CATEGORIES

Ghost town

Many out there believe that the capital's streets, pubs and even hospitals are home to myriad ghosts-a few friendly, some less so. On a walk through some of these supposedly haunted sites, Carla Passino tries to separate fact from fiction

A voyage of discovery

A cruise on the beautiful River Severn offers a unique way to discover the heart of England

The beautiful game

ILLUSTRATING a highly popular activity that paused for a few days earlier this month out of respect for the death of our late Queen Elizabeth II, L. S. Lowry's Going to the Match, painted in 1953, for an exhibition in honour of the Football Association's 90th anniversary, is set to kick-off a few ripples in the art market when it goes under the hammer next month.

My favourite painting Stella loannou

Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going? by Emma Talbot

Aerofilms Collection

by Claude Grahame-White and Francis Lewis Wills

A Cotswold capital

During the Civil War, Oxford briefly became Charles I's capital. Simon Thurley explains how the city was fortified and the university adapted to accommodate the Court

It's time we came back to earth

The excitement over space travel is overblown, says the (terrestrial) explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison. Instead of reaching for the stars, we should be marvelling at and caring for what we already have on our own planet

In search of black magic

After years of decline, English truffle hunting is enjoying an exciting revival. Ben Lerwill heads to the Cotswolds to join the search for this highly prized fungus

Going with the flow

Once the most fertile land on a farm, water meadows are now increasingly valued for the huge diversity of life they sustain, as Natasha Goodfellow discovers on a tour of some of the Cotswolds's best examples

Faking it

Real or faux marble? Amelia Thorpe weighs the pros and cons of the two options

Pure enchantment

The lure of the Cotswolds never wavers, as these five new to the market properties show

Elizabeth the Steadfast

Elizabeth II, Britain's longest-serving monarch, embodied the traditional values of duty, fidelity and constancy throughout her glorious reign, yet always managed to move with the times. Matthew Dennison pays tribute

Rural business to receive helping hand

A NEW Government initiative to boost investment in the rural economy has been welcomed by countryside organisations. CLA president Mark Tufnell describes it as ‘the first steps towards delivering a robust and ambitious plan to create economic growth in the countryside’. Earlier this month,

Proof of a nation's love

IN the hours after the news from Balmoral, I walked through St James’s Park, joining little streams of others converging on Buckingham Palace. Reaching the road, we found many more coming down the Mall.

Athena Cultural Crusader Glasgow's magnificent temple to the Arts

A THENA recently had the good fortune to travel through Glasgow on her way to the Highlands. The city was bustling with life and bathed in sunshine. It was also overwhelmed with rubbish, a consequence of the bin strike, with great ziggurats of boxes, cups and bags stacked up on every street corner.

Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard

Thomas Gray

The majesty of slate

Silenced Welsh quarries evoke a vanishing world

Treasures from South Africa

Clusters of delicate flowers, often in muted colours, will bloom for several months, making tulbaghia an irresistible garden plant, writes John Hoyland

Testing boundaries

We are a nation of hedge lovers-and rightly so-but there are myriad traditional means of dividing land and containing livestock that are both charming and a boon to wildlife. Octavia Pollock reports

Each month of this 125th-anniversary year, COUNTRY LIFE illustrates a period in the development of the English great house. In the ninth of this 12-part series, John Goodall looks at developments during the Regency

ON October 5, 1826, Hermann, Prince of Pückler-Muskau, wrote from London to announce his safe arrival in England. The letter was one in a whole series written to his former wife over a period of three years that described a tour of England,

Neither beautiful nor useful

THE RHS has taken leave of its senses, telling us to share our gardens with slugs, wasps and vine weevils.This is bad news for plants-which are what the RHS is all about and it's not what gardeners want to hear.

Little frizzle and other spooky stories.

Now a thriving tourist spot, the Isle of Mull was once a perilous place to survive-particularly if you stumbled upon its multitude of myths and magic, believes Helen Fields

Sea fever

In the aftermath of civil war, one of the great painters of the New World developed a highly expressive and personal language to explore Man's connection with wild Nature, conflict and race

In the dead of the nightshade

Employed by Roman archers to poison arrows, by emperors' wives to achieve widowhood and by Cleopatra to enhance her beauty, folklore has not exaggerated the fatal tendencies of belladonna

The secret to growing coriander

CORIANDER might be the most global of herbs, bold enough to combine with flavours from lemongrass to chilli in food cultures as diverse as Indian and Mexican.

Field trials

The Prairie at The Barn, Serge Hill, Hertfordshire The home of Mr and Mrs Tom Stuart-Smith

Family affairs

Past grandeurs flourish again at two elegant country houses, one overlooking Blenheim Palace and the other rolling Hampshire parkland

The 21st-century country house

At this month's Focus/22, COUNTRY LIFE will host an event at which interior designer Emma Sims-Hilditch will discuss the changing face of the English country house

Playing with history

A post-Modern livery hall that is a striking home for an ancient company can teach us something about sensitive development in London.

Confessions of a lifetime

The author on the painful memories evoked in his new memoir