Meet the family leading the psychedelic revolution

Amanda Feilding has been at the forefront of psychedelic science for more than halfa century. Now her sons are

LOOKING at the downstairs loo at Beckley Park - the country pile of the Feilding family and home to the psychedelic research nonprofit The Beckley Foundation - I realise it's a good primer for what's to come. I'm about to have lunch with pioneering drug campaigner Amanda Feilding, 81, and her youngest son Cosmo Feilding-Mellen, 39; between them they run two of the three arms of the Beckley psychedelics empire. Amanda is head of the foundation which for years has sponsored cutting-edge and exploratory research into psychedelic compounds while Cosmo is CEO of Beckley Psytech, a pharmaceutical company developing novel psychedelic therapies to treat mental ill health (the third arm of the empire, Beckley Waves, is a start-up incubator for the psychedelics industry and headed up by Feilding's oldest son, Rock Feilding-Mellen).

On the walls of the loo there are pictures of Amanda with her beloved Birdie, a pigeon she raised from a fledgling, alongside a framed genealogy of the Feilding family (they're descended from Charles II). There's a stack of New Scientist magazines and a bookshelf which features a mix of drug textbooks, books on the nature of consciousness, anthropologies of ancient or mystical religions and a well-thumbed Collected Works of Nietzsche.

Feilding is Countess of Wemyss and March and Beckley Park, set on the edge of Oxfordshire fenland, has been her family's home for centuries. The Tudor hunting lodge has hosted everyone from the Black Prince to Aldous Huxley.