This week sees the launch—at a guide price of ‘offers over £5 million’ through Knight Frank in Exeter (01392 848824) —of Grade I-listed Cothay Manor and its magical gardens near Wellington, Somerset, described by Christopher Hussey of COUNTRY LIFE (October 29, 1927) as ‘the most perfect small 15th-century country house that survives in the kingdom’. Looking ‘as though it had been moulded by thick fingers out of the soil’, the manor sits behind its own fishpond among the meadows and woods of the Vale of Taunton, little more than five miles from junction 27 of the M5 motorway.
Hussey attributes Cothay’s survival as a rare, if not unique example of a largely unrestored and unaltered West Country manor of 15thcentury type to ‘its concealment among the deep lanes that wind nowhere in particular from Wellington towards the Devon border’, and to the ‘lightness of healing touch’ of his friend Lt-Col Reginald Cooper, who bought Cothay in 1925, repaired the gatehouse, sympathetically restored the house and laid out the gardens. One of his more ambitious projects was to re-route the River Tone, which washes the western edge of the garden, to save his favourite pine trees from erosion.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 10, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 10, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
