A most welcome return

An award-winning restoration project has addressed serious structural problems within an important Palladian house and brought it back to life as a modern family home. Oliver Gerrish reports.

Power to the people

Long gone is the Thames-side wasteland– a new neighbourhood is thriving and the transformation of its centrepiece, Battersea Power Station, completes in September

To the point

An echo of a forgotten age, arrowsmith Will Sherman and his mongrel Bodkin spend their days in a Victorian forge surrounded by medieval weaponry. Ben Lerwill pays a visit

‘Sharp in detail, clean in colour'

Known as ‘the boy’ and only 39 when he died on active service in the Second World War, Eric Ravilious had already accomplished so much, thanks to his fastidious eye for mundane detail

This is me

In a bid for immortality, painters through the ages have returned to the face they know best. Yet these self-portraits are not necessarily a window into the artist’s soul, believes Matthew Dennison

In the thick of it

Wading through mud and rueing February for its fickle nature, with frost one day and rain the next, John Lewis-Stempel takes a moment to admire the heron’s ability to keep clean in the mire

Plantaholic heaven

The Coach House, Ampney Crucis, Gloucestershire The garden of Mr and Mrs Nicholas Tanner. It’s no surprise that the garden belonging to the organiser of The Specialist Plant Fairs is filled with very special plants, but it is the way they are displayed that really makes the site distinctive.

By royal example

A grand house ‘practically in the palace gardens’ of Hampton Court and another on the site of a royal hunting lodge in Oxfordshire show how to live the good life

Southdown sheep

ONE of the most charming passages in Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne is his letter to Daines Barrington of December 1773, reflecting on how, despite having travelled the Sussex Downs for more than 30 years, he still investigated ‘that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by year’.

Love or lustre?

Inspired by the East Anglian countryside, a potter, poet and songwriter is reinterpreting shimmering Persian lustreware for the modern age, finds Lucien de Guise

Building on history

Harrow School, London HA1 The property of the Keepers and Governors of the Possessions, Revenues and Goods of the Free Grammar School of John Lyon within the Town of Harrow on the Hill. As the school celebrates its 450th anniversary, John Goodall looks at its early history and principal buildings

Think big

The old advice always used to be to plant small and wait, but recent innovations mean that gardeners can plant outsize trees with confidence, says Charles Quest-Ritson

Three men in a triptych

As children grow into adults in the blink of an eye and with three sons in their twenties, Clive Aslet decided to capture this moment of their youth in a group portrait

Twinkle, twinkle ancient stars

A bronze ‘sky disc’, thought to be the world’s oldest map of the cosmos, is the star attraction of an exhibition about Stonehenge, finds Vicky Liddell

Pure acting

Four mesmerising performances bring works alive

The Eden project

The singer on gardening, climate change and using music to propagate a topic

The bloodhound gang

Far from snoozing on a porch all day, bloodhounds are highly active pack-hunting dogs that require ‘slobber cloths’ when in company, discovers Katy Birchall

Better by design

A house built of Beer stone in Devon has commanding views, as do a cleverly converted Chilterns farmhouse and a Scandinavian style property in prime Shires hunting country

Friends for life

I DON’T accept the old adage ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. I buy books I already own when I see a new edition with a wonderful cover. Then there is the title.

ENGLISH HOMES OLD & NEW Part 2 Lancastrian and Yorkist 1400–85

Each month of this 125th anniversary year, COUNTRY LIFE will illustrate a period in the development of the English great house, from the Middle Ages to the present day. This week, John Goodall looks at the 15th-century home

A lack of common knowledge

Enshrined in law since 1215, commoners’ rights allow the unrestricted grazing of all sorts of livestock–including ducks–that learn to ‘heft’ or ‘lear’ to the land in an ancient farming system that’s now under threat, says Octavia Pollock

A brush with history

A family in Wiltshire has built a 100-year-old empire on brushes for sweeping, scrubbing, cooking and construction, finds Julie Harding

Through the glass starkly

Swamping a building with natural light can create more problems than it solves

St George's, Bloomsbury

IT may seem a contrarian’s choice to pick St George’s, Bloomsbury, London W1, as Nicholas Hawksmoor’s masterpiece ahead of his East End wonder, Christ Church, Spitalfields. The latter, the subject of a high-profile conservation campaign in the 1980s, has been variously described by architectural writers as ‘the grandest’, ‘most stirring’ or ‘stupendous’ of Hawksmoor’s creations.

Lend me your ear(wig)

Once believed to be adept at entering our ears so as to lay eggs in the brain, sending us mad, no creature was more unfairly condemned by its name than the earwig, laments Ian Morton

Seed funding

PEOPLE don’t grow plants from seed as much as they used to. It’s a pity, because this form of propagation is a good way to stock a large garden on the cheap.

Over the hills and far away

Beatrix Potter transcended a lugubrious childhood to emerge as a highly original writer and illustrator, whose cherished characters– inspired by the Nature around her–have more than stood the test of time, believes Matthew Dennison

Nature and food– how to have it all

Caring for the natural environment and food production are not binary activities, says Jamie Blackett, who presents the findings of his research on a thorny subject, the current ‘rewilding’ zeitgeist

International velvet

First woven in Damascus in the late 7th century, sumptuously sensual velvet has long been a trapping of prestige, indulgence and luxury, says Michael Montagu

High art, low behaviour

Works from a roguish 18th-century MP’s Dorset estate far exceed expectations at Lawrences of Crewkerne