice 50g flaked almonds, toasted 2tbspn fresh dill

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A simple side of samphire Add butter to a frying pan and sauté some samphire. Squeeze over lemon juice, grate over Parmesan, add pepper and serve. It’s as simple as that!

Melanie Johnson

prinkle salt over the skin of S the salmon and refrigerate for an hour. Pat with kitchen roll to remove any excess liquid.

With fairy shoes in every flower It might be common and unremarkable, but the deadnettle has been a powerful and effective country remedy for centuries, discovers Ian Morton

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ROUCHING along hedgerows, field margins, grass verges, in disturbed soil and on waste ground, it barely catches the eye. Its modest flowers, although among the earliest to appear and the last to quit the year, cannot compete for attention either in colour or display with bolder and brighter springtime blooms. It is no more than a wayside weed and its very name seems to condemn it: deadnettle.

However, names are deceptive and this unassuming plant is not even a nettle—it’s a herb, a member of the Lamiaceae family that includes mints, lavender, rosemary, sage and basil. Its misnomer derives from the jagged leaf shape, which it probably developed to dissuade grazing animals and leaf-eating insects by mimicking the botanically unrelated stinging nettle.

As do so many wild plants that are now overlooked, the deadnettle has history. The first of this species to flower, Lamium purpureum, presents its modest mauve bloom clusters and purplish leaves as early as February and remains until November. Its slightly more prominent relative L. album, with white flowers and green foliage, follows in March and lasts until December—and it is this variety that commands the bigger reputation. In the distant days when Christian festivals punctuated the rural year, it was known as ‘white archangel’ because it was traditionally observed around May 8, the Feast of the Apparition, the day the Catholic church dedicated to the Archangel Michael to commemorate his reported 5th-century appearance on Mount Gargano, in southern Italy. Alternative local names included ‘blind’, ‘dumb’ or ‘dead’ nettle—not a condemnation, but a celebration of its innocuous nature— and ‘sweet nettle’, which came from the practice, common among rural children, of sucking the flowers for their nectar.

Above all, deadnettle was valued for its curative properties. John Gerard declared A bizarre, yet beneficial plant: Lamium maculatum, the spotted deadnettle

in his Herball of 1597 that ‘the White Archangel flowers… are baked with sugar, as also the distilled water of them, which is said to make the heart merry, to make a good colour in the face, and to make the vital spirits more fresh and lively’. Nicholas Culpeper confirmed in his 1653 Complete Herbal that the plant ‘makes the heart merry, drives away melancholy, quickens the spirits, is good against the quartan ague (and) stauncheth bleeding at the mouth and nose if it be stamped and applied to the nape of the neck’.

The plant “makes the heart merry, drives away melancholy, quickens the spirits...”

The medicinal reputation of deadnettles endured over time. In her A Modern Herbal of 1931, Maud Grieve (a fellow of the RHS) related the traditional recommendations concerning internal haemorrhages and menstrual problems and advocated creams and potions to treat piles, varicose veins, rashes, eczema, bruises and burns. Grieve acknowledged that ‘it was used with great success in removing the hardness of the spleen which was supposed to be the seat of melancholy, a decoction being made with wine and the herb applied to the region of the spleen, the decoction also being used as a fomentation’.

In what amounted to a fulsome, authoritative and enduring endorsement, she wrote that bruised dead nettles mixed with salt, vinegar and lard had ‘proved useful’ in reducing swellings and easing gout, sciatica and painful joints and muscles, with a tea made from dried leaves mixed with honey promoting perspiration and acting beneficially on the kidneys to aid urination.

Chemical analysis has since revealed the plant’s formidable array of glycosides, phenylpropanoids, iridoids and flavonoids, proving once again the instinctive soundness June 8, 2022 | Country Life | 139

of so many old remedies. Our ancestors knew what worked, even if they didn’t know why.

Carl Linnaeus based his Lamium classification tag on the ancient Greek word for throat or hungry monster, dramatically likening the helmet shape of the flower to open jaws. Far prettier is the association the plant enjoys in many English regions—in Lancashire, the white deadnettle flowers were known as pixie shoes and in Norfolk as

The honey sac is protected by fine hairs –genuine pollinators only are welcome

Above: Bees’ favourite: purple deadnettle. Below: The short-flowering yellow deadnettle

Cinderella’s slippers, because of the little black markings inside them.

In her Forgotten History of British Plants, ethnobotanist and Kew research associate Gabrielle Hatfield relates that ‘the fairies became cross at their shoes being continually stolen by centipedes, so they decided to hide them among the nettles. Pick a piece of deadnettle and turn it upside down. In every little flower you will see two pairs of fairy shoes, neatly hidden’.

The flowers of all deadnettle variants cluster on square, fibrous and hairy stems in whorls of six or 12 verticillasters. The

purple and white varieties offer different dining opportunities to bees, their principal pollinators. The flowers of the purple plant, which for some obscure reason is also known as ‘bad man’s posies’, have short corolla tubes that invite all kinds of bees to enjoy their nectar, but those of the white variety have extended tubes that only a longer proboscis can reach.

This includes the red mason bee and the burnished brass moth, but mainly the bumblebee, which gave the plant one of the favourite folk names, ‘bumblebee flower’.

The honey sac is protected by fine hairs to exclude small insects—genuine pollinators only are welcome

• Deadnettles are native to Europe, Asia and North Africa and are naturalised across the temperate world. Traces found in Bronze Age digs suggest a long history of human use and Pliny recommended them to keep snakes out of the garden • The leaves of Lamium album provide food for the green tortoise beetle (far right) and the

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caterpillars of garden tiger (below left) and angle shades moths

most effective of the species for treating ulcers and sores

• Two species have a visual connection with a mustelid, employing the ancient Greek word for ‘weasel’, gale. The hemp (Galeopsis tetrahit) was so-called because its flower was said to resemble the face of the animal. The yellow kind (L. galeobdolon), likewise identified, also echoes the Greek word for an unpleasant smell.

Although its yellow flowers and white-streaked leaves make it the most attractive of the group, its regional names included ‘dummy nettle’ and ‘weasel snout’. Preferring damp and shady locations, yellow has the shortest flowering season, from April to July.

Culpeper regarded it as the

• The henbit variety (L. amplexicaule) is similar to the purple plant, but is lighter and more graceful, with deep-pink blooms.

Its popular name reflects chickens’ taste for its seeds.

The spotted version (L. maculatum) is close in appearance to the white nettle, but has a central streak of white with white blotches on its leaves • L. album’s juice was the prime plant source of ItalianRussian botanist Mikhail Tsvet’s late-19th-century pigmentation experiments, in which he pioneered the laboratory technique of separating different liquid components by colour bands.

Tsvet—who invented chromatography and whose name

means colour in Russian— detected green chlorophyll, orange carotenes and yellow xanthophylls in the deadnettle extract. He announced his findings in 1900 and devised the term chromatography in papers in 1906. Sadly, his work was overlooked thereafter and his findings discounted, but subsequent developments in the science earned British chemists Archer Martin and Richard Synge a Nobel Prize in 1952

Alamy; Getty

Grasping the deadnettle

there. When they have done their job and seeds have eventually formed, the pressure of further intrusion causes the plant to propel the next generation into the surrounding soil.

Unlike stinging nettles, which are a suitable animal foodstuff and have a nutritional value similar to clover, deadnettles are avoided by cattle, which find their oily stems pungent and distasteful. Linnaeus recorded that cows in his native Sweden refused them, although he announced them fit for human consumption when boiled or added as a pot herb. Young leaves and shoots are variously described by foragers as tasting like spinach or celery when cooked and may be added raw to salads or used in pesto. Purple deadnettle extract may also feature in organic soap, its astringency claimed to have special skin-cleansing value.

The slug of the Baskervilles Prowl the wilds of Dartmoor at night and you just might stumble upon our largest land slug, discovers Jack Watkins

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HORT of re-enacting a scene from The Hound of the Baskervilles, you might think there is little reason for prowling the wilds of Dartmoor at night. A naturalist wouldn’t find it so strange, however, given that some of the area’s most intriguing wildlife—including bats, owls and nightjars—is essentially nocturnal. Also among their number is the ash-black slug, as Dartmoor National Park is one of the strongholds of what is believed to be the world’s largest land slug. Africa may have its Big Five, which includes lions and rhinos, but the park’s website states that it is proud to include the ash-black as a member of ‘Dartmoor’s Little Five’, keeping company with the cuckoo, marsh fritillary, otter and blue ground beetle.

Dartmoor is proud to include the ash-black slug as a member of its “Little Five” It’s possible that other giant slugs await discovery in the equatorial rainforests, but what is certain is that, among the 44 known species present in Britain, Limax cinereoniger is our largest—most measure between 4in–8in, but some clock in at a whopping 12in. A. E. Ellis’s British Snails, first published in 1926 and for 40 years the standard work on the subject, even described them as ‘being up to 10cm to 40cm [4in–15¾in] long’.

By comparison, one of the most common slugs, the large black (Arion ater), reaches up to 5½in in maturity.

Feeling sluggish

• Slugs and snails are members of the gastropod class of molluscs • Although Limax cinereoniger is dark in colour in Britain, on the Continent, where it is widespread, its colour and markings can also include white, yellow and red • The Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland publishes the magazine Mollusc World and its website has a helpful section on identifying common garden slugs and snails (www.conchsoc.org)

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The ash-black slug, the world’s largest land slug, is thriving in Dartmoor National Park

Although some species of slug may be viewed as pests by gardeners, ash-blacks are unlikely ever to be seen near the precious lupins or hostas. They are essentially inhabitants of ancient woods and forests, both deciduous and coniferous, and may also be found on adjoining hillsides, rocky areas and grassland. According to the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, although now scarce, the slug ‘is probably the most reliable indicator of ancient, semi-natural woodland’.

Present all year round, ash-blacks spend most of their time on the woodland floor, hiding under logs, loose bark and dead leaves.

They love humid or moist conditions, hence the preponderance of them in the warm, sheltered oak woodland near the banks of Dartmoor’s River Dart. The slugs will emerge from their • Slugs are hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female reproductive organs. However, two slugs are still required to complete the mating process • In the collection of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum is a glass jar containing a slug impaled on a thorn. Originally black, the slug is bleached white from years of immersion in alcohol. The instruction on the jar reads: ‘Charm for warts. Go out alone & find a large black slug. Secretly rub the underside on the warts and impale the slug on a thorn.

As the slug dies, the warts will go’

cover on a damp day, but are usually active at night when, demonstrating considerable mobility, they climb trees to feed on fungi and lichens. They can be remarkably long lived, surviving for up to five years.

Back in the 1950s, the ash-black, together with the large black, was part of an important study, one of several to demonstrate that slugs react to smells. Placed in the middle of a field at a certain distance from fungi, the slugs were observed to first crawl off in the direction in which they had been set down, before stopping.

After a few moments, during which their tentacles moved from side to side, the slugs would start to slide off again, this time taking a spiralling course in the direction of the source of food. When the food was moved to a different spot before the slugs reached it, they would once again stop, repeatedly retract and extend their tentacles, then move off in the direction of the relocated fungi once more.

The ash-black is identified by the whitish keel or ridge running along the length of its back and the central line of its foot, which contrasts with the black or dark-grey body.

Ellis described them as ‘stout’, but one Nature website goes so far as to call them ‘handsome’. No one has yet claimed that they are charismatic, but slugs are sadly understudied and undervalued and, if ever the call goes out for a poster boy—or girl—to front a longoverdue ‘We Love Slugs’ campaign, the ashblack has got to be in the running.

Art market

Huon Mallalieu

I love Paris in the springtime Business was booming in the world capital of drawing, headed by the sale of a Michelangelo

P

ARIS was the world capital of drawing for one week last month. It was frustrating to have only two days, with so much on offer: superb exhibitions, including the Louvre’s drawings owned by Giorgio Vasari, the founder of art history, and ‘True to Nature: Open Air Painting 1780–1870’ at the Fondation Custodia, which demonstrates that oil sketches can be close kin to drawing. At the centre were the Salon du Dessin at the Palais Brongniart and Drawing Now, the contemporary fair in the Carreau du Temple.

I was happy to stay at the Drawing Hotel, opened in 2017 in the rue de Richelieu by Drawing Now’s founder Christine Phal. She and her daughter, Carine Tissot, run the Drawing Lab there, offering four exhibitions a year, as well as space, equipment and support for anyone to drop in and draw.

The week also saw the sale of probably the most distinguished drawing that Christie’s will have to offer for many a year. Michelangelo’s 13in by 8in brown-ink-andwash Nude Man (after Masaccio) had been subject to an export stop by the French government, which lapsed in time for the sale to coincide with the Semaine du Dessin. Perhaps 10 of the artist’s drawings are still in private hands and this was his first known nude, produced when Michelangelo was honing his skills by drawing from Masaccio’s frescos in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence, Italy. It is not exactly a copy, as he enhanced the physique of the shivering man newly emerged from baptism.

When sold in 1907 it was regarded as ‘school of’. It then 144 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

belonged to the pianist Alfred Cortôt (1877–1962), and only in 2019 was it authenticated, by then Christie’s specialist Furio Rinaldi. In the event, it was bid to €23,162,000 (£19.5m), having been estimated to €30 million.

Nothing in that league was at the Salon, but the opening was bustling with connoisseurs joyful to be there. Business was being done, although, I suspect, judiciously.

A tradition at the Salon is a loan exhibition to publicise particular museum collections.

This year’s was advance notice for one that has yet to open, the Musée du Grand Siècle, which will occupy an old barracks at SaintCloud from 2026. The drawings on show were a tiny portion of a magnificent gift of 673 paintings, 3,502 drawings and 603 Venetian glass animal figures collected by Pierre Rosenberg, art historian and former director Fig 1 above right: Nude Man (after Masaccio), brown ink and wash,

by Michelangelo. €23,162,000.

Fig 2 right: Studies connected to a horse race in Rome, by Théodore Géricault.

With Arnoldi-Livie

Art market

Fig 3: Pencil head by Carry van Biema. With De La Mano of the Louvre. What an eye, and what luck, he has. I was most taken by a black-and-red pastel head of a man by Federico Barocci (1535–1612), which gave a powerful impression of character.

Barocci divided his painting career between his native Urbino and Rome and pioneered the use of pastel, especially for heads such as this and for studies of cats.

Here, I illustrate some of my favourite offerings on the stands, whether sold or not. A later artist who made a formative visit to Rome was Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), who travelled in Italy during 1816 and 1817. In Rome, he concentrated on classical sculptures of men and horses, and he planned an ambitious painting of a horse race in the streets.

Like many of his projects, it was never completed, but studies such as the 7¼in by 10in sheet of male figures (Fig 2), including Laocoon and horses, with Arnoldi-Livie of Munich, are connected to it.

In his last years, Géricault made studies of severed heads and limbs. With Maurizio Nobile of Milan there was a similar subject by a contemporary, a drawing of a condemned man by Giuseppe Diotti (1779–1846). Later, Diotti made a before-and-after double study of the head.

Always on the lookout for work

by Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946), I found two with the Lancz Gallery of Brussels. A watercolour of two women seated in a park made me laugh, but the 10½in by 15½in Arbres au levant 1946 in 146 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

Fig 6: Neophyte I by Laila Tara H. With Purdy Hicks Gallery

Fig 4 above: Bateaux a l’ancre, Le Pouliguen, 1908, by Edouard Vuillard. With Jill Newhouse. Fig 5 below: Lontains, thread sewn on silk, by Frédérique Petit. With Galerie Valérie Delaunay

harbour scene (Fig 4) in distemper on paper of 1908 by Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940), shown by Jill Newhouse of New York.

The opening of Drawing Now also bustled—I saw two major deals being concluded at the same time on one stand. This is the fair at which to find emerging talent and to discover new ways of drawing. I was intrigued by the 5in by 8in Lointains (Fig 5) by Frédérique Petit (Galerie Valérie Delaunay), who ‘draws’ in thread sewn on silk, and by Marie Havel (Galerie Jean-Louis Ramand) who uses flocking on card. A fusion of traditions, as in Laila Tara H’s 19½in by 14in Neophyte 1 (Fig 6) in natural pigment and watercolour on Indian hemp paper, derives from Indo-Persian miniatures (Purdy Hicks Gallery).

Next week Feast of fairs

ink and watercolour was matter for a sigh. Rather than Spilliaert’s hallmark eeriness, this was a poignant, perhaps last, observation of the dawn through trees.

There was poignancy, too, in a 11in by 9in pencil head of a young girl (Fig 3) by the Dutch-German Carry van Biema (1881–1942).

A teacher and author of a nowrare book on colours, her promising career ended at Auschwitz.

In the 1930s, she had worked in Barcelona and the drawing was with De La Mano of Madrid. Sunniness rather than melancholy characterised the 15½in by 13¾in

Pick of the week

After 40 continuous years of organising art fairs, Brian and Anna Haughton have retired, but their seminars continue. This year’s is at the British Academy, 10–11 Carlton House Terrace, SW1, on June 29 and 30. The programme takes the form of a tour of dynasties and their cultural expressions of power and prestige, starting in Florence with the rise to political dominance of the Medici, through to the importance of jewels in the Royal Indian courts. Diplomatic gifts such as tapestries, silk, gold boxes and porcelain always played a central role in international relations.

Lecturers include Amin Jaffer of The Al Thani Collection, Johann Kräftner (the Liechtenstein Princely Collections), Leslie Greene Bowman (Thomas Jefferson Foundation) and Mathieu Deldicque (Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly). Tickets cost £110, or £190 with a Champagne reception and dinner at the Athenaeum on June 29 (www.haughton.com/seminar).

Books

Edited by Kate Green

The meat of the matter The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plantsonly diet won’t improve your health or save

the planet Jayne Buxton (Piatkus, £25) RED line now divides us and it is drawn with the blood of farm animals.

On the one side, there are omnivores /carnivores, on the other vegetarians/ vegans. If not yet as rancorous as Brexit, this political-cultural split may become the great matter of our times. Indeed, according to the environment writer and commentator George Monbiot, the farming of livestock will cause the end of times.

It’s the cows and sheep, you see. They take up land space and their methane burps warm the air space. In his recent, muchpublicised book Regenesis, Mr Monbiot declares the pasturefed organic cow the ‘most damaging farm product’ on Earth. The only future is #meatfree #farmfree. However, the vegans currently have the wind in their turbines and the light in their eyes; some five million people signed up for last year’s ‘Veganuary’ campaign.

On such a contentious subject as future food, the first duty of the reviewer is to declare their skin in the game. I have kept livestock for 25 years. On the other hand, like a Shoreditch hipster, I would not touch with a barge pole a sausage from a factory farm on ethical grounds alone. I self-identify as an ‘ethical carnivore’. Conveniently, my views thus align with the author of this book, the slightly shrill title of which belies a calm, incisive dissection of veganism’s salvationist claim to protect human health and the planet.

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Vegans may claim the ethical crown, but it belongs to omnivores

At most, 14.5% of global emissions come from farm livestock; in Britain, it is about 5.7% To the meat of the matter.

If anything, Jayne Buxton, who runs a work-life balance consultancy, understates the inherent indispensability of flesh in the human diet; physiologically, we are more dogs than herbivores (nota bene the canine teeth).

However, she does take a sharp steak knife to those dire warnings from the 1970s that eggs

and meat were heart attacks on a plate; as large-scale metaanalyses now confirm, we who eat animal protein and fat are less likely to have heart attacks than serial cereal-consumers.

Food for thought, no? Quite literally. Our progression from ape to homo sapiens was probably fuelled by eating proteinrich flesh. Having made the promeat case, the author presents the research contra the high-carb, animal-free diet that veganism entails—and it is damning.

In June last year, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that children on vegan diets were, on average, 1.2in shorter, with 4% –6% lower bone mineral content.

However, surely the veggie option on the menu is good for the planet, because cows produce more greenhouse gases than anything. After all, everyone

from Prue Leith to Sadiq Khan, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Blue Peter and The Guardian tells us so. (One of the book’s triumphs is revealing the hidden financial hand behind so much veganism; The Guardian has received almost $2 million from the US-based Open Philanthropy Project, a backer of animal-rights activism and plant-based ‘meat’.)

I have lost count of the times I have been told that 51% of greenhouse gases are caused by animal agriculture. Then I find that, as did the author, the people quoting that figure watched the 2014 Netflix documentary Cowspiracy. At most, 14.5% of global emissions come from farm livestock; in Britain, it is about 5.7%.

The author poses an inconvenient truth. Cattle in ‘regenerative’ schemes (a new-bottle label for the old wine of traditional outdoor grazing) reduce global warming, not least because grass can sequester as much, if not more, carbon than trees.

I would add that organic-style farm herbivores are boons to biodiversity; the emissions from a cow’s derriere will feed 2.2 million insects a year, the beginning of a food chain up to the apex swallow and fox.

The cows of livestock farmers have, however, been made a scapegoat for the real C-word problem of climate change, which is cars and cheap air travel. The carbon cost of a 112g serving of regenerative beef is a negative 0.4 kg; a single flight across the Atlantic is 1,600kg. Perhaps some celebrities should ditch the jet-setting.

A couple of years ago, ethical veganism was given legal protection in Britain. Perhaps ethical carnivorism should receive the same status? If you want to join our church, you’ll find this book a foundation text.

John Lewis-Stempel

Books Birds, Beasts and Bedlam Derek Gow (Chelsea Green Publishing, £20) HE cover is often the hardest thing to get right in a book project, but, here, what you see is what you get. The author stares peevishly at the reader from behind a Hagrid beard like a large rodent, one aggrieved that humans have stolen his habitat, intent on getting it back and not minding whom he upsets along the way.

There is a substantial excess of talkers over doers in the increasingly fractious world of conservation. Mr Gow is a doer —the subtitle of the book is ‘Turning my farm into an Ark for Lost Species’. There is also a suffocating surfeit of PhDs over farmers. Mr Gow is a farmer. He is the go-to man for landowners suffering from the Noah Complex, for stocking their arks with anything from a water vole to a stork (I should declare an interest here, as he is helping me to restore Ratty to his rightful place on the banks of our burn).

We have to start at the beginning to understand this remarkable force of Nature. Think Gerald Durrell, but where Durrell’s childhood was spent terrorising the inhabitants of Corfu with creepycrawlies, Mr Gow’s was spent retrieving his sheep from the

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150 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

There is an excess of talkers over doers in conservation. Mr Gow is a doer gardens of aggrieved residents of the Borders market town of Biggar. The canniest, gobbiest boy in the class usually becomes an auctioneer in this rural community and so it proved with Mr Gow. He might still be there, but

for a radical streak and a deep and genuine love of animals.

His earliest wish had been to be a zookeeper—he is of the generation who rushed back from school to watch Johnny Morris performing his Dr Doolittle shtick on Animal Magic—and he gravitated into the arcane world of zoos and wildlife parks, seized a chance to attend a summer school at the zoo on Jersey started by his hero Durrell and the rest is history. He now lives in Devon, on 300 acres, and breeds and reintroduces water voles—more than 7,000 to date—and beavers.

Mr Gow is an amusing raconteur and, in this warm and funny autobiography, he writes with a whimsical fluency about the moments of humour and pathos in an unusual life, such as being bitten by a Scottish wildcat or when an angry bison bull started to break down the sides of his trailer when being transported on the M6. He has an intelligent take on the environment and sheds a mercilessly accurate light on the absurd bureaucracy and ‘cultural arrogance’ hardwired into Britain’s Green State.

Jamie Blackett

fairly feudal and, it would seem, lethal village of Champton (move over Midsomer and St Mary Mead), opens with just such a scenario. The row is pretty vicious, but murder? There will be, however (several pages in), a violent death in the church— involving a pair of secateurs— which may or may not be related to the contentious loo plan.

The Revd Coles—sometime rock musician, co-presenter of Saturday Live on Radio 4, recently retired vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire, author,

polymath and general national treasure—is now turning his hand to gentle detective fiction, bringing a new character to the genre, one who is surely ripe for a television serial.

He is Canon Daniel Clement, a thoughtful, tactful and intellectual cleric, observant of human nature; he lives with his eavesdropping mother, Audrey, a woman tin-eared to the sensitive issues of life, and two omnipresent sausage dogs, Hilda and Cosmo (there is a lot of dachshund action in the book).

There are also a much-married, jovial squire, a distant heir, a self-important county councillor, a gamekeeper steeped in country lore and multifarious nosey parkers and old bats.

Violent deaths aside, it’s a cosy world of Desert Island Discs, flower rotas and walnut cakes, beautifully written and evocative, run through with the comforting, ancient liturgical rhythms that transport you to Evensong and gentle organ music in a cool country church on a summer’s evening. KG

Alamy; Richard Cannon/Country Life Picture Library

Murder before Evensong Richard Coles (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99) NYONE who has lived in a rural parish knows that plans to replace pews with loos or kitchens can be divisive, even if the most trenchant opponents are subsequently grateful for the facilities. The Revd Richard Coles’s first novel, set in the

Emulating Gerald Durrell: Derek Gow releases a water vole—one of more than 7,000—into the wild

Crossword A prize of £25 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened.

Solutions must reach Crossword No 4733, Country Life, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR, by Tuesday, June 14. UK entrants only

ACROSS 1 Outdated repartee (8) 5 Grab eggs (6) 9 Familiar relatives distribute earnings (8) 10 Dismayed that silver is at ghastly core (6) 12 In a brief moment through a feeling of dread (7) 13 An item would be two of it (7) 14 Feeling inferior at present (12) 17 Literati loan lodgings (12) 22 Then ape way to make hydrocarbon (7) 23 Notice blistering start to argument in facial feature (7) 24 Animal lairs in grounds (6) 25 Abuse hard to say (8) 26 Used to be wine to send abroad (6) 27 Yes gales damage fake facial feature (5,3)

DOWN 1 Down-and-out gets food in pub (6) 2 Blue band for member of clerical order (6) 3 Horse in middle of day is in shape (7) 4 Magnanimous when regathered at new place (5-7) 6 Barge which is not as heavy (7) 7 PM man of straw (8) 8 Following strike idol has time inside up to this point (8) 11 Cheat on libel action to solve problem (5,3,4) 15 Only redeem wool (8) 16 Applaud trick that is rubbish (8) 18 Drink beloved of French tutor (7) 19 Agamemnon’s son mends stereos (7) 20 Small matter of pudding (6) 21 Noon or ten past two (6)

Bridge Andrew Robson I LEFT my home office where I had played the Gold Cup quarterfinal (online) to find my wife. She shrieked for joy on hearing we’d lost—now I could join her for two 60th birthday parties that weekend. I was at the time discussing the boards on the phone with my partner Alexander Allfrey, who was amused at the reaction.

Here are two deals from the semi-final stages, not featuring your correspondent (who was enjoying fine wine and company at the time). The first is a very well-played slam by the eventual winning team captained by Janet de Botton.

TAIT

ACROSS: 7, Paramount; 8, Brill; 10, Crossbow; 11, Autumn; 12, Game; 13, Ayrshire; 15, Maltese; 17, Shotgun; 20, Timeless; 22, List; 25, Skater; 26, Estimate; 27, Kneel; 28, Vigilance. DOWN: 1, Bairn; 2, Nausea; 3, Cobblers; 4, Snowman; 5, Crotchet; 6, Glamorous; 9, Pair; 14, Panicking; 16, Twenties; 18, Holstein; 19, Ascetic; 21, Earn; 23, Samoan; 24, Stock.

The winner of 4731 is Mrs E. Fletcher, Argyll

152 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

432 982 AQJ8532 9 N QJ10764 W ✢E 4 S 98632

AK84 KQ4 A3 Q765 109 N 6 W ✢E QJ87652 S J94

South

QJ753 J53 K94 A3

62 A109872 10 K1082 West

North

AKJ K3 1096 KJ754

Q108765 A5 K7 AQ10

East

1 (1) 1 3 (2) Pass 3 (3) Pass 4 (4) Pass 6 (5) End

(1) Playing Five-card Majors.

(2) Fit-showing jump (in NorthSouth’s methods), showing five Hearts and four Clubs (at least).

(3) ‘I have a good hand, tell me more.’

(4) Showing the sixth Heart.

(5) Knows partner has three cards between Spades and Diamonds— and holds three ‘cover-cards’.

SOLUTION TO 4732

Dealer South Neither Vulnerable

Dealer North North-South Vulnerable

South

4733

return, cross to the (Knave and) Queen of Clubs and claim his slam.

On our second deal, both Souths declared Five Spades doubled on the singleton Diamond lead (an opening Heart lead would have worked better).

The key suit is Clubs. The correct percentage play taking the suit in isolation is to lead to the Queen and return to the ten.

However, it’s close, and declarer was correctly swayed by East’s One Spade bid. East had shown five Spades to West’s two, also East rated to hold the Ace of Clubs for his bid.

Declarer won West’s ten of Spades lead and drew trumps in three rounds. When, a tad surprisingly, it was East who turned up with three Hearts to West’s one, it was almost certain East held fewer Clubs. Declarer crossed to dummy’s remaining top Spade and led a low Club to his King, winning the trick. He next led a low Club and ducked in dummy.

As declarer hoped, East’s Ace ‘beat air’ and declarer could win East’s

1 4 5 End

West

Pass(1) 5 Pass

North

2 (2) 5 (4) Pass

East

3 (3) Dbl Dbl

(1) Anyone for a cheeky non-vulnerable Three Heart pre-empt?

(2) Playing Five-card Majors, North opts to show the fit.

(3) Dubious, as East does not want his partner to outbid Spades at a high level.

(4) Hard to resist, although Five Clubs (which partner would naturally double) would go three down.

The successful declarer won the Diamond with dummy’s Knave to lead a Spade. East rose with the King and switched to the King of Hearts (best). Winning the Ace, declarer overtook the King of Diamonds with dummy’s Ace, thrilled to observe West merely discard. He cashed the Queen of Diamonds, shedding his Heart loser, and continued with a long Diamond.

There was no defence. East elected to ruff with the Knave of Spades but declarer overruffed with the Queen, ruffed the ten of Clubs and led another winning Diamond. East ruffed with the Ace, but declarer discarded his Queen of Clubs and claimed his doubled game.

It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if West had bid the frisky Three Hearts.

North may have been stymied; East may have raised to Four Hearts (to make), silencing South; and North may have tried Five Diamonds (expecting South to be very short in Hearts); East would have doubled and the defence would have taken the first three tricks—Ace-King of Spades and a Spade ruff.

Spectator

M

ANY fishermen have a weakness for the latest tackle, gizmos and ephemera. The Swedish word lagom, meaning ‘just the right amount’, was not coined with the average angler’s rod room in mind, but recent kit trends among game fishers have lowered the tone a bit.

Let me paint you a picture of an example at our local petrol station.

Gigantic 4x4 with knobblies and snorkel exhaust—perhaps for submerging your truck as a casting platform—roof bristling with batterie de pêche, a gazillion rods of every length, blonde in the passenger seat chewing gum and tapping a languid blue fingernail on the chrome wing mirror, himself in aviator shades, baseball cap, faux combats with zips and pockets enough to confound the Artful Dodger. All this to pursue the gentle art of salmon fishing.

What a relief then, to visit the River Ewe with our friend Mr B and know that inside his waders he was wearing simple tweed plus-fours, sober stockings, a checked shirt

Joe Gibbs

The last cast and a jumper. No tie, I’m afraid, but hey-ho. Wielding his rod, we admired his consummate double Spey cast. By the end of the first day, he had grassed a fine 16- and a 14-pounder. He brushed aside our congratulations, ascribing his success to the Ewe Blue, a fly he designed for the river. Call me old fashioned, but I put it down to him being suitably dressed.

The wading on the bouldery bed of the Ewe can be wobbly. Sir Hector Mackenzie, a former proprietor in the 18th century, trained his white horse, Trig, to wade into the pools. Trig became quite interested in the sport and, when he saw the swirl of a salmon or sea trout over the fly, would back steadily to the bank, where Sir Hector would land the fish.

I discovered this too late. I’d left my nag behind, never dreaming it could be part of my fishing paraphernalia. If any future fishing hosts see me rocking up to the lodge with a horsebox in tow, they will know why. History doesn’t record whether Sir Hector was

TOTTERING-BY-GENTLY By Annie Tempest

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 sourced and produced from sustainable managed forests, conforming to strict environmental and socioeconomic standards. The manufacturing paper mill holds full FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certification and accreditation All contents © 2022 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for

158 | Country Life | June 8, 2022

well fortified with a dram, but just possibly he was the origin of that 1970s advertising adage for a wellknown whisky, ‘you can take a White Horse anywhere’.

The recent kit trends among game fishers have lowered the tone We stayed in the fine manse at Poolewe overlooking the river or, as a former inhabitant and man of the cloth might have preferred, frowning upon it. The author of a book on Gairloch, a keen angler himself, he recalled the Victorian occupant of the manse minutely cross-questioning him over lunch on the art of salmon fishing. A day or two later in the kirk, the writer heard his examiner use this information word-for-word to illustrate the wiles of Satan.

Ever since Christ stilled the waters of Galilee, fishing and mortality have been entwined.

Raymond, the Ewe gillie, witnessed a gentleman hook a fish and fight it for minutes before collapsing unconscious in the water. Raymond had to let the rod go, perhaps a shade reluctantly, needing both arms to rescue him.

He performed CPR and revived his charge on the bank who, on coming round, gasped: ‘What about the fish? Get the fish!’ To be brutally honest, that thought had occurred to Raymond, too. Miraculously, the rod had not moved afar and the fish was still attached.

Clasped from behind by his gillie, the fisherman continued the battle, slumped senseless once again, revived and finally landed a 22-pounder. Holding fisherman, net, fish and rod, Raymond took a selfie for the record before returning the monster to the deep. It was the last fish his gentleman caught.

Next week Jason Goodwin

Visit Tottering-By-Gently on our website: www.countrylife.co.uk/tottering

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