CATEGORIES

The roads most travelled

In driving cattle, sheep and geese to market over the centuries, drovers shaped many of the routes we still use today. Gavin Plumley charts their harsh journeys across the country

Ancestral Modernism

Leuchie Walled Garden, East Lothian A home of Sir Hew and Lady Dalrymple A Modernist home created during the 1960s within the walled garden of a historic house stylishly blends the contemporary and the historical.

The Shell Country Alphabet

THE middle decades of the 20th cen-tury were a time of much curiosity about the appearance of Britain, its countryside and townscapes, its landforms and archaeology, as well as contrasts between the regions.

Of Constable and clouds

A walk in the painter’s Suffolk stronghold triggers new appreciation of his depiction of big skies

Can the tide be turned?

SLOWLY, but increasingly surely, Rishi Sunak is pulling back on the forays of his predecessors as he seeks to re-establish his party as a credible force in British politics. He may not succeed, but he has brought a sense of reality to the Government. It isn’t, of course, a quick fix. The spoilers are still in the wings.

A bridge too far for rare gulls

KITTIWAKE nests have been removed from a bridge in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, after concerns that the birds’ excrement was damaging the structure.

Farewell to a giantess of the trade

A selection of the late Jan Finch’s stock at Sworders reflects her wisdom, flair and eclectic taste

Bearing gifts, we traverse afar

Festive entertainment—music, ballet, pantomime— is easy to find at this time of year, but the Christmas opera is a rarer beast, suggests Henrietta Bredin

A remarkable restoration

IN torrential rain and buffeted by vicious cross winds, I drove over the old Severn Bridge into Wales recently to meet Helena Gerrish at High Glanau Manor, her house near Monmouth, originally designed for himself by Henry Avray Tipping.

Trumpet majors

The magnificent new glasshouse display at West Dean, West Sussex, shows why it's time that hippeastrums came in from the cold, says John Hoyland

Welcome to the party

Tired of hiding away the fine cutlery and taking down the family heirlooms? Then where better to entertain than a party barn?

Halfway houses

Two properties could be greater than the sum of their parts with a little investment, as another shows that a ruin is anything but

Putting a barn to work

Transforming a barn into a wedding venue, accommodation—or both— can be a nice little earner, finds Arabella Youens

A room for all reasons

Party barns were once little more than useful venues for large social gatherings, but now, former agricultural buildings are being converted into multifunctional spaces that are transforming rural properties, finds Arabella Youens

Nature's way

THE Michelin-starred chef of Berkshire’s Coworth Park, Adam Smith (formerly of The Ritz), has just opened Coworth’s new restaurant, Woven, and it is outstanding.

Taking the right turn

Joey Richardson's artwork is so exquisite that the Royal Warrant Holders Association asked her to create a gift for the Queen. Serena Shores meets the master craftswoman taking the ancient art of woodturning to new heights Photographs

Fair-feather friends

Come autumn, millions of migrant birds flock to Britain to overwinter here. Stephen Moss charts their gruelling journeys from the Arctic, Scandinavia and Siberia and considers why they are prepared to fly so far

Each month of this 125th-anniversary year, COUNTRY LIFE illustrates a period in the development of the English country house. In the 11th of this 12-part series, John Goodall looks at the early 20th century

ON September 7, 1918, the critic and biographer Lytton Strachey wrote to his cousin Mary Hutchinson from The Bird in the Bush Inn at Elsdon, Northumberland.

The Mousetrap

A DECADE ago, an entry on The Mousetrap in the Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre noted that audiences for the long-running West End phenomenon were said to have consumed more than 395 tons of ice cream and 80,000 gallons of drinks, as backstage staff ironed about 100 miles of shirts.

Show me the way to go home

Plodding home in the gloaming, through a wood stripped bare by November gales, John Lewis-Stempel stumbles across a magical fairy ring of wood-blewit fungi

Littered with snags

ONCE we sign up to litter picking in the countryside, we never get let off. It’s an unending task, in which we soon get to know the worst offenders.

Off balance

RECENT figures that appeared in your magazine (Town & Country, October 26) showed that, off Blakeney Point in Norfolk, grey-seal pup birth numbers were 25 in 2001, a little more than 3,000 in 2019 and predicted to be 4,500 this year. Their main diet is fish and crustaceans.

Castle gates clang shut

NOTTINGHAM CASTLE closed its doors to the public last week, after the trust that manages it fell into liquidation.

From a jester to The King

LAST week, The King visited St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield, London EC1, in anticipation of a major restoration project and the 900th anniversary of the hospital’s foundation.

Beauty in a bridge

THE footbridge that connects the rugged headland of Tintagel, Cornwall, to the mainland, completed in 2019, has won the Building Beauty Awards organised by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust.

Tasty and trustworthy

ATERRIFYING statistic I heard recently is that there are more food banks in this country than McDonald’s,’ says S. J. Hunt, CEO of the Country Food Trust (CFT).

Harrying back

WE might soon see hen harriers circling above the skies of the congested A303 after a conservation breeding scheme was announced by Natural England.

Let there be light and song

WHEN thinking of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, you would be more than forgiven for training your mind to turn on the radio at 3pm on Christmas Eve to hear the soft solo treble of Once in Royal David’s City echo from the lone chorister at King’s College, Cambridge.

No time for sentiment

After shovelling silage and feeding his sheep on a damp October morning, John Lewis-Stempel takes aim at a grey-squirrel drey in a bid to warn off its absent occupants from targeting songbirds

The phoenix rises

London is the centre of all things Eastern and Oriental this week