SAM GIBSON, who heads up Scottish agent Galbraith’s new North of England office, based at Hexham (01434 405975), has hit the ground running with the launch onto the market of the ‘wildly romantic’, Grade I-listed Coupland Castle, near Wooler, Northumberland, which is for sale jointly with Strutt & Parker (01670 898711) at a guide price of £1.9 million.
Unseen from any public road, it stands in 25 acres of gardens, paddocks and woodland traversed by the River Glen and adjoining the extensive Lanton estate— an idyllic setting presided over by the rolling Cheviot Hills to the south.
The sale follows the death, in October last year, of antique dealer and restorer Robin Jell, who bought the rambling historic building in 1979 and restored it over the years. He filled its many rooms with antiques and a large collection of pictures painted by his mother, the watercolourist Pauline Konody, and his maternal grandmother Isabel Codrington, who worked in oils—both exhibited widely during the 1920s and 1930s.
Although known as a castle, Coupland is in fact a late tower house, built of softly coloured volcanic rock with buff-sandstone dressings in three or four stages. It was the last fortified building to be constructed on the border in the late 1580s or early 1590s, following the recommendation of a Border Commission that a chain of forts be built to protect the frontier from marauding Scots.
Denne historien er fra January 22, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra January 22, 2020-utgaven av 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.