LIVID flares on the skyline of this stupendous city, as Festival fireworks blaze above Edinburgh Castle.
What an improbably beautiful capital the Scots can boast! We have a Grand Tier view, standing on the balcony of The New Club. (New? Hardly, founded as it was 1787, but it looks crisper than most gents’ clubs, having been remodelled by Reiach and Hall in the 1960s.) The building, of elegantly cantilevered steel and Rubislaw granite, is now Category A-listed, even if its entrance —bang next to Ann Summers —feels like the approach to a Huddersfield snooker hall.
Within, it resembles a modern Oxbridge college: Churchill, perhaps, or St Catherine’s. A few grandees resigned their memberships when the original William Burn premises of 1837 were torn down. However, the lustrous Georgian sideboards, the redisposed oak panelling in the great dining room, the wide-branched silver candelabra, the swagger portraits of the likes of Earl Haig and Charlie Stuart, look, I think, superb against sharp Modernist lines, black leatherette banquettes and ochre-silk wallpaper.
A breathtaking 18th-century tapestry adorns an unplastered fire-brick wall: an enormous neo-Adam stone urn finial, salvaged from the 19th-century building, stands grandly in the sheet-glass antechamber to our eyrie above Princes Street.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة August 29, 2018 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة August 29, 2018 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Tales as old as time
By appointing writers-in-residence to landscape locations, the National Trust is hoping to spark in us a new engagement with our ancient surroundings, finds Richard Smyth
Do the active farmer test
Farming is a profession, not a lifestyle choice’ and, therefore, the Budget is unfair
Night Thoughts by Howard Hodgkin
Charlotte Mullins comments on Moght Thoughts
SOS: save our wild salmon
Jane Wheatley examines the dire situation facing the king of fish
Into the deep
Beneath the crystal-clear, alien world of water lie the great piscean survivors of the Ice Age. The Lake District is a fish-spotter's paradise, reports John Lewis-Stempel
It's alive!
Living, burping and bubbling fermented masses of flour, yeast and water that spawn countless loaves—Emma Hughes charts the rise and rise) of sourdough starters
There's orange gold in them thar fields
A kitchen staple that is easily taken for granted, the carrot is actually an incredibly tricky customer to cultivate that could reduce a grown man to tears, says Sarah Todd
True blues
I HAVE been planting English bluebells. They grow in their millions in the beechwoods that surround us—but not in our own garden. They are, however, a protected species. The law is clear and uncompromising: ‘It is illegal to dig up bluebells or their bulbs from the wild, or to trade or sell wild bluebell bulbs and seeds.’ I have, therefore, had to buy them from a respectable bulb-merchant.
Oh so hip
Stay the hand that itches to deadhead spent roses and you can enjoy their glittering fruits instead, writes John Hoyland
A best kept secret
Oft-forgotten Rutland, England's smallest county, is a 'Notswold' haven deserving of more attention, finds Nicola Venning
