Whenever I drive one of my vintage cars, I make a bet with myself that at the first traffic stop someone will lean out of a modern car and gravely assure me: 'They don’t make them like that any more.' This is undeniably true. But then they also don’t make electric light bulbs or radio sets, or so many other things, like they used to, so why do we car enthusiasts drive — and by choice, in all weathers — cars of such great age?

This is an easy question to ask, but has many answers. For me, the first reason is that I like it. Vintage motoring is fun. Old cars are all characters, some good, some bad, whereas modern cars, with several notable exceptions, do not possess such charisma. Most look alike, many are alike. They are totally bland, suitable for a sanitised society, where to conform is too often considered too important. Cars, like clothes, mirror social and political change.

When the old cars that I prefer were new, the world was a livelier, larger place and the cars made then reflect these characteristics. In addition to such famous makes as Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Bugatti, Delage and Alfa Romeo, there are many others less well known. All have their own personalities, often stemming from the attitudes and outlooks of their entrepreneurial designers and manufacturers.

What motor manufacturer today, for example, would proudly advertise his tiny two-cylinder car as having 'The Pull of an Elephant and the Appetite of a Canary'? Or, in describing its performance, would claim, 'With Spurs, would climb Trees'? Jowett from Yorkshire did for years, and in its day was very successful.

Then there was the enormously long Burney, designed in 1930 by the R100 airship engineer, Sir Dennistoun Burney, with a wheelbase of 13 feet and 5 inches, and an eight-cylinder engine hanging out for several feet beyond the rear wheels. At another extreme, the Trojan ran on solid rubber tyres, powered by an engine lying on its side under the front seat, and behind a bonnet empty except for the petrol tank. And what modern car, even with ABS braking, possesses the style of the mighty American Duesenberg, whose driver could adjust the brakes as he drove with a control marked Dry, Rain, Snow, Ice?

These days, my old-car driving is mainly confined to three cars, in order of seniority: a 1935 Auburn cabriolet, a 1936 Cord roadster (both made by the firm in Indiana which produced the Duesenberg), and a 1937 Jaguar SS100.

The Cord has a coffin-shaped bonnet, blunt as a blue-nosed whale; the sort of car Toad of Toad Hall would have enjoyed. The little SS100, so called because it was made by the SS car company, later Jaguar, and could reach a speed of 100mph, is light-footed as a mountain pony, slightly built and, in the wet, skittish as a trainee ballerina.

No one could deny that the Cord is well made. Clutch and brake pedals move on roller bearings, every nut and bolt is plated, and after 50 years, the body of high-grade metal is still free of rust. It was also the first American car to combine innovations such as retractable headlamps, independent front suspension and an engine and gearbox built on a special frame for easy removal.

The Cord had an integral body, totally soundproofed and without running boards, a built-in radio, rheostat-controlled instrument lighting, variable-speed windscreen wipers, headlamp main-beam warning light, concealed door hinges, and many more examples of ingenuity. But it had — and has — a weakness that neither time nor the expenditure of large sums of money by subsequent owners to experts of various kinds has been able to cure completely. This is its means of changing gear.

As an early front-wheel-drive design, the car has the gearbox laid out in front of the engine and front wheels. Gear changes are made by moving a tiny electric switch in a miniature gate on the steering column. No doubt, this seemed a very good idea at the time, because it did away with any need for complicated mechanical linkages. This switch activates solenoids, to open and close valves controlling vacuum servos, which, in turn, manipulate a lever that actually changes the gears. Many a garage mechanic, contemplating for the first time this nest of magnets, wires, valves, tubes and levers, must have echoed Shelley’s words: 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.'

I have often felt this despair acutely when, after half a century, the solenoids suddenly show their age and I realise with alarm that I cannot engage any gear at all. I coast around roundabouts or across intersections, usually in rush-hour traffic, with irate drivers hooting, my V8 engine racing away, but not transmitting any power whatever to ever more slowly turning wheels. Then, miraculously, energy returns to the stricken vehicle, and the gear changes as slickly as ever.

The Auburn takes its name, not from the colour, but from the town of that name where it was made, and provides another kind of vintage motoring. In contrast to the Cord, it is as temperamental as a superannuated building society clerk. The engine’s eight cylinders fire obediently in line, pistons the size of flower pots pound up and down, and the car’s sheer size metamorphoses even the shortest drive into a stately progression.

An ingenious device, controlled by a small lever in the centre of the steering wheel, enables the driver to change the back axle ratio as he drives. This has the effect of doubling the gears available (six forward gears instead of three) and also enables him to drive long distances without changing gear manually — useful in the conditions for which the Auburn was designed, tooling leisurely along broad American highways under a high mid-Western sun.

The Auburn was intended, after all, for a big country and an unhurried time when in the USA petrol cost less than the equivalent of 2½p per gallon — and in Britain not much more than 5p. At such prices, who but a miser would complain of the speed at which its Carter carburettor drinks the 20 gallons of petrol which the tank contains?

While the SS possesses such a narrow cockpit that driver and passenger sit thigh to thigh, so close together that the doors have cut-away tops so that their right and left elbows respectively can hang outside in the slipstream, the Cord and Auburn have high doors and weigh around 2½ tons. The feeling is of travelling in an open tank. A 4.7-litre engine churns away about 6ft in front of the occupants’ legs and somehow seems totally divorced from the wheels. In all three cars, after a few miles on a warm day, there is a sensation of heat and the constant drone of many mechanical parts all working hard that is, of course, totally absent in a more modern car.

I acquired a Cord more than 20 years ago, after putting an advertisement in the London Evening Standard. This brought a reply from Australia. Apparently, a ship’s engineer who owned the car had bought the paper in Southampton, but did not read it until his ship docked in Sydney. On his return, he sold me my first Cord. I then heard of another that had lain in a shed in Staffordshire for years and bought that and, out of the two, built one.

I liked this car so much that I 'gave' it to a character, Doctor Jason Love, whom I created in a series of adventure novels. When the first, Passport to Oblivion, was filmed, I was asked to hire the car to the studios in Elstree. It lay neglected in the studio garage for months, next to the yellow Rolls-Royce that appeared in the film of that name.

No one heeded my warning that old cars, like old people, can become very crotchety and temperamental if not constantly cared for. Then, the Cord was suddenly required one morning for David Niven, as Doctor Love, and John Le Mesurier, as an intelligence agent, to drive through the winding lanes of Hertfordshire.

A studio employee drove it to the rendezvous, near Aldenham, but the old car was clearly much put out at being summoned so summarily and 'driven without feeling' by a stranger. The battery was flat, the tyres soft, and the engine overheated in protest. To show its total displeasure, it refused to start when the actors were ready. So, just out of camera range, a rope was attached to the front bumper for members of the crew to pull, and I pushed at the rear.

Then, as if to atone for this behaviour, the engine started perfectly and Niven and Le Mesurier drove away in splendid style to the next location.

Here again, temperament prevailed, the radiator boiled and the car stopped in clouds of steam. At this, the director wisely decided to shoot a completely new scene in which this unexpected breakdown had a part to play.

Now every time I see this film on TV — called Where the Spies Are —for reasons never made clear to me, I recall this instance when art imitated not nature, but mechanical mishap.

Since those days, the Cord has been totally rebuilt. In July last year, my eldest son Jeremy and I took it to Brooklands for the annual Reunion of the Brooklands Society, dedicated to keeping fresh the memory and traditions of what was the world’s first — and most famous — purpose-built motor-racing course.

The day was warm and, surprisingly for a Sunday in summer, the roads nearly empty. The big old car bowled along effortlessly. One sits higher up than in a modern car and is able to see over the tops of fences and hedges and the roofs of other cars. The shortest journey thus becomes as important as its purpose, to be enjoyed as an outing for itself, not simply as a means to an end.

Another reason why driving an old car can be rewarding is that something about its appearance, whether it is large or small, brings out the best in other users of the road. Camaraderie between drivers returns — and of course when these cars were new it was customary for motorists approaching each other in cars of the same make to wave a friendly greeting.

Once, I had a puncture, and the feeble jack I had borrowed for the journey from my modern car could not cope with the weight. Other cars stopped, and their drivers offered aid or advice, but the heavy metal defeated them all. Finally, the driver of a passing coach saw the little group of people in the layby with jacks of various types spread about, and instantly assessed the problem.

The driver pulled off the road and produced a huge hydraulic jack that could lift a bus, and once more the Cord was mobile. None of his coach passengers objected to the involuntary stop. They all climbed out and surrounded the car, praising its looks and workmanship. Old cars remind older people of their youth, when they might have owned models of that make. Younger people enjoy seeing examples of individual minds and a pre-computerised age.

While the Cord is a Cunarder among cars, the SS100 provides totally different sensations and reactions. The big car gives an easy, soft ride, but the SS, with its cart springs and shock absorbers set up tightly, feels like riding on a board. If the windscreen is folded flat it provokes such a rush of air that goggles are necessary. Similarly, the wind whips round the side of the screen, even if it is raised, so a leather jacket is a wise precaution. The car has a skimpy aluminium body so that the rear wings can buckle if anyone attempts to push it over the headlamps, and behind the windscreen two cowls that rise like metal breasts to shield the instruments, were not in the best of taste.

A deeper reason for this coolness was that the SS100 could outperform other cars that cost nearly twice as much.

The SS100 reeks of the open road — and, to some, of the open roadhouse — and so in my latest adventure novel, Tank of Serpents (Collins), when I needed to provide a raffish character with a pre-war sports car, I chose this one, which is rather unfair, since I have owned four SS100s and all have given me an enormous amount of fun at very low cost.

Indeed, I can remember being let down by a mechanical failure only once. This was on an unusually hot day, when the engine overheated, causing the condenser in the distributor to lose its ability to condense. I simply coasted off the road, allowed a few minutes for the engine to cool, fitted a replacement condenser, and went on my way.

Spares for vintage cars are rarely a problem. There are clubs for nearly every make, and dozens of small firms make replacement parts. The Vintage Sports Car Club caters for the interests of all vintage car enthusiasts. (By definition, 'vintage' cars refer to those made between 1919 and 1930, so my trio are all post-vintage Thoroughbreds.)

Samuel Johnson wrote that 'a man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected'. By this reasoning, drivers of vintage cars have to be people of resource and resilience, and, in my experience, they are. Our cars come to possess almost human qualities and failings. In essence, they reflect the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the people who built them — and our own. Perhaps this is really the reason why we like them so much?

This article first appeared in the October 16, 1986 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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Momentum is beginning to build for the autumn sales season and the buzz is being amplified by the arrival to the market of a number of distinguished residences that are steeped in history and have fascinating back stories.

Top of that list is Chaddleworth House in west Berkshire, with its Norman connections and racing pedigree, which is for sale for the first time in more than six decades with an asking price of £7 million via James Walker of Knight Frank and Ed Sugden of Savills.

That purchase price buys a Grade II-listed house, set in 31 acres of parkland on the edge of the picturesque small village of Chaddle-worth on the southern slopes of the Berkshire Downs, seven miles south of Wantage and 11 miles north-west of Newbury, within the North Wessex Downs National Landscape.

Chaddleworth is now on the market following the death in July 2026 of its long-term owner, Lady Eliza Mays-Smith, née Guinness, one of heiresses of the great brewing dynasty. Lady Eliza was a lifelong supporter of horse racing, Lady Eliza is probably best remembered for her association with nearby Lambourn, where, for many years, she and her first husband, the late David Nugent, ran the racing town’s famous downland gallops, now owned by Jockey Club Estates.

Approached from the village lane along a sweeping drive that passes by the ancient village church of St Andrew and leads to the south front, Chaddleworth House enjoys wonderful views across a ha-ha to its own parkland with panoramic vistas over the surrounding countryside and the Wroughton Woolley Park estate.

The house sits happily within its gardens, which are well stocked and include a wonderful walled garden, a tennis court and a swimming pool.

Built on a symmetrical, Georgian, four-square plan of grey brick under a slate hipped roof, the main house offers some 11,000sq ft of timeless family accommodation on three floors.

This includes, on the ground floor, a cheerful reception hall, a central stair hall with an elegant cantilever staircase, four principal reception rooms, a large kitchen and various domestic offices.

The principal bedroom suite, three further suites, five further bedrooms and a shower room are on the first floor; and three further bedrooms, a bathroom and attic are on the second.

Additional accommodation is provided in the four-bedroom garage annexe and the 18th-century former coach house and stable block.

Chaddleworth House stands on land granted by William the Conqueror to Robert D’Oyley, a Norman nobleman and landowner from Ouilly, near Lisieux, who took part in the Norman Conquest and eventually held no fewer than 36 Domesday manors across six counties.

According to David Nash Ford’s Royal Berkshire History, for much of the Middle Ages the manor of Chaddleworth was held by Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, which was granted the lands in 1284 by Henry II’s consort, Queen Eleanor, as a token of support for Eleanor of Brittany, who was one of the nuns.

After the Dissolution, the manor eventually passed to William Nelson, a successful government lawyer, whose family was to own it for more than 250 years.

The present Chaddleworth House was built between 1809 and 1811 by George Kerr Nelson, whose son sold the manor estate to the Wroughton family of nearby Woolley Park, another racing dynasty, many of whom were lord lieutenants of the county.

Chaddleworth House is for sale via Knight Frank and Savills.

'Unmitigated England’/Came swinging down the line/That day the February sun/Did crisp and crystal shine’, rejoiced Sir John Betjeman in Great Central Railway, Sheffield Victoria to Banbury as he rode the ‘trail of glory’ of the Victorians’ last mainline railway.

For writers such as Betjeman, railways — especially steam engines — have offered endless inspiration. Pioneered by the British, they denote national pride and nostalgia, as well as providing the perfect metaphor for the narrative journey. David Lean’s 1945 film adaptation of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter delivered one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history when Trevor Howard removed the grit from Celia Johnson’s eye. The railway station where they meet, and where Howard’s character departs by train, marks the beginning and the end of the story and their short, but tender affair.

Train journeys make terrific plot devices. Together with the jeopardy of missing a stop and arriving somewhere unexpected, they are also a place to encounter strangers. A train supplies a cast of characters in a series of rooms, each with a different motive for travel, which is partly why Agatha Christie’s 1934 classic murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express works so splendidly, spawning numerous adaptations with star-studded casts. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, an avalanche strands the rail passengers, cleverly containing the drama. The film stars Margaret Lockwood as socialite Iris Henderson, whose carriage companion, the elderly governess Miss Froy, disappears, prompting Henderson to question everything and everyone around her, as well as her own sanity.

In film and literature, railway travel means leaving the past behind and embarking on something new. For the excited young wizards of J. K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, waiting for the Hogwarts Express at London King’s Cross station, it’s the start of a new term that promises adventure. Yet boarding the school train, we learn, requires a leap of faith: ‘The tricky part was getting onto platform 9¾, which wasn’t visible to the Muggle [non-wizard] eye. What you had to do was walk through the solid barrier dividing platforms nine and 10. It didn’t hurt, but it had to be done carefully so that none of the Muggles noticed you vanishing.’

Rail travel is about possibilities. ‘In between the stations, things flitted past so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it,’ writes C. S. Lewis in the 1945 sci-fi novel, That Hideous Strength. A similar feeling is imparted in Edward Thomas’s celebrated 1915 poem Adlestrop, with its surprisingly lovely unscheduled train stop in the Cotswolds. ‘Yes. I remember Adlestrop,’ he begins wistfully, recalling its ‘willows, willow-herb, and grass,/And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry’, and the blackbird who serenaded the passengers pausing there.

By contrast, Dickens, writing at a time of rapid rail expansion, conveys the railway’s irrepressible force. ‘Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped… enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up,’ reads his 1848 novel Dombey and Son. ‘In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.’

The steam engine’s unprecedented power is also emphasised in the galloping meter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 children’s poem From a Railway Carriage, which describes it, with more wonder than fear, ‘charging along like troops in a battle,/All through the meadows of horses and cattle’.

By the turn of the century, the railway was often cast as something heartwarming and familiar. In E. Nesbit’s 1906 novel The Railway Children, and its 1970 film adaptation, watching the trains and talking to the railway staff distracts the children from the sadness of being separated from their father. One special train, the Green Dragon, travelling to London, where they last saw him, symbolises the hope of being reunited. ‘Why don’t we ask the next train to take our love to Daddy?’ suggests Phyllis, the youngest child, in a poignant moment in the film.

Sometimes the railway station is associated with beloved characters, such as Paddington Bear, and sometimes the locomotives themselves are the characters — the cheerful Thomas and haughty Gordon in Revd W. V. Awdry’s ‘The Railway Series’ books, for example — whose displays of strength and speed to demonstrate that they are ‘Really Useful Engines’ invariably end in disaster.

‘I don’t think it’s the speed that matters,’ stresses Betjeman in the 1970 documentary Railways For Ever!. ‘It’s the release from tension; the thrill of seeing real country… And for some of us, there will always remain memories of the hiss of steam, the sudden roar, the triumphant scream of the whistle, smuts, and the grimy majesty of the whole thing.'

This feature originally appeared in the December 24, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

One a track on a farm somewhere in Ireland, Florence leans against the steering wheel. Soft breezes from the car’s open windows ruffle her ears. It’s summer and the sun is shining. Florence, I learn, ‘loves to drive’.

A self-possessed, well-muscled, prepossessing little six year old, she is the smooth-haired miniature dachshund belonging to Lady Ana Johnson, only daughter of the late last Earl of Dunraven, and once in a while, away from public roads — and to her considerable delight — she sits on her owner’s lap as they crisscross the fields by car.

In Britain, miniature dachshunds — both long- and, like Florence, smooth-haired — are currently one of the nation’s favourite dog breeds: between 2014 and 2024, puppy registrations for long-haired miniature dachshunds quadrupled. In Ireland, too, their popularity is growing. For Lady Ana, the decision had nothing to do with trends: ‘As a child, growing up in a classic Jack-Russell-sheep-dog family, I always wanted to have a sausage dog.’

Florence, who was born during the pandemic, is Lady Ana’s second, but certainly won’t be her last. ‘I hope I’ll always have miniature dachshunds,’ she reflects. ‘I see myself at 85 surrounded by a little pack of them. They’re incredibly loyal: I’ve never had such loyal dogs as these.’

Dapple patterned in colouring, Florence’s tiger stripes, her fond owner suggests, ‘are not terribly obvious, although perhaps more obvious the more rosé you consume.’ She is named after a character in children’s television programme The Magic Roundabout, as was her predecessor, Zebedee, and is stoutly adored both by Lady Ana and her 11- and nine-year-old daughters.

Florence is not alone in inspiring passionate attachment in her human. Across the country, dachshund owners feel the same overwhelming enthusiasm for the German origin breed popularised two centuries ago by Queen Victoria, who once claimed of the short-legged, big-bark dogs that ‘nothing will turn a man’s home into a castle more quickly and effectively than a dachshund’.

‘They’re good, plucky little dogs, very brave, very sporting, very friendl y —and they’re huge characters,’ observes Jonathan Reeves, who, in his late eighties, recently acquired a black-and-tan, smooth-haired miniature dachshund puppy called Polly. Reeves ought to know. A great-nephew of Maj Claude Jarvis— t he former Governor of Sinai, who wrote a long-running Country Life column, ‘A Countryman’s Notes’, Reeves had his first dachshund as a small boy during the Second World War and, alongside working cocker spaniels and springers, has owned a succession of others over the following eight decades.

He admires their loyalty, their ‘great endurance’ and intelligence; he enjoys their love of country life and their concern for their own comfort: ‘They love Agas.’

The dachshund may well be the most instantly recognisable dog breed in the world, with its distinctive, elongated silhouette — which accounts for its soubriquet of ‘sausage dog’ — and distinguished, fine-featured head with almond-shaped eyes, black nose and long, silky ears. Typically, they have pretty faces, gleaming coats, a long stride and a determined sense of purpose.

In the early 1890s, novelist Henry James commended the ‘beautiful countenance’ of his dachshund Tosca (he was also rumoured to have claimed that she was ‘intelligent enough to be shocked’ by the suggestion that American women possessed less sex appeal than their European counterparts).

The dogs’ long bodies made them suited to their earliest working purpose: dachshund means ‘badger dog’ and these fearless, strongbodied little creatures were once used by German foresters to hunt badgers in their setts.

Unsurprisingly, this fearsome heritage made for a breed characterised by bravery and tenacity. Even today, dachshunds tend to appoint themselves guard dogs in any home they inhabit. Few well-cared-for, properly trained modern examples, however, inspire the reaction of Wadl and Hexl, who belonged to Wilhelm II early in the last century: the Kaiser’s dogs were described as ‘biting, snarling little brutes with jaws measuring half the length of their smooth bodies’.

By contrast, in August 1904, James described Tosca’s successor Max as ‘the best and gentlest and most reasonable… small animal of his kind’ and allowed the dog to sleep in his own favourite armchair at Lamb House, his home in Rye, East Sussex.

A century on, charm remains a byword for the dachshund. A smooth-haired miniature called Mouse, belonging to Clare Durdin Robertson, chatelaine of Huntington Castle in Co Carlow, Ireland, numbered the actor Rupert Everett among her conquests.

Queen Victoria’s first dachshund arrived at Windsor Castle in about 1841, but it was Deckel, brought over from Coburg by Prince Albert four years later, who really converted the redoubtable monarch; her attachment was only eclipsed half a century later, by another German breed, the Pomeranian.

Television producer Olivia McPartland-Brooke describes her wire-haired miniature dachshund Dot, a four year old with melting dark eyes and a characteristic grey-and-tansplashed rough coat, simply as ‘miraculous’: ‘I love the energy, I love the attitude.’ Like Florence and the many dachshunds owned by Reeves, Dot is at the centre of her mistress’s life. Lady Ana describes Florence as ‘by my side the entire time’. Dot went a step further and was one of McPartland- Brooke’s bridesmaids, accompanying her down the aisle on a pristine white lead terminating in a ribbon rosette.

In Britain and North America, dachshunds are recognised in two sizes — standard and miniature — and three coat types: smooth-, long- and wire-haired. Distinct in aspects of their appearance, all share the same extended, muscular body, short, powerful legs, long tail and large front paws, as well as their long, engaging, invariably animated faces.

Dachshunds share character traits, too: their curiosity, cheerful busyness and, in many instances, a streak of stubbornness. McPartland-Brooke is unsure if ‘curious’ adequately summarises Dot who, on Clapham Common, ‘needs to say hello to everyone as if she’s in her own garden’ and is impossible to take for a quick walk because ‘she’s too chatty, she wants to talk to everyone she meets’ — ‘nosy’ is perhaps more apt.

In towns and cities, in villages and on farms, the behaviour of the dachshund continues to suggest its working origins, even where there are no badgers to be seen. ‘They’re definitely little hounds rather than terriers,’ Reeves believes. ‘They use their noses a lot to track scents for a very long way.’ The Kennel Club labels the dachshund a ‘persevering hunter and tracker’ and paintings of the breed by canine artists such as Maud Earl, Frances Mabel Hollams and Friedrick Wilhelm Keyl frequently emphasise the dogs’ musculature, their broad shoulders and alert gaze.

Unlike other short-legged dogs, a dachshund’s body is clear of the ground, suggesting its practical backstory. Often, only water stops them in their tracks, although many owners have been surprised by an unexpected willingness to ford shallow pools or streams.

Loyal themselves, this is a breed that inspires loyalty. Dot followed an earlier dachshund called Daisy, owned by McPartland- Brooke’s parents, whom she loved as a child; Reeves has remained dedicated to the breed his parents first acquired in the 1930s, despite his need, in adult life, for a larger working dog; and Lady Ana can imagine both her daughters owning dachshunds as adults. Why? ‘Dot is perfection!’ exclaims McPartland-Brooke. ‘She’s a lot of fun, she has no anxiety whatsoever, she’s very positive, she loves a cuddle and, really, she’s a bit of a joy.’ As for Florence, adds Lada Ana: ‘When she’s really, really happy, she howls.’

As with any pet, potential owners should exercise vigilance. Their long backs make dachshunds vulnerable to problems, including intervertebral disc disease (IVDD), which can be costly (and very difficult) to treat. Responsible breeders do their best to minimise the likelihood of IVDD by screening and active dogs that remain fit and well muscled often suffer fewer problems than their sedentary cousins or those that jump unnecessarily.

Is this a reason to look elsewhere, at other breeds? None of the owners to whom I spoke believe so. In 80 years, Reeves has had a single dachshund with IVDD and Lady Ana suggests that exercise keeps the back muscles taut and helps to prevent problems. ‘They’re really jolly, good little dogs,’ Reeves assures me. Can we doubt him?

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If you’ve ever owned or been owned by a cat you’ll know that they like to loll in the most inconvenient places (on top of laptop keyboards in the middle of a high-pressure meeting, for example) and refuse to move until they, and only they, are ready.

The same feline stubbornness was rumoured to have greeted Victorian visitors to the country estate of Murray Edward Gordon Finch-Hatton, 12th Earl of Winchilsea and 7th Earl of Nottingham.

In the drawing room, guests would often be greeted by the Earl’s pet lion lounging on the sofa — he picked it up while touring Egypt. Anyone for tea? Or should that be does anyone want to be the tea?

Haverholme Priory was consecrated in 1139 as a rare Gilbertine monastery — a uniquely English medieval order which allowed nuns and canons to commune under the same roof. In 1164, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was said to have sought refuge at the property after falling out with Henry II for the umpteenth time.

It took six more years for the then King to rid himself of Becket, and six more Henry's until Haverholme Priory's life as a monastic retreat came to an equally abrupt end.

In 1539, when Henry VIII forced the Gilbertines to relinquish the land they’d drained and tended and made habitable for four centuries, Haverholme was first handed to Lord Clinton and then to a succession of different families.

When Country Life was invited to pay a visit in the early years of the more genteel Edwardian era, the house had been in the possession of the Finch-Hatton’s — or the Earls of Winchilsea and Nottingham — since 1831.

This family was responsible for a series of huge renovations, including extensions constructed with local Ancaster stone. Now a 30-bedroom, four reception room mansion with a wrap-around terrace, Haverholme also boasted 70 cottages, small farms, a pub and 800 acres of woodland and a heronry.

The lion wasn't even the weirdest bit. In the garden, an array of presumably, Gilbertine monk’s coffins studded the lawn. And it is reported that, from time to time, the ghostly footsteps of monks and nuns could still be heard on the chipped stone terraces.

The lion-owning 12th Earl died aged 47 in 1898 (the big cat was, at some point, gifted to a zoological society), just two years after he inaugurated the first-ever London to Brighton car run. He had also, to his great credit, formed the National Agricultural Union which campaigned for better rights for all agricultural workers. His widow, Lady Edith, remained at Haverholme.

He was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Henry Stormont Finch Hatton, the father of Denys Finch-Hatton of Out of Africa fame, and Haverholme's last owner.

By 1921, the post-war depression had put a massive strain on the family's finances, so the 13th Earl took the decision to sell the priory in order to preserve some of his other ventures. Unsurprisingly, Haverholme lingered on the market. In fact, it lingered on it for a very long time.

Five years later, the Earl had to sell off the estate in individual lots — the priory sold to a demolition company.

On November 13 of the same year, Country Life broke the news that all of the estate's deer had been culled, the woods felled and the heronry — heron's nest on the same site, every year — destroyed.

The conservatory was sold for £23 (£1,747 in 2026), a porch fetched £28 (£1,529) and the tower clock, which ended up in St Edith’s Church in nearby Anwick, made £25 (£1,365). Adverts for the 'CHEAP' Ancaster stone balustrades and Tudor chimneys appeared inside the magazine.

In 1927, a 52-year-old woman, Edith Fernie, was killed by a train at a level crossing. She was in the process of building herself a new home at Woodhall in Lincolnshire and was hoping to use a large quantity of Haverholme's Ancaster stone and ornamental gate. Rumour has it the now spare stone was used to fill in some holes in Liverpool's Docks.

A very small, ruined portion of the priory still stands in a field to this day.

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Cornwall — £3,200,000

The dream for any keen sailor is a house where you can walk to the end of the garden and get straight on to the water. And that's the exact experience you'd have if you moved to The Garden House, on the edge of Polruan-by-Fowey.

This handsome, stone-built property has much to shout about: a commanding position, spectacular views, period features and an acre of mature gardens.

Its standout feature, though, is that direct access to the popular sailing waters of the Fowey Estuary.

Stone steps lead down from the garden to a sandy beach — an idyllic launch pad for adventures on the estuary and beyond. It’s hardly surprising that the owners have held onto the Garden House for three decades.

For sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details and pictures

Gloucestershire — £2,500,000

You don’t have to head to the coast to set sail. Instead, why not make a beeline for the Cotswold Lakes, a collection of more than 180 lakes just south of the Cotswolds National Landscape, where there’s plenty of scope for sailing and other watersports.

The aptly-named Boathouse is one of six properties on The Peninsula, an enclave on the shores of the 114-acre Landings Lake. The New England-style property comes with its own private jetty, which means you can be out on the water in a jiffy.

If you want to get stuck into the local sailing scene, South Cerney Sailing Club is just around the corner. There’s a lot on offer on dry land too, with a brasserie, gym, tennis courts, and various trails nearby.

Life at the Boathouse seems to be about as close to plain sailing as it can get.

For sale via By Design — see more details and pictures

Cumbria — £2,750,000

When it comes to sailing hotspots, the south coast tends to steal the limelight. But here is a compelling case for casting the net wider.

This Arts and Crafts house is tucked away on a private lane just 200 metres from Lake Windermere, where there are watersports galore. According to the selling agent, Finest Properties, Watermead occupies ‘one of the area’s most tightly-held addresses’ — and it’s easy to see why.

It’s a tremendous spot, framed by the mountains of the beautiful Lake District National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

After a day spent on the water, where better to kick back and relax than on that two-tier deck with a vista of England's largest lake?

For sale via Finest Properties — see more details and pictures

Dorset — £9,500,000

If you want to make a splash, this newly-built house on the waterfront at Christchurch Harbour takes some beating.

Known as The Slipway, it has everything a keen sailor could want to get onto the water fast: a slipway, jetty and pontoon. The property comes with a ‘significant’ chunk of the foreshore too — ideal for mooring multiple boats up to 50ft, according to selling agent, Knight Frank.

The house itself is very smart indeed, all clean lines and floor-to-ceiling glazing — you’ll need a good window cleaner on speed dial.

One really lovely feature is the number of bedrooms with balconies, which make the most of the far-reaching views of Mudeford, the Needles at the Isle of Wight, and Studland in the distance.

Being a new build, its energy-efficiency is also something to write home about: it has an EPC rating of A.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures

Cornwall — £7,500,000

Another strong contender for the ‘make a splash’ category is this ‘modern masterpiece’ (to quote selling agent, Savills) on the Pendennis Headland.

It boasts an incredible location, with the sheltered waters of the Carrick Roads on one side and the open sea on the other. Behind it sits Falmouth, where there’s plenty of watersports on tap. And did I mention the steps that lead down to the secluded beach?

Inside, the spec is, as you might imagine, impressive. To pick out a few highlights: floor-to-ceiling glazing (and you would, with a view like that), a double-height reception and dining area, a dual-aspect main bedroom with a balcony, bathroom and dressing room, and a leisure, wellness and cinema space.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures

As summer travellers return home from their final trip to Europe, the conversation has shifted once more in favour of the continent. What is it that we love about it? The pace of life? The food? Density of attractive people?

I would like to submit a more left-field answer: the signage. The street names, shopfronts and various insignia decked out in sexy font and sexier colours: streets full of mom-and-pop eateries emblazoned with Art Nouveau typeface.

Hey: that's just me. Or is it? Branding, whether corporate or personal, has become one of life’s key success indicators. In today’s hypervisual culture, a company’s choice of font (for its logo, copy or storefront, say) can easily make or break it.

Imagine, then, the fury incurred by Britain’s luxury cigar retailers when they found out about a provision in the Government’s Tobacco and Vapes Act (in consultation until October 2) that would mandate plain packaging for all tobacco products. This means, in essence, that the same font and pictures of mangled feet found on a pack of Benson & Hedges could soon appear in lieu of Cuban crests on a case of Montecristos.

Anti-branding of the sort would unwittingly dissolve the distinctions between handmade and mass-market cigars — which, per Jimmy McGhee, commercial manager of tobacco merchant James J. Fox, ‘is like putting a bottle of Château Yquem 2015 into the same bottle as a Blossom Hill’. In doing so, the Government is betting on the notion that Cohibas (‘the Macallan of cigars’) are often indulged purely for show — and that an inability to be seen ordering these will be, for many, enough of a deterrent.

It’s fair to think about the benefits — for one thing, it might keep the posers at bay — but Jimmy notes that modern packaging, which is likely to be cardboard, will be fatal to the cigars themselves. ‘Traditional boxes are about more than branding,’ he remarks. ‘They are lined with Spanish cedar, which allows the tobacco to breathe, whereas cardboard is more porous and absorbs more moisture.’

Benevolent observers might congratulate the Government for seeing through its commitment to fighting carcinogenics. Those more cynical, however, will note that cigars are not the same as cigarettes (only one of them is chain-smoked) and that we would do well to address more rampant problems, such as vapes. (The Act's provisions for the latter are as follows: vape adverts banned by June 2027, free samples abolished and no more sale of the item via vending machines by October 29, 2029.)

They will also observe that replacing traditional cigar packaging comes with additional risks. The labels appearing on boxes at the top end of the market, for instance, tend to incorporate hidden micro-printing and UV-fluorescent inks for authentication. ‘The provision is a counterfeiter’s dream,’ Jimmy quips.

It also betrays the state's attempt to muscle into a cultural vogue for homogenisation. So much of modern life is built on sameness: the same cars; the same interiors; the same cosmetic surgeries. I ask you, whether smoker or not: is that really what we want? Also, some of us like the smell. Just leave this one alone, please.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The celestial scoring system of the Michelin Guide currently anoints more than 3,700 restaurants, beacons of light that stretch from New Zealand to the Faroe Islands. Yet, before it became a universal blueprint, the guide served as a bible to specifically French petrolheads, recommending hotels and service stations along the Hexagon’s main motorways to spur car travel and, indirectly, tyre sales for its parent company.

The guide dished out one star to the restaurants worth making a stop for; two stars to those that might warrant a detour; and three to those that served as a destination in their own right. What began as a bit of PR for the automobile industry eventually morphed into the definitive anthology of taste. Thus it is that the destiny of global gastronomy is inextricably tied to that of the motorway — an odd analogy to the British, whose experience of stopping for lunch on the road might, at best, involve a Nando’s.

Compare this with France, where the country’s best roast chicken — according to chef Heston Blumenthal — is found at the Aire du Poulet de Bresse service station just off the A39 near Dijon and a dismal picture of our sceptred isle begins to form. Although British cuisine has come on in leaps and bounds since the first crop of maverick chefs took over our kitchens in the 1980s, their spirit has not extended to the diners that line our own cross-country motorways. These are prosaic, unmodernised spaces, dotted here and there by the airs of routine, where a mini M&S might offer a reprieve from fast-food.

Britain’s top service stations

Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire M40, Junction 2

The service station with the UK’s broadest range of retail outlets, 16 in total (12 eateries). Nearby attractions include the oldest surviving model village in the UK, Bekonscot, which welcomes upwards of 150,000 visitors per annum

Gloucester M5, between Junctions 11A and 12

Britain’s most elegant service station — constructed from Cotswold dry-stone walls and sustainably harvested ash stems from the Forest of Dean — serves 1.6 million hot drinks each year, including 1.1 million coffees

Lancaster M6, between Junctions 32 and 33

Designed by Bill Galloway and Ray Anderson, the juxtaposition of low-rise buildings with the now Grade II-listed Pennine Tower harks back to the golden age of driving. This was once the site of a restaurant serving steak and lobster, although that has since shut down. Lancaster also serves 900,000 hot drinks every year

Tebay, Cumbria M6, between Junctions 38 and 39

Serving 1.1 million hot drinks (including 836,000 coffees) every year, together with 287,000 pies and sausage rolls and 60,000 portions of fish and chips, this famous gateway to the Lake District is strongly committed to the local environment, with a well-frequented duck pond, on-site farm, dog walks and water and a pledge to plant 3,000 trees to establish wildlife corridors

Cairn Lodge, Lanarkshire M74, between Junctions 11 and 12

This most recent addition to the Dunning empire is accessed via a medieval fortress. The gateway to the Highlands is wildly popular, selling 836,000 hot drinks, including 255,000 coffees, every year

For some, the service station is a symbol of civilisational decline — a cultural no man’s land that typifies the UK’s woes and inequities. It wasn’t always the case: our oldest station, now known as Watford Gap Services, but first opened as Blue Boar in 1959, was a meeting point for rock-and-roll royalty: Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the Beatles were known to frequent its 24-hour café. For others, it feels akin to a time warp: somewhere that hasn’t been upgraded since the 1960s. The absence of a decent meal is far from the only grievance: other amenities that seem basic to other countries are often lacking here.

The loos, perhaps the only area in which Britain’s service stations outperform those on the Continent, are only slightly more salubrious than those on the Greek islands. ‘I think, in general, that they are all awful,’ laments author and conservationist Charles Rangeley-Wilson. ‘We’d do the world a favour by reverting to the habits of yesteryear and seeking out local cafés and garages in villages off the main route.’ ‘I don’t stop at service stations anymore,’ concurs Rosie Paterson, Country Life’s Travel Editor. ‘The average rural restaurant has improved so exponentially in the past decade that there is really no need to go via a service station, except to refuel and, perhaps, grab a Diet Coke.’

Yet rerouting via a village for a pit stop can be tricky. ‘It sometimes feels as if our motorways are designed to entrap,’ says Nicole Maslen, a producer at Goalhanger Podcasts who often travels for work. ‘We also lack awareness of local alternatives, having never benefitted from a dedicated guide the way that France has.’ The numbers, nonetheless, suggest that service stations remain immensely popular. Moto, the UK’s largest operator, records an average of more than 120 million visits from drivers every year. The same reasons to hate the service station are, for some, the reasons to love them.

‘Everyone has a favourite,’ notes Tabitha Steemson, a manager at CT Group, ‘and I love mine precisely because it is a bit s***.’ Her culprit is Leigh Delamere, of Gavin & Stacey fame — among the largest service stations in Europe and one of the many operated by Moto. It sits on the M4 between Junctions 17 and 18, near Chippenham, Wiltshire. Such a service station’s appeal is associative: a necessary evil en route to making memories.

There are, nonetheless, some green flags to look out for. ‘Take the Red Lion Truck Stop off the M1 near Northampton,’ points out motoring correspondent Adam Hay-Nicholls. ‘I was always taught by my father that lorries were an indication of a decent brekkie — and that is pertinent here.’ The service station is also somewhere we return out of loyalty for the familiar. ‘You know my favourite,’ says my friend Claudia Everest-Phillips, a paralegal and amateur artist. I do: it’s the beloved Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where we have often stopped when travelling to and from the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire.

The most popular service stations in the country have gentrified themselves in order to improve. When the M6 was built in the 1960s, slicing through land belonging to the Dunning family in Cumbria, its proprietors decided to open a service station that has grown, since 1972, into a beacon of the British road. Tebay Services offers none of the trappings found among its peers: no fast food, no slot machines, no unsanitised massage chairs. Instead, it has farm shops, selling produce that comes from Dunning-owned fields and other local growers. An accompanying hotel and caravan park have since been opened.

‘We were the UK’s first family-run motorway service area,’ Sarah Dunning says, ‘a friendly refuge sheltered behind a plantation of Scots pines from the sound and fury of the motorway.’ The food was — and is still — simple and local, served in a 40-seat restaurant next to a small shop selling crafts, as well as drivers’ essentials. The model worked. In 1992, the Dunnings opened a southbound station on the same site and have since expanded to other parts of the country.

Further stations were launched, in Gloucestershire in 2014 and at Cairn Lodge, Lanarkshire, in 2019 (on a site acquired from the MacInnes family). ‘Drivers will re-route journeys to go via Tebay,’ observes author and editor Simon Mills. ‘It’s like a pilgrimage. They show up with their hampers and their tote bags and load up their Rovers as if it’s the weekly shop. Come to think of it, for some, it might be.’

Britain’s worst service stations

Fleet, Hampshire M3, between junctions 4A and 5

Primary grievances: State of loos (avoid at all costs after Glastonbury) and the price of fuel

Thurrock, Essex M25, between junctions 30 and 31

Primary grievances: Awful shower queues and anecdotal reports of food poisoning

Rownhams, Hampshire M27, between junctions 3 and 4

Primary grievances: That the space is ‘packed with utter goblins’ and the apathetic McDonald’s staff

Bridgwater, Somerset M5, junction 24

Primary grievances: State of loos. Has a multi-storey car park despite being, by some accounts, ‘the size of a garden shed’

Heston, London M4, between junctions 2 and 3

Primary grievances: Conditions that have been described as both ‘cramped’ and ‘post-apocalyptic’. Harsh lighting

As overall standards improve, so do expectations: today, one in five drivers will make a point of avoiding certain service stations because they are deemed unsuitable (according to www.confused.com), in the same way that many will add their preferred service station as a deliberate stop. However, it’s more than the quality of produce and service that draws motorists, again and again, to the holy trinity that is Tebay-Gloucester-Cairn.

‘The idea [behind expanding to the Gloucestershire site] was born in 2007,’ Dunning explains, ‘when conversations began on the Matson housing estate [on the edge of the city of Gloucester] about how the M5 motorway could become an asset for the local community, creating jobs and generating sustainable income.’ Today, the Farmshop and Kitchen work with more than 130 local producers within a 30-mile radius, alongside a further 70 producers from across the South-West.

The service-station edifice itself has also proved inspirational to photographers and artists, such as the American realist painter Edward Hopper, since the early days of motoring. ‘Quite why this is is hard to pin down,’ states Philip Butler, a photographer whose anthology, 226 Garages and Service Stations, was published in September last year. ‘It started in the USA, where gas stations might be the only structure on a highway for miles — and the little illuminated outposts were considered to be a safe haven on a seemingly endless journey.’

Architectural historians may find more to love if they go further back. ‘The Texaco in East Sheen, London SW14, is a rare example of a 1920s filling station still in daily use,’ notes Butler . ‘For the Art Deco lover, the Clock Garage, now a Kwik Fit in Woodville, Derbyshire, is one of the best preserved 1930s sites.’ One in Worcestershire might look at home on the @accidentallywesanderson Instagram account, owing to its soothing symmetry: the Regal Garage in Upton upon Severn. Service stations are also ‘a symbol of escapism and the romance of the open road,’ Butler says.

For philosopher Alain de Botton, the service station shares a poetic language with the airport and train carriage. ‘In spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts,’ he wrote in 2002’s The Art of Travel, ‘we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.’

It is a profound, and no doubt truthful, statement, although it helps if the services in question offer more than a Starbucks.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Northamptonshire — £2.85 million

A magical medieval house dating back to the 15th century, largely rebuilt in the 19th century, and wonderfully restored and designed for the 21st century.

For sale via Michael Graham — see more details and pictures.

Cheshire — £4.75 million

A hugely spacious, recently-built home in an unspoilt rural setting in Cheshire.

Six bedrooms, almost 10,000 sq ft of space, landscaped gardens, and a separarate leisure suite that includes indoor pool, gym and sauna.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Kent — £4.95 million

Tinley Lodge is set in just over eight acres of land that include a Japanese garden, paddocks and a pond with its own pontoon. The house itself is elegant and clean in design inside, with six bedrooms and over 6,000 sq ft of space — all in a home that's easily commutable to London.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

Surrey — £2.625 million

In the leafy Surrey Hills near Churt, Gorse Cottage is an eight-bedroom home in a secluded, two-acre pot near Frensham Great Pond.

For sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details and pictures.

Sutherland — £7.5 million

One of the great Scottish estates is for sale. Morvich takes in almost 5,000 acres of the Highlands, and has a wonderful, Grade B-listed, seven-bedroom principal house at the centre.

For sale via Galbraith — see more details and pictures.

Sussex — £1.65 million

This Grade II-listed Georgian rectory in Seaford has a wonderfully private plot, elegant balcony and a 13th century brewhouse cottage in the grounds.

For sale via Bees Homes via OnTheMarket — see more details and pictures.

At about 2pm on August 25, 1769, two Irish MPs, James Agar and Henry Flood, rivals for the control of the parliamentary borough of Callan, Co Kilkenny, met to fight a duel at Dunmore Park just north of the city of Kilkenny. Having discharged his pistol first and missed, Agar called out to his opponent: ‘Fire, you scoundrel.’ Flood shot him dead, the bullet — according to newspaper reports — piercing his left breast. This encounter between two well-known figures became notorious and seems to have encouraged the practice of duelling in Ireland, which remained common well into the 19th century. For present purposes, however, it also introduces both the social circle that created Dangan Cottage and the political context that shaped it.

Flood’s second for this bloody encounter was Gervase Parker Bushe, then High Sheriff of Kilkenny. The previous year, in February 1768, Bushe had married Mary, the real focus of our story and to whom we will return. She was the daughter of the Recorder of Dublin and the sister of a young man then training for the bar, Henry Grattan. Flood, Bushe and Henry Grattan, in other words, were well known to one another.

They all came of prosperous Protestant stock and, to different degrees, were politically active by the mid 1760s in the Irish Patriot cause. This sought the reform of the Irish parliament in Dublin and to secure recognition of the political integrity and interests of Ireland. Their cause responded to the American and French Revolutions and was overthrown by the events of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland and the Act of Union that followed in 1801.

Flood and Grattan both went on to enjoy considerable celebrity as Patriot leaders and fell out in the 1780s. Bushe had a more understated career, but only marginally so. A decade after the duel, he stood for election as MP for Kilkenny against James Agar’s son and, although he lost the vote, successfully overturned the result. He was then appointed a commissioner for Revenue on a generous salary and became more sympathetic to the Government.

A visit to France in 1789 made him sceptical of the Revolution and in 1790, as a founder member of the Royal Irish Academy, he produced an acclaimed paper estimating Ireland’s population as ‘above 4,040,000’. His calculation was based on Hearth Tax returns, for which he was responsible. Bushe died in 1793 at the family seat of Kilfane House, two miles north of Thomastown, Co Kilkenny.

Soon after this, in about 1795, one of the Bushes’ nine children, a daughter, Harriet, married John Power (later Sir John Power, 1st Baronet of Kilfane). The couple rented, then bought the Bushe family seat, which they rebuilt in 1798.

Part of Kilfane’s appeal doubtless lay in its proximity to Kilkenny, a bustling and fashionable centre of late-18th-century social life in Ireland akin to Bath in England. Its wide society suited John, who was an obsessive huntsman, so much so that, in 1797, he purchased a pack of hounds and established the Kilkenny Hunt Club, the first venture of its kind in Ireland. His twin brother Richard, who divided his time between Kilfane and Dublin, shared in this venture. He combined it, however, with another passion: acting.

Richard’s interest took formal expression in The Private Theatre in Kilkenny, which he ran with great success from 1802–19. Its extensive repertoire, played by actors of social standing in front of audiences of their peers, however, had a pre-history in country-house performances around the city. The anonymously published The Private Theatre of Kilkenny (1825), which records the history of this initiative, notes that Henry Flood, Gervaise Bushe and Henry Grattan were all involved in amateur plays from 1774. It adds that Flood and Grattan appeared together as Macbeth and Macduff in Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Tragedy’, roles that anticipated their subsequent political rivalry.

All these details matter because they indirectly illuminate the lives of two women whose interests and activities — which are almost impossible to trace in the historical record — created Dangan Cottage as we see it today. The first of these was Mary Bushe, who must have moved out of Kilfane House soon after her husband’s death in 1793 and taken up permanent residence at Dangan, about two miles south of Thomastown on the banks of the River Nore.

In the course of her married life, she was presumably party to much political discussion and must have struggled to deal with the tensions that surfaced between her brother and husband. As a widow, however, she surely remained in touch with the roaring social life of Kilfane House, presided over by the second woman who concerns us, her daughter Harriet (from 1836, Lady Power).

Neither mother nor daughter seems to have appeared on stage, although Harriet may have composed a prologue to a play in 1802. Both were also necessarily marginal to John’s enthusiasm for hunting, predominantly a male pastime. It’s tempting, therefore, to infer that their interest was directed in a completely different direction and explains the appearance of new landscape gardens in the newly fashionable Romantic aesthetic at both Dangan and Kilfane during the 1790s.

Which garden had precedence is impossible to determine, but each must have informed the other. It seems likely, as a matter of shifting tastes between generations, that the Romantic sensibility would have been picked up by the daughter and passed on to the mother. Whatever the case, work at Kilfane presumably got under way in about 1798, when the house was rebuilt. Here, the new landscape garden — recently restored and now known as Kilfane Glen — had as its centrepiece an artificial waterfall and cottage orné.

Nothing is securely known about the corresponding work at Dangan. A house certainly existed here in 1786, when The Post-Chaise Companion described it as ‘the seat of Miss Hewetson’ (a statement repeated in later editions even after it had changed hands). It’s not clear what this house looked like, but much of it is probably fossilised within the present building.

Dangan is laid out on an irregular plan (Fig 1) with four radiating wings, respectively a main block containing reception rooms and a bedroom — now the entrance hall (Fig 4) — a bedroom range, and a kitchen and service block, portions of which may incorporate the remains of a medieval tower built by Odo Archdekin in the 13th century. Mrs Bushe cosmetically recast the main domestic range with a thatched roof and verandah (Fig 5). Grilled windows fringed with stained glass were installed and although the whole was pointedly renamed a ‘cottage’, it was effectively a villa on an intimate scale.

At the same time, she transformed its setting. A Gothic arch was constructed to screen the property from the road (Fig 2), which was reputedly diverted away from the building to create what became locally known as Madame Bushe’s Corner. If the 1839–40 Ordnance Survey map accurately records her planting, the surrounding garden was laid out in two parts with a small formal grid of borders to the north and east and a naturalised landscape with walks dropping south to the river. This gave the house views over the river and the ruined medieval tower of Grennan Castle on the far bank, a perfect Romantic eye-catcher. There was also a thatched hermitage supported on tree trunks with a moss house beneath and a ‘rustic bridge’ crossing to an island.

The result, although diminutive in scale, clearly attracted attention and in The Irish Tourist (1815), Anthony Atkinson speaks of the ‘celebrated cottage of Dangan, the seat of Mrs. Bushe, a little object, which the traveller notwithstanding one defect, which may be corrected, will certainly find worth visiting’. The defect in question was ‘the border of a young plantation on the lawn, which in a line parallel with the river, partially intercepts the view… shutting out the grandeur of nature’.

It seems a bold observation, given that Mrs Bushe was a subscriber to the book, although Atkinson acknowledges ‘the evident elegance of the place’. He thought the ‘moss-house… composed of an elevated and a subterranean apartment, exceeded, in point of beauty and variety, every thing of that kind which I had seen in the progress of my travels’. He pompously concludes: ‘Praise, when you can — But when you must — condemn.’

Mrs Bushe died a year later, in 1816, and by 1821 Dangan Cottage was occupied by a certain Mr Joseph Greene, possibly a lawyer. By September 1826, it was being advertised to ‘sportsmen’ for let or sale with 14 acres of land in the Dublin Evening Post. ‘The premises have been much improved of late,’ readers were assured, with ‘good stabling and [a] coach-house.’ The property, it continued, was ‘within two miles of Mr Power’s fox hounds’ and ‘beautifully situated on the banks of the River Nore’. Thereafter, for the next century, the house passed through the hands of numerous different owners and tenants, many of their names preserved in local newspaper notices and administrative documents.

In 1831, for example, it was the home of one Charlotte Mary Scott and in April 1849, a Mrs Bermingham. On April 8, 1863, a Mr Tate ‘late Master in the Royal Naval School, New Cross London, and in King Edward VI’s School, Marlborough’ ran an advertisement in the Wexford Constitution offering places at ‘Dangan Cottage, Thomastown’ for ‘the sons of gentlemen preparing for the Colleges, the Public Schools, or the Mercantile profession, and requiring tuition in the Classics, the Mathematics, the French and English Languages and Drawing’. He promised ‘moderate’ terms. It was probably then that the house was re-roofed in slate, shorn of its rustic verandah and re-fenestrated with a series of bow windows.

By 1870, Dangan was up for let again, unfurnished, but — according to advertisements — newly painted and papered and, on October 9, 1875, its entire contents were offered for sale. There was an S. W. Davis in occupation in 1879, a William Percival in 1888 and, by 1896, it was the home of the local doctor, Patrick Murphy and his wife, Georgina. Dr Murphy died in 1932 and his wife in 1948, after which the entire contents were again auctioned and the house sold for £3,000. In 1968, it was purchased by Lord William and Lady Beresford, who removed the Victorian bow windows.

When the present owner bought the house in 2013, it required extensive renovation, including the replacement of the roof and the renewal of services. The fabric was repaired making use of architectural salvage, including doors, shutters and chimneypieces, to preserve and enhance its historic character. Mr Moore went on to furnish the main interiors — an enfilade of Tapestry Room (Fig 8), library (Fig 3) and drawing room (Fig 6) — in a similar spirit, with many items from Irish country houses. Portraits, paintings, ceramics and furniture came from places such as Russborough, Co Wicklow, Carton, Co Kildare, and Headfort, Co Meath, to name but a few. There are other items, too that have caught his discerning eye, notably Aubusson and Flemish tapestries, as well as late-18th-century French toile fragments that now dress a bed (Fig 7). It looks like a collection assembled over many generations.

Meanwhile, Mr Moore has worked to restore the garden and its buildings. In 2017, a new rustic bridge was constructed, inspired by the Chinoiserie designs of 20th-century garden designer Russell Page. There are plans to restore the moss house and the verandah, surviving iron elements from which have been rediscovered. What has been achieved so far promises well for these endeavours; in country-house terms, Dangan Cottage has become again, as Atkinson acknowledged in 1815, a little object certainly worth visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Falmouth-based agent Jonathan Cunliffe, a keen sailor, is understandably excited by the imminent launch onto the market — at a guide price of £5 million — of the enchanting Little Flushing, in the village of Flushing.

This is the sort of Cornish house people dream of: a thatched, period cottage amid beautiful gardens, and right on the water. It's not hard to see why Cunliffe describes it the spot as 'one of Cornwall's most remarkable waterside settings', and Little Flushing itself as 'one of the county's most iconic waterfront homes'.

It sits behind its own private harbour, with a slipway, dock and listed stone quay. From the house and gardens you look south-west across the water to Falmouth, the Royal Cornwall Yacht Club and the town’s elegant Greenbank terrace.

The plot of just under an acre is wonderfully secluded, backed by mature trees, yet at the same time it's still close to the heart of a thriving waterside village that has everything from quirky narrow lanes and colourful cottages to a village shop, primary school and even a bowling green.

Inside, Little Flushing is just as beguiling. This five-bedroom, three-bathroom house has been beautifully done in an elegant, timeless style, and is set up to make the most of the sea views.

Downstairs, the reception hall — heated in colder months by a wood-fired range — opens on to a series of reception rooms, plus the country kitchen with its Aga and adjoining scullery.

Above, a split-level landing leads to four bedrooms, all of which have sea views — and the master bedroom even has a balcony.

There's a fifth bedroom on the ground floor, and the house also includes a boathouse, garage and workshop within the grounds.

Little Flushing was acquired by the late George ‘Jumbo’ Ellison more than 30 years ago, the unlisted house is being sold on behalf of his family, following the death of his widow, Rosie, in March of 2026.

Ellison came from a line of successful entrepreneurs, among them his grandfather who founded an electrical switchgear company in Paris that went on to become a market leader worldwide. Ellison himself stayed closer to home, where he owned a nearby boatyard, Falmouth Boat Construction, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Little Flushing is for sale through Jonathan Cunliffe — see more details.

Jeremy Vine is on his bike. ‘Hold on, I am cycling past a building site,’ he says, when he picks up my call. I check that he’s not cycling his penny-farthing, which resulted in a recent nasty injury. Just a regular bike for him today, he confirms. ‘Cycling is riddled with those sort of problems, isn’t it?’ I say empathetically.

‘I never like the words "riddled" or "problems" connected with cycling,' he replies. 'Cycling's mainly full of joy and solutions. Car driving is riddled with problems. Car driving has destroyed our cities and our countryside in many ways, but that’s a conversation for another day.’

Bicycles aside, he has been enthusiastically giving me his recommendations for Appledore, a historical fishing and shipbuilding village in North Devon. These include the Flame Factory, a pizzeria and burger house; The Crowbar, a pub and restaurant; and Jack Sprats, a bistro. ‘I love it,’ he gushes. He is a patron of the town’s book festival, which will be running from September 18-27, and also holidays there each summer.

It is also near where his new murder mystery book is set. The second in a series, Turn the Dial for Death follows the Sidmouth-based murder-solving local radio broadcaster Edward Temmis, who’s ‘maybe past the peak of his career and is worried about the next generation.’

Jeremy pauses.

‘Not that that’s me, you understand?’

It is his listeners on BBC Radio 2 that keep him grounded. ‘I used to think I was going to tell them the news, and now I realise they tell me.’ His television program on Channel 5 also keeps him busy. ‘I do them every day. I do two hours of TV and two hours of radio and I have never been more professionally satisfied than I am now, at the age of 61.’

Ann Widdecombe was a regular guest on his show until her death on July 8. ‘I was very upset. She really almost felt like a friend,’ Jeremy says ‘It was such a powerful connection between me and Ann, Ann and the audience and the audience and me. Sort of a beautiful triangle. And it's so tragic that we’ve only really seen it because of this awful thing.’ He agrees that people have parasocial relationships with famous personalities, particularly radio presenters.

‘I’ve had a couple of stalkers, and that’s no more than any other broadcaster. I’d say I’ve probably had three. I mean, stalking is the industrial disease of broadcasting, it unfortunately comes with the territory,’ he says. Alex Belfield, who stalked Jeremy, was recalled to prison in February this year for breaching his licence conditions.

‘It creates this wonderful illusion, particularly radio, that you’re having a personal conversation. But if you create that connection, I suppose the change in the modern world is that the person on the other end, if they have bad intentions as with Ann Widdecombe, they are able to come back.’ Does he regret becoming a well-known personality then? ‘I don’t regret it. I love having my audience. It’s the best thing in the world to do the job I do.’

Jeremy has worked at the BBC now for 39 years. ‘When I arrived I just thought everyone looked like I do now, 60-year-old blokes. Now, though, I look around and I’m so proud to work in New Broadcasting House — somewhere so many different people are doing different things.’

He has two children, aged 19 and 21, with wife Rachel Schofield, who is also a journalist. It is her he credits with his love of nature. ‘Actually, she said she wouldn’t marry me unless I was a member of the National Trust, which is the most middle class thing that’s ever happened to me.’ He is still a member. He lives in London, near the Thames, and although he sometimes dreams of moving to Devon, I think he’s far too enamoured with his life in the London media circus.

Your aesthetic hero

Oscar Wilde. He was so funny. He would have been massively famous now if he lived today, but the fame would have ruined him.

A possession you would never sell

I could never sell my penny-farthing. I bought it for £1,200 from Roger in Stockport, and ever since I bought it, for some reason, a lot of people have gotten very excited about riding penny-farthings. Roger now has a three- or four-years-long waiting list. So I know if I ever sold it, I would probably never manage to get another one.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Marilyn Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I just think it really gave you an insight into her life. She was quite fragile, and all the issues that we see with people who became famous in the early days were not ready for what fame did. Elvis being the other classic example.

There was one photo where she was posed on this sort of velvet curtain, and she was topless. She'd done it for $40 for a calendar, and she forgot all about it. And then when she got her first movie, somebody found it and said, ‘Oh, how can this woman be in the movies when she's a topless model?’ And she came out fighting and said, ‘I had to do that because I had nothing to eat.’ I was so impressed with her. You know, she had some agency.

A book you’ve found inspiring

The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary. It changed my life. He was a Spitfire pilot whose plane blew up. He fell into the sea and his face had been blown off. He was then repaired by an amazing cosmetic surgeon in East Grinstead called Archibald McIndoe. I begged the publishers to read it for Audible. I didn’t really want to be paid or anything, so I gave the fee to RAF charities and they let me read it.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Hotel Du Vin in Glasgow, because when I used to present Eggheads I always stayed there, and it was so lovely.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Sadly, I had to buy a new smartwatch, because I lost mine.

The music that you work to

As I am writing my books I have to concentrate, so I will listen to the Calm Music playlist on Spotify.

The items you collect

My daughters’ drawings.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

It’s got to be a radio, hasn’t it? One on which I could listen to all my favourite DJs from the past 50 years.

Your favourite painting

I used to go to the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow on my days off from Eggheads and I always went to see the same painting, which is the Salvador Dalí painting, Christ of Saint John of the Cross. And I'm so inspired by how the hell he had done this painting and what it's all about that I then wrote a novel about it called The Diver and the Lover.

The last podcast you listened to

I was just listening to one about Fred and Rose West, actually. I am quite a true crime person.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Writing 400 words of my next book.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

Jason Isaacs from The White Lotus.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I went to Nairobi on the job, as a correspondent in Africa, and I went to a place that served amazing steak and meat. It was a once in your lifetime thing.

The best present you’ve ever received

My daughter gave me a cartoon, which I think was in The Times, that had me in it. Also my mum is 87, so anything she gets me, I always treasure.

On the horizon, strange trees danced, a mirage of slender trunks marking the distant Norfolk coast. All around was blue water, stippled with white horses whipped up by the brisk north-easterly, yet directly before us was clean, smooth sand, an East Anglian desert island.

Walking up a slight rise to where wind-blown ripples sheltered puddles of warm seawater, we glimpsed the oddest element of this otherworldly scene: fishing trawlers, bright red and green with tiny figures in oilskins scratching around their hulls. Unable to resist, we set off towards them, six girls in shorts and jumpers, giving the fishermen, no doubt, something of a turn.

They were cocklemen, out on the sandbank revealed by low tide in the middle of the Wash, that great sweep of bay between Lincolnshire and Norfolk where King John once lost his baggage train full of treasure. All summer long, they will beach their cockleboats here, raking around in a large circle and then shovelling up cockles into bags, just as their kin have done for thousands of years, bar the hydraulic lift to hoist the ton bags on board. They might get two or three tons in one trip, making enough to render working in wintertime unnecessary.

Tough and sturdy, they received our interest with some bemusement, refusing any payment when we asked if we could scoop up some cockles for lunch. Duly armed with a towel-full of shells, curved and fluted and mottled in sandy hues, we set off back to where we could see the mast of our vessel, eager to offer up our haul for lunch.

We had sailed to this desert island aboard Victorious, a 42-foot-long, gaff-rigged wooden cockleboat built in Kings Lynn in 1932, wide of beam and shallow of draught. Her captain, Henry Chamberlain, a former Royal Marine, had restored her to perfection and now, with a white-painted hull, red sails, long bowsprit and steeply raked stern, she is a beautiful boat. The hold once intended for the catch has two bunks and a tiny galley, where our foraged cockles sizzled.

After boarding at Fosdyke in Lincolnshire, where a huge boatshed sheltered vessels in various states of repair, we had motored up the River Welland to the Wash against the wind as bacon sizzled and enamel cups of tea and coffee were circulated.

As a group, we had bonded in the hunting field and were thus well used to wild weather and winds. Sarah Kate Byrne, stylist to the stars of ITV Racing and side-saddle doyenne; Rosie van Cutsem, whose clothing brand Troy London (now closed, sadly) was worn by The Princess of Wales; Anna Pope, artist and co-founder of Watatunga Wildlife Reserve; Rachael Hampton, world-class dentist; and Anna Sands of Bodney Hall Farm holiday rentals, made up our crew, guided by Henry and his mate, David (Tomo) Thompson.

We swiftly settled in for a day when phones were used only for taking (hundreds of) photographs, when the wind tangled hair and stirred the blood and when stories were shared of hair-raising adventures at sea, none of which, thankfully, concerned Victorious. She stoically crested each wave, before settling comfortably into her sandy berth on the sandbank and we set off on our cockle mission.

Lunch was thus served on a beach as private as any billionaire’s Caribbean island — and what a lunch it was. Henry had gathered an array of goodies, including tomato soup, Baron Bigod cheese, the lightest focaccia I have ever tasted from Bert Blaize at North Norfolk Cellars in Wells-next-the-Sea and Matt Gregory’s Coral 2024 natural wine, all complemented, of course, by our fresh-as-can-be cockles, dusted with North Norfolk Sea Salt from Brancaster.

On our return, we coasted before the north-easterly, sails hoisted, cheerfully plunging into the waves. I accepted the tiller with some trepidation, having not sailed for some years and then with a wheel, but Henry kept a close eye and it wasn’t long before I had the feel of her. She was heavy, but eager and responded well to the helm.

Succeeding buoys came up swiftly; it’s astonishing how fast one can sail with wind and tide together and it wasn’t long before we were approaching the mouth of the river, into which we shot like an arrow finding its mark. Mudbanks slipped by as seals popped up to say farewell and cormorants, so swift beneath the water and so ungainly out of it, flapped out of our way.

Fortunately, Henry took the helm for the last bit, under engine power, with a heart-stopping bit of manoeuvring that saw Victorious spun on her heel and urged alongside the jetty as the tide threatened to smash her into the boat moored behind.

Safely tied up, we breathed a sigh of relief and repaired to The Ship Inn nearby for a pint of Guinness. The proprietor, Fiona Carter, is a great champion of Fosdyke history, with black-and-white photographs of past ships (including one whose skipper had fallen foul of that tide and crashed into the bridge) arrayed in the restaurant. She and her husband, David, have long supported the shipyard and it is reassuring to find in this unassuming corner of Lincolnshire a place where traditional shipbuilding skills are flourishing.

Victorious is not Henry’s only boat. He has several others, all redolent of Norfolk’s maritime past, with two more for the open sea: My Girls, a 20-foot-long lug-rigged crab boat, and Salford, a 30-foot-long open lug-rigged whelker. They can both traverse the saltmarshes and creeks of Wells-next-the-Sea, too, together with two mussel flat boats and Mabel, a 16-foot-long beach boat based in Blakeney. Aboard these, guests can explore the tidal saltwater creeks of the coast as they wish, stopping to swim or feast or simply snooze in the sun. I will certainly be returning for more coastal explorations, but for now, I will sleep soundly with the taste of those cockles still salty on my tongue.

Coastal sails for six people start from £595; saltmash sails for four people from £395. A sail aboard Victorious for eight people is £895. Visit the Coastal Exploration Company website for more information.

Galloway, that part of south-west Scotland that leans out into the Irish Sea and the warming currents of the gulf stream, defies expectations. A landscape of forests and farmland, moors and mountains, coupled with a coastline harbouring artists’ colonies in villages that would not look out of place in Cornwall, makes for the sort of location that invites creative spirits, not least those with horticultural ambitions. 

However, Mary Gladstone, the hand behind the spectacular gardens at Craichlaw House, just outside the small village of Kirkcowan, declares a surprising lack of horticultural ambition; colour and design on the other hand, come very naturally. ‘This is not a specialist’s garden,’ she emphasises. ‘I choose plants that do well here in Galloway, which will offer maximum drama for minimum input.’ Some 30 years of experience have refined and adapted her choice of plants and the way she grows them — and the garden has evolved accordingly.

Her first sighting of Craichlaw was in 1991, on the arm of Andrew Gladstone, the man she was about to marry, who had inherited the Victorian pile and its wooded estate some 14 years earlier. A teenager at the time, Mr Gladstone waited until he was 24 before moving into the house, which his grandmother had last occupied several decades earlier. ‘It was like stepping back into the 1950s,’ she recalls. ‘The house was still untouched, because Andrew had thrown himself into rescuing the woodland, which then was a shambolic mess of collapsed beech trees and laurels and completely overrun with Rhododendron ponticum.’ 

Grey granite walls completed a picture of rather dour austerity, leavened, perhaps, by the approach: the drive follows a tree-fringed loch, complete with its own island and stone-built curling huts. (The loch, created by Mr Gladstone’s great-great-grandfather to provide water to power a sawmill in the valley below, occasionally freezes in winter and is still used by the Kirkcowan Curling Club.) However, there was no garden, only empty lawn to the south of the house that incorporated formal yew hedging, planted by Mr Gladstone’s grandmother in the 1930s. Beyond that lay a ha-ha, meadows and a wooded horizon. However, Mrs Gladstone, who had met her future husband when studying Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh University and is possessed of extraordinary creative energy, was excited rather than deterred by the somewhat bleak surroundings. By 1994, married and pregnant with triplets (‘I found I had a great urge to be creative when pregnant’), she had drawn up a plan for the gardens and found contractors to execute the design. 

The 16th-century Peel Tower, rebuilt when the house was remodelled in Scottish Baronial style by Mr Gladstone’s great-grandfather during the 1860s, proved an excellent spot from which to map out the new design. From this vantage point, she quickly conceived a broad gravel terrace with steps dropping to the yew-hedged lawn. This would be formally divided into four parts, crossed by wide grass paths, with places for sitting and eating and ‘quirky views’ to challenge any notion of formal sobriety. 

Today, each quarter of the garden erupts with colour from late spring until autumn. It peaks from late July until mid August when the massed perennials are matched by a supporting cast of agapanthus, roses, clematis and hydrangeas. Three decades of critical appraisal, soil improvement and experimentation has delivered a gloriously immersive experience. The vibrant colours and sheer enthusiasm of the herbaceous planting is arresting in the boldness of its execution. 

This continues to the east of the house, which once presented a particularly austere face to the world. Now, it is clothed in a gorgeous assembly of pink and purple clematis, golden hop and scarlet roses, fronted with an eruption of golden heleniums and tawny heliopsis. Below lie generously filled beds of perennials, repeating the colours and themes of the south borders — a dramatic spectacle invisibly held together by horizontal netting, stretched 2½ft above the soil. 

The drama takes an unexpected turn on entering the cloistered and almost monotone stillness in the gravelled enclosure of Sophie’s Garden. (The design was conceived during an especially strong urge to create when pregnant with her fourth child.) This is populated with granite standing stones and perfectly topiarised cones of hornbeam, inspired by similar ones she had seen at Waterperry in Oxfordshire. Mrs Gladstone is currently considering adding skirts of Geranium Rozanne around the exposed trunks of the cones, to soften the almost shocking austerity. This, she acknowledges, would make it difficult to trim the topiary. However, her part-time gardener, Peter Smith, is equal to the challenge and the construction of a special platform for the purpose of pruning is envisaged. 

Mr Smith, who has known the Craichlaw garden since working with the original contractors on a Youth Training Scheme, is also a dab hand at propagation and together they make a formidable team. Almost every plant in the garden has been raised at Craichlaw, either from cuttings, division or seed. Together too, they have conquered a fungal attack that threatened the yew hedge, by trimming it in the spring instead of giving it the traditional autumn cut and are working on ways to increase the single swag of Tropaeolum that garlands the hedge with scarlet — ‘it’s fiendishly difficult to grow from seed’.

The same curiosity and desire to experiment — matched with an unflinching critical eye — have brought much acclaim to the pieces Mrs Gladstone has created as a self-taught ceramicist. The twin disciplines of gardening and pottery are naturally complementary. Both begin with understanding the earthy medium from which plants and pots might one day emerge and both are hands-on. Restraint and repetition of texture, form and colour create the drama on display on the shelves of the small gallery next to her studio and alongside the wide gravelled terrace. 

‘There was too much colour in the garden, especially yellow, to begin with,’ she reflects, ‘and miscanthus turned out to be too much of a solid blob blocking the view, whereas Stipa gigantea is much more transparent.’ Repetition of a limited palette of plants that do well in the Galloway climate provided the answer. Pennisetum alopecuroides works well, but has proved too much of a handful to keep under control and will also be removed. However, the Stipa tenuissima — although it self-seeds all over the place and is pulled out by the bucket-load — will stay.

The cotton lavender (Santolina chamaecyparissus) and Sedum spectabile remain superb late into the season. Erigeron karvinskianus needs management, too, but clearly enjoys itself on the sunny stone steps. None of these plants is particularly special or difficult to grow, but as Mrs Gladstone explains: ‘It’s the effect they produce together, and how they complement the house, that I’m after.’ Her success in this ambition is nothing short of magnificent.

Craichlaw, Dumfries & Galloway, is open by appointment through Scotland’s Gardens Scheme.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As the traditional season of going on holiday draws sadly to a close, all we're left with are our memories, our dreams, and 800 new photos on our phones which we will definitely, absolutely get around to organising properly next week. Or maybe the week after. October at a push.

Let's forget that post-holiday legwork, though, and instead focusing on the dreams: what would life be like, we imagine, if only we had an Italian villa of our own?

If the villa in question were anything like this villa in Monguzzo, for sale at €1.5 million through Italy Sotheby's International Realty, the answer would be 'very wonderful indeed'.

The three-bedroom villa has plenty of relaxed charm: while not particularly pretty, it's a fine three-bedroom home that was totally refurbished in the 1990s, with three bathrooms, spacious living areas and a hobby room.

It also comes with a two-bedroom guest house within the grounds, plus a Scandinavian-style timber house that the agents suggest is ideal as anything from guest accommodation to an artist's studio.

As fine as the villa is, the main attraction here is the garden, named Il Giardino di Poggio Castello. Just under two acres, and ringed by mature trees to create a cool, elegant, secluded setting, it was created as a true labour of love by the photographer Piero Sierra.

Sierra took the house and garden on in 1991, working on the project with landscape architect Giulio Crespi — and while the villa may be a classic Italian home, the garden is not. Sierra and Crespi created the outdoor space in the tradition of English garden design, with the landscape arranged as a sequence of interconnected garden rooms.

Each part of the garden has its own character, planting scheme and atmosphere. There's a border garden, a woodland garden and pond garden, a garden dedicated to plants that thrive on acidic soil, a gravel garden, architectural garden, cottage garden, rose garden, entrance garden, and a space described as the 'Rustic Cottage Mini-Park'.

To find outdoor space with such variety is nothing short of staggering, and as you can see from the images it's all been thriving in the temperate northern Italian climate, in between Lake Como and Lake Lecco.

Sierra's background as a photographer is also key to understand why the gardens have been created this way: the villa has an ever-changing sequence of views, perspectives and seasonal blooms that transform throughout the year to make sure that no two garden strolls are the same. The owner has spoken in the past about photographing the landscape repeatedly across seasons and from different viewpoints, using the images to refine sightlines and the overall experience of moving through the space.

It's truly something else, and a key selling point. As agent Luigi Aliverti puts it, this is 'a property of rare distinction and virtually impossible to replicate, where the garden is not merely a setting for the residence, but a genuine work of landscape art.'

For sale via Italy Sotheby's International Realty — see more details.

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There was, in my mind, only one kind of gardener. They feature in this magazine; cultivating, planting and maintaining various acres of this green and pleasant land. Always on land. But then I met Titouan Bernicot.

Titouan gardens in a wetsuit off the coast of French Polynesia. He doesn’t grow tomatoes, tulips or trees, but organisms that predate the dinosaurs by 250 million years. His crop is coral.

Titouan’s horticultural career did begin on dry land: ‘I had my tomatoes, a little lettuce and stuff,’ he says. But, aged 16, when he was surfing over a bleached and dying reef, he discovered the crop that will likely consume the rest of his life.

Coral reefs are the ocean's great overachievers — they cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet shelter a quarter of all marine life and provide food security and livelihoods for more than one billion people. They also act as natural breakwaters, underpin tourism economies and, rather importantly, produce a substantial share of the oxygen we breathe; Titouan, who describes the reefs as ‘rainforests of the sea’, puts it at more than half globally.

Humanity has a nasty habit of ruining the most useful parts of the natural world and reefs are no exception. Live-coral cover has roughly halved since the 1950s and we are currently experiencing the aftermath of the worst mass-bleaching event on record: between January 2023 and March 2025, heat stress hit 84% of reefs across 82 countries. Rising ocean temperatures is the primary driver, compounded by pollution, coastal development, overfishing and coral-eating starfish outbreaks. The economic case for acting now is stark. Unchecked coral loss could cost $500 billion a year by 2100, against a fraction of that to protect ocean health today. There is a simpler, more urgent case too: our own survival. ‘No reef, no ocean, no air,’ concludes Titouan.

The environmentalist was still a teenager when he founded Coral Gardeners, which restores reefs by growing coral in underwater nurseries — mostly on suspended rope structures — before transplanting mature fragments back onto degraded reefs. Rather than rushing the polyps into deeper water, the organisation deliberately lets them mature for up to two years in the nursery, prioritising resilience, species diversity and connectivity so the restored reef can function as a genuine ecosystem. ‘Nature loves diversity — a resilient reef has a lot of different coral species, not just one,’ says Titouan.

Since 2017, the company has planted 221,212 corals across 103 species and restored 25,100 square metres of reef — 20 Olympic swimming pools' worth — across 12 active sites in French Polynesia, Fiji and Thailand. And the team’s patience pays off: despite 2024's catastrophic bleaching event, their corals have maintained an average survival rate above 80%. The team combines hands-on gardening with in-house scientific research (CG Labs), AI-powered monitoring tools and partnerships with brands and institutions to fund the work and raise public awareness of reef decline. ‘We know restoration alone can't save reefs at the rate we're losing them,’ he says, ‘which is why we focus also on storytelling and building a movement, since real change starts when people understand how much we depend on the ocean.’

I visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters on Mo'orea a few years ago. It is not a subtle island. Nature does not so much exist as loom large in high definition. It is an earthly paradise, its soaring volcanic peaks iced head to toe in spongy vegetation. On moodier days, clouds snag in the steep crevices and raindrops the size of marbles plip-plop off palm fronds and pool inside hibiscus plants. The air becomes so thick with moisture you swear you can feel and hold it in your mouth. The people I met described how ocean water runs in Polynesians’ veins and that it’s not uncommon for older fishermen to ask for a shark’s permission before taking fish from their feeding grounds. It is, in other words, precisely the sort of place that produces people like Titouan.

There is, tucked away on page 44 of Coral Gardeners' latest report, a single sentence that ought to have made rather more noise than it has. In June, at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, the President of French Polynesia announced that his government would formally recognise ‘coral gardener’ as an official profession. On the face of it, it is a bureaucratic footnote. In practice, it is rather extraordinary: an environmental NGO, founded by someone not yet 30, has effectively willed a new career into existence by government decree.

Buried a few pages later is something else. On the atoll of Ahe, Titouan’s team repurposed the ropes of a defunct pearl farm — his family's trade — to grow coral instead, with growth rates nearly 20 times the original volume in under a year. Meanwhile, in Italy, the same methodology developed for tropical acropora (a genus of small polyp stony coral) is now tentatively being trialled on cold-water Mediterranean gorgonians (colonial soft corals).

You'd assume a coral-restoration project in French Polynesia and the great houses of Italian fashion and Swiss watchmaking would have little to say to each other. You'd be wrong. In nine years, more than 500 companies have come knocking, wanting to attach their name to Coral Gardeners. Titouan turns most of them away.

His filtering process is, to put it politely, unsentimental. He wants evidence of homework done before a single penny changes hands; partners who have ‘properly started even before our discussion to build a CSR (corporate social responsibility strategy) with some tangible goals’ — and, crucially, ‘not just giving us some financial support for us to do the thing.’

There are two big names who cleared the bar. Rolex and Prada Group. The watchmaker — who Titouan speaks of with something close to reverence, calling them ‘our North Star’ — has backed Coral Gardeners, via its Perpetual Planet Initiative, since near its inception. Earlier thsi month, the President of French Polynesia visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters earlier this month and joined the team underwater to inspect the nurseries. The moment was caught on camera by CNN for Call to Earth, the cable news networks's multi-platform editorial series that exposes some of the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. It launched in 2021 in partnership with Rolex.

Prada, in partnership with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, is helping to fund Titouan’s projects in the Mediterranean. He singles out the luxury fashion house's Re-Nylon collection, spun from recycled fishing nets. ‘Introducing nylon into [high] fashion is bold,’ he says, ‘but using recycled fishing net nylon’ — and sustaining it for years, as one of the label's bestsellers — is ‘brilliant.’

It would be easy to mistake all this for greedy ambition. However, Titouan doesn’t even consider himself a custodian of the reef, much less so its keeper. ‘The reef has given me everything in my life,’ he says, ‘so I want to give back… nature is not something we own, but something we live in harmony with.’ The billion-dollar question is whether it’s a philosophy that scales to planetary emergency. Titouan might be our and the ocean’s only hope, and the closest thing gardening has to a creed.

We learnt from a previous move that, if at all possible, time is the greatest luxury. There is nothing more stressful than trying to pack up your kitchen when the removal van is already waiting outside. This time, we were determined to do things differently.

Because we planned to rent out our London house, we didn't need to move everything. In some ways, that made the decisions even harder. We had to leave the house furnished, yet I found enormous pleasure in choosing the pieces that would come with us to Wales: the paintings that held memories, the favourite chair, the objects that very much felt part of our story. Even after all that careful editing, the house still felt remarkably full. I have long accepted that I am a collector, and certainly a maximalist.

In the weeks before we left, I worked methodically through every room. One pile was destined for the charity shop, another for Wales. There was something unexpectedly therapeutic about handling every drawer, every cupboard and every shelf. The move became an opportunity to edit our lives, as much as our possessions.

Having used a removal company before, we decided against hiring one this time. They were wonderfully efficient, but the contents of our home had vanished into huge, hastily packed boxes with little thought to where things would end up. By packing ourselves, we knew exactly what was in each box and could unpack directly into its new home, instead of first sorting through a mountain of mixed belongings.

The luxury of time also meant we could change our minds. Paintings were swapped in and out of the pile destined for Wales. I realised I wanted the new house to have a slightly different feel from London, and knowing that not everything had to come immediately gave me permission to create a fresh chapter, rather than simply recreating the old one.

The children's rooms also received a thorough cull. Every drawer was sorted, every basket emptied, every long-forgotten toy rediscovered. Oddly, it became one of my favourite parts of the move.

We had originally planned a large farewell party before leaving London. The invitations were sent out. Once we had added up the cost, we realised we would far rather spend the money on our new home. We'd already hosted years of wonderful dinners and celebrations there; it felt right to leave with those memories intact rather than forcing one final occasion. Besides, by then our lives revolved around paint charts, deep cleans, packing boxes and tradesmen. We had mentally moved on long before we physically left.

As for my wardrobe... well, I should confess that clothes have always been my weakness. Thankfully, my mother came to the rescue. She owns the clothing company Moloh and has rails in her van for transporting her collections of tailored attire. It proved to be the most extraordinary and perfect moving vehicle. My dresses, coats and jackets travelled exactly as they lived at home, still hanging on their hangers, while shoes, handbags and hats disappeared into enormous clear bags. It was a hugely satisfying process and one in which remarkably little emerged crumpled.

Our move happened over several weeks. My mother would drive to London, spend the night, and we'd load the van together before setting off for Wales early in the morning. The children took turns joining the journey, each trip punctuated by service station treats and a growing excitement that this strange adventure would soon become everyday life. The move itself was an adventure for all of us.

Arriving with each new vanload was always slightly surreal. Here was a house we had spent months renovating from afar, making countless decisions about paint colours, wallpaper and kitchens, yet it still didn't quite feel like ours. We'd place boxes in rooms knowing everything would eventually move again, before turning around and driving back to London.

As expected, the house wasn't quite ready when our London tenants were due to move in. Suddenly, reality hit. We still had decorating to finish, rooms to repaint and a house to put back together before handing over the keys. There were moments of mild panic, but somehow we got there. I owe a great deal to my husband, Ned, whose calm determination carried us through those final frantic days.

The children, dogs and I retreated to my parents' house (in the countryside in Wiltshire) for a week while the final work was completed. It had always been the plan, but none of us appreciated quite what a gift it would become. It gave the children space to settle into a country life, and break away from London, without living among paint tins and dust sheets. Once our house was more ready, it gave Ned and me something even more precious: uninterrupted time to begin making sense of our new home, just us. My parents very kindly looked after our children and our pooches while we began the big unpack.

Where do you begin when unpacking an entirely new life? There were boxes everywhere, deliveries arriving daily and, naturally, rather too many new purchases already waiting patiently to find their new home. The decorator had finished, the wallpaper was up, but carpets still hadn't been laid, meaning everything would eventually have to be moved all over again.

Ordinarily, I like everything finished immediately. This house, however, was teaching me patience. My dressing room hadn't yet been built, so I improvised with temporary clothes rails and reminded myself that this, too, was part of the process. The goal wasn't perfection on day one. It was simply to begin.

Ned and I had the luxury of a few days of just us — where we could really work out the house and enjoy it solo. We also worked out the order of importance for unpacking. It was the kitchen first, and then the kids' rooms. We really wanted them to enjoy this part and not be overwhelmed by not having ‘their stuff’.

Looking back, I'm so grateful we moved slowly. Instead of one frantic day, we had weeks to let go of one home while gradually falling in love with another. In the end, it wasn't really about moving furniture at all. It was about giving ourselves enough time to believe that the move was happening. It meant that we could adjust, as it was gradual, we could see it unfolding and happening.

We were all now living in the countryside. It no longer felt daunting because we'd had time to grow into it. By then, I knew we wouldn't want to turn back.

Read part one here. Part three will be published on Friday, September 4.

Enid Blyton's prodigious output of hearty stories for young people may have been mocked and satirised over the years — some are no longer in print due to ‘outdated’ themes and attitudes — but her lively stories about naughty schoolgirls, buried treasure and midnight feasts continue to absorb generations of children, as well as adult collectors.

Blyton (1897–1968) was also an avid reader in childhood and knew how to captivate, saying of Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women: ‘Those were real children… That’s the kind of book I like best.’ The wholesome activities of the Famous Five have arguably survived best in popular imagination and, in 2008, inspired a Disney animation; GWR currently uses their adventures to advertise outings by train to the West Country.

The quintet was introduced in Five On A Treasure Island, in which Julian (nearly grown-up and the natural team leader), Dick (boyish, brave) and Anne (domesticated, feminine, cautious) spend the summer holidays at Kirrin Bay with their Uncle Quentin, an irascible scientist, prodigious baker Aunt Fanny and cousin George (uncompromising tomboy), who owns a mongrel dog, Timmy. Blyton wrote 21 in all between 1942 and 1963 and there were numerous spin-offs and annuals.

At school in Kent, where Blyton was head girl, she started a magazine, Dab, and wrote poems and short stories. She gave up her place at the Guildhall School of Music to train as a teacher — her early writings included educational books and contributions to Teachers World magazine.

Her first husband, Maj Hugh Pollock, an editor at George Newnes, encouraged her to buy a typewriter, which revolutionised her output. As for many prominent figures, however, there was no escape from the unflattering posthumous biopic. In Enid (2009), Blyton, played by Helena Bonham Carter, was portrayed as ruthless and unlikeable. There was little mention of her charitable fundraising in which young readers were encouraged to raise money for sick animals and disabled children through clubs, such as the Busy Bees and Sunbeam.

Her publisher, Hachette UK, explains that the process of editing out ‘offensive terms’ began in Blyton’s own lifetime and still continues, but that the intention is to keep her stories ‘at the heart of every childhood’. Indeed, her fan club thrives and the annual Enid Blyton Day (on August 23 this year) attracts more than 100 attendees.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Where is it?

East Sussex, near the village of Brightling between Hastings and Tunbridge Wells.

A quick description

It’s a 90-acre farm with a farmhouse whose core dates from 1560 with 19th-century additions, as well as an oast house and a barn.

When did you buy it?

1994.

How did you find it?

We were living in London and went to see a house for sale. My father-in-law was elderly and my husband, Adam [Nicolson, the journalist and author], wanted to move closer to him. Friends had told me about the first house that was quite near, but it wasn’t right. I went for a walk before heading back to London and spotted a handwritten ‘for sale’ sign.

What made you buy it?

It wasn’t so much the house as the surrounding countryside: it reminded me of the Auvergne in France, with its rolling hills and fields.

Was the purchase smooth?

We dithered. It was quite expensive and a stretch financially, but the actual purchase was pretty smooth once we’d made up our minds.

Favourite aspect?

It’s hidden down a little lane and is surrounded by woods, which gives the setting a slight Hansel and Gretel feel. The house itself isn’t very practical. My husband is 6ft 3in and I’m quite tall, too, and it has very low ceilings in parts.

Best memory of living there?

When Rosie, our elder daughter, turned one, we had a birthday party and housewarming in a field under a canvas tent looking out over the views. We still camp and have barbecues there today; it’s one of the most magical things about the house.

Biggest mistake?

Mixing home and work life. With hindsight, I’d like to separate them.

Biggest indulgence?

The first thing we did was replace the cowl and restore the oast house, which is now Adam’s study and a space for guests.

Sarah Raven is creative director of her eponymous gardening brand. The next open days at Perch Hill, East Sussex, are on August 28 and 29. For tickets for these and her one-day course, A Day with Alan Titchmarsh and Sarah Raven ‘Why I Garden’ at Perch Hill Farm (September 22) visit www.sarahraven.com

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

You'd be forgiven for associating the Derbyshire Dales with purple heather, a stalwart flower for this most romantic, beloved, yet hardy part of the British Isles. When I was a child, however, it was in Derbyshire that I used to marvel at tropical passionflowers, cannas and spiked lobelias, all thanks to the green fingers of plantswoman Julie Soghomonian.

I remember her stand of plants, quite casually, but commandingly, arranged like a floral sweet shop. Rich, firework colours jostled together on a little cart parked outside the campsite check-in desk at Birchwood Farm near Matlock, where my family used to stay each summer on our holidays from nearby Nottingham.

The farm, a seven-mile walk from Matlock, was run by her late parents, Nora and Frank Smith. I have memories of the dirt track that ran between the fields of campers where Julie lived on one side in a bungalow with her children, Emily and Jordan, with her polytunnel on the other side. Around its doorways were stacked piles of variously sized pots and it was surrounded by a simple fence beefed up with nettles, where you would occasionally spot a laced Wyandotte hen mischievously pecking about.

Throughout this little homemade nursery, Julie’s talent and taste for largely glamorous perennials could be seen growing at large. It was a passion she discovered as a child — both sets of grandparents had cottage gardens brimming with flowers, vegetables and soft fruit. It would be her mother’s successionally planted flower-beds, however, that were most inspiring. These brimmed with perennials chosen to provide a never-ending succession of colour throughout the growing season. As Julie started propagating plants herself she showed the same skill, now developed with her own style and flair.

At first, she sold her plants to campers, but she also attended many local country fairs and markets, most regularly the Tansley car boot sale. This was quite the early-morning task for a mother with two small children. The car piled with plants, off they would go. Emily remembers how she and her brother would cradle the hanging baskets as their mum drove them off for a day of selling her precious propagated cargo.

Today, Julie is to be found growing plants on a larger, but still very personal scale just down the road from Birchwood Farm in the town of Wirksworth, on a patch of land that she inherited from her mother.

Entering the busy Georgian walled garden, home to Secret Orchard Nursery, is like stepping into a Rousseau painting. The nursery cat, Harper, slinks through the brimming carnival of flowers — penstemons, scabious, dahlias and rudbeckias of both the annual ‘Sahara’ and the towering, often short-lived perennial that is ‘Prairie Glow’. Everything has been grown and propagated from seeds and cuttings. Potting away in her greenhouse with the radio on is her kind of heaven: ‘The stress just lifts off you and the satisfaction of seeing everything potted and growing away is golden.’ She is often out at midnight, torch in hand, looking for slugs.

Emily now works at the nursery, too, where she is particularly helpful with social media. ‘When she was three, she was a potting wizard, then she stopped and didn’t start gardening again until she turned 20.’

Walking through the nursery, I am reminded of Julie’s beautiful handwriting, which can be seen on her plant labels with wondrous, chocolate selection-box-like descriptions as the air — particularly above the echinacea and eryngium — buzzes with both wild and honey bees feasting on the early-autumn nectar and pollen.

Back in 2014, however, when the nursery arrived, the land within the four walls was a Sleeping Beauty forest of brambles hiding old tarmac that required hard work to erase. Today, the battle has been won and paths have been laid of old brick and sandstone — easily found in this limestone valley. Indeed, the foreground of colourful plants contrasts magically with the magnificent hillsides dotted with sycamores. The main hill is known locally as the Gilkin and Wirksworth itself is known as ‘the gem of the Peak’.

Space has been carved out for two constantly full greenhouses, painstakingly built by Julie, pane by pane. There is also a plant-sale area. In summer, punnets of damsons — the nursery contains mature fruit trees, some of which were planted back in the 1960s — are especially sought after.

The plants have gained a reputation for their superior quality and range. In an age of online buying, many gardeners are now seeking out local nurseries such as this and realising the benefits of buying from the grower as they used to. However much time they save, a mobile-phone screen can never capture the atmosphere of such places.

Best of all — and a testament to Julie’s efforts in taking cuttings — is that the nursery has not had to diversify away from plants and become more of a tea room, as have so many commercial garden centres. Come October, the walled garden’s door will shut for the winter, when she will be heading to sell her homegrown, handmade wreaths of hydrangeas and berries at the Wirksworth Christmas market.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In leafy east Hertfordshire, Mark Rimell of Strutt & Parker quotes a guide price of £2.495 million for Broadfield Hall in the hamlet of Broadfield, which stands in some 15½ acres of formal gardens, paddocks, parkland and farmland, a mile or so north of the village of Cottered and three miles west of Buntingford.

Once part of a moated manor estate, the hall’s formal grounds include extensive Yorkstone terracing, a walled garden, a 17th-century rose parterre and a boating lake. Established planting includes a wealth of mature trees and a rare tulip tree.

In the late 1500s, Sir John Brockett of Brockett Hall and his wife, Ellen, sold their interest in the manor of Broadfield to Edward Pulter, who settled it on his son, Litton Pulter. He died in 1608 in his father’s lifetime, leaving a son, Arthur, aged four. Arthur went on to hold a prominent position in the county, becoming a magistrate, a captain in the militia and High Sheriff for Hertfordshire.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, he retired from public life and, with his wife, Lady Hester Pulter — the daughter of James Ley, created 1st Earl of Marlborough in 1626 — set about rebuilding Broadfield Hall. The building was still unfinished when Pulter died in 1689, but was completed a year later by his grandson, James Forrester, who also commissioned the young Nicholas Hawksmoor — at that time a junior draughtsman for Sir Christopher Wren — to design Broadfield Hall’s impressive Grade II*-listed stable block, which was built in about 1691, according to its Historic England listing.

Forrester’s grand house was demolished in the mid 19th century, rebuilt in 1882 and eventually replaced in 1939 by the present unlisted Broadfield Hall, built by William Harston in the Art Deco style.

It retains many period details, including a grand cantilevered staircase with a vaulted ceiling, beautiful fireplaces throughout and original 1930s mahogany joinery.

For much of the 20th century, it was lived in by Prince George of Denmark and his wife, Anne Bowes-Lyon. She was a niece of the late Queen Mother, who was a regular visitor, as was the present King.

The main house provides 6,000sq ft of light-filled living space with additional accommodation available in the converted coach house.

The ground floor boasts three enormous reception rooms, a huge kitchen/breakfast room and a family room/study.

A delightful sun room overlooks the parkland and formal gardens and there’s a gym to relieve City stress.

The first floor offers five bedrooms and three bathrooms, with the principal bedroom suite enjoying the luxury of a dressing room and roof terrace.

For sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details.

I'm standing in front of the exuberant, comedic and muscular paintings of nonagenarian Rose Wylie (b. 1934) at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), thinking about what makes an artist and their work quintessentially English. Is it humour, scale, technique or none of these things?

The RA first opened its doors in 1768 and its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, spent the next 21 years orating what English art could and should be in his annual Discourses.

As at all European academies, history painting was held in the highest regard, with portraiture, landscape and still life fighting for the lower rungs of art’s hierarchical ladder. Reynolds talked at length of a national school, at the same time as urging English artists to emulate their European neighbours. Yet, today, in our global society, should we still attempt to define art by geographical borders?

Many artists now often study, work and live in different countries to where they were born. To consider ‘English’ artists, we must first define them as those who live and work in England for sustained periods (rather than necessarily being born here). That said, how do we begin to corral all the disparate work these artists produce? Is there any coherence at all?

Despite ongoing financial difficulties for England’s museums and galleries, the recent closure of several major commercial galleries and continued cuts to art-school funding, the country has managed to maintain a thriving art community.

Many overseas artists choose England as their base and English-born artists successfully run studios in metropolitan centres and rural locations. Even if their work often sells in international auctions and art fairs and they exhibit all over the world, it is England that all these artists call home.

Here, too, there are a number of areas of particular interest to contemporary painters right now.

If we follow the lead of auction houses, some of the most sought-after paintings by English artists working today are those that verge on abstraction. Many are being produced by women artists born in the 1990s — Rachel Jones (b. 1991), Jadé Fadojutimi (b. 1993) and Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990).

Jones only graduated from the RA Schools in 2019, but two years later she was included in the landmark contemporary painting exhibition ‘Mixing it Up: Painting Today’ at the Hayward Gallery, London. Her vivid oil-pastel painting, lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021), is some 23-feet (more than seven yards) long. Viewing it is an immersive experience, as the chewy colours sizzle, pop and shimmer, turning the giant teeth into cosmic landscapes and saturated skies.

Yukhnovich has gone one step further. Her canvases have been exhibited at the Wallace Collection, London, but, in 2025, she created a giant wrap-around mural for the newly restored Frick Collection in New York.

Her exuberant, abstracted florals often take inspiration from Rococo artists, such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and they now command seven-figure sums at auction.

Her latest work, conceived in dialogue with site-specific wall paintings and exploring how myths and stories change over time, was on show at the Victoria Miro gallery in Venice this summer.

Collectors similarly scrabble to acquire the latest paintings by Fadojutimi. Her sweeping abstracts come from deep within. They are vast meditations on life, exploring the characters, spaces and personas we create for ourselves.

Today’s abstract artists are ambitious and emotive and their work offers viewers glimpses of imagined spaces and psychic states. They all build on a long tradition of abstract painting in England, by the likes of Bridget Riley (b. 1931), Ian McKeever (b. 1946) and Fiona Rae (b. 1963).

This is part one of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

'Cucumber dipped in vinegar!’ begins Anne excitedly in Enid Blyton’s Five Go Off to Camp, reeling off with enthusiasm the sandwiches prepared for them for a moorland hike to their pitching spot. ‘Oooh, Mr Luffy, your sandwiches are much nicer than ours!’

It’s not hard to imagine that fresh, tangy fillings such as cucumber would have delighted post-war picnickers such as the Famous Five. In both fiction and reality, our affection for the cucumber sandwich has been enduring. Piled on patterned plates at cricket matches and summer regattas, it’s a snack that feels quintessentially English, yet its origins lie in India. Wilting under the searing heat, officials of the British Raj found relief in a refreshing local crop: the cucumber. They gave this fruit, made up of about 95% water, an English twist by sandwiching it between delicate slices of soft white bread — and then transporting the tradition back home.

The cucumber’s 4,000-year-old ancestor was a bitter-tasting gourd with a bulbous form and prickly skin, but it was gradually sweetened by selective breeding. Centuries before British colonials popularised the cucumber sandwich, Europe’s rulers were already developing a taste for the fresh green crunch. In the 1st century AD, on the island of Capri off Italy, the Emperor Tiberius was widely reported to have commissioned the first specularium (proto greenhouse) to ensure a year-round supply of cucumbers to satisfy his daily cravings. By the early medieval period, Frankish king Charlemagne had issued an edict, decreeing that his cherished cucumbers be grown on all his estates.

In Britain, cucumbers were also once the preserve of the elite, as much fuel and space was needed to run the hothouses in which they were cultivated. As coal became cheap and plentiful in the mid 19th century, the practice proliferated and these prestigious foreign fruits, forced into straight forms by hand-blown glass tubes, became a point of pride. As etiquette expert William Hanson recently shared with his followers as he enjoyed afternoon tea at The Goring: ‘In Victorian-era Britain, cucumber was the caviar of its day.’

‘A plate of delicate cucumber sandwiches soon came to be seen as a prominent signifier of social status, highly recommended by the many authors of afternoon-tea etiquette books that appeared throughout the Victorian era,’ Gillian Perry, author of Please Pass the Scones: A Social History of English Afternoon Tea, says. ‘Unlike the starchy English vegetables that graced dinner plates, cucumbers held a more exotic air. The delicacy [of the sandwiches] added to the understanding that afternoon tea was a treat confined to the upper middle and aristocratic classes.’ In the evening, they would sit down to a substantial evening meal, she explains. ‘As such, the afternoon tea-table items were not required to fully sustain.’

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861, concurs that sandwiches confected for afternoon tea are ‘dainty trifles, pleasing to the eye and palate, but too flimsy to allay hunger where it exists’. The leisured classes did not need the hearty meal served to manual workers and these light, spongy snacks boasted the idleness of those who enjoyed them.

In P. G. Wodehouse’s 1932 short story Open House, such idleness sees the cucumber sandwich become a missile. The host, Eustace Milliner, is joined for afternoon tea by his formidable aunt, Lady Alcester, a woman who is described as ‘passionately addicted to cucumber sandwiches’ and prone to ‘fling herself on them like a starving wolf’. Yet when her cat, Francis, begins to stalk William, the canary Milliner is minding, the cucumber sandwiches are hastily hurled at the would-be killer. Although the canary survives, the featherlight refreshment proves an inadequate projectile.

‘The very nature of a cucumber sandwich makes it poor throwing,’ we’re told. ‘He could have obtained direct hits on Francis all day without slowing him up.’ Another cucumber-mad aunt, Lady Bracknell, appears in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, where cucumber sandwiches are again code for the trivial preoccupations of the satirised upper classes. Her nephew and host, Algernon Moncrieff, has a corresponding penchant for the ‘reckless extravagance’ of this sandwich and, before Lady Bracknell can lay a gloved finger on the delicacy, he has absentmindedly swallowed the lot. When she enquires about the promised sandwiches, Lane, the butler, supplies a swift lie. ‘There were no cucumbers in the market this morning,’ he fibs. ‘Not even for ready money.’

Not everyone, however, took to cucumbers so enthusiastically. They were once known as ‘cowcumbers’, as it was thought only cattle could digest them. This name was later deemed unseemly by Victorians such as Charles Dickens, who used it to send up the gin-soaked, snuff-loving nurse Mrs Sairey Gamp in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. ‘In case there should be such a thing as a cowcumber in the ’ouse, will you be so kind as bring it, for I’m rather partial to ’em,’ announces this corpulent woman with ‘a husky voice’ and ‘very little neck’.

According to Dr Johnson’s famous epithet, the ‘physicians in England’ feel that ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing’. The writer Sir Compton MacKenzie was equally disparaging about the conventions of the British afternoon tea. ‘You are offered a piece of bread and butter that feels like a damp handkerchief — and sometimes, when cucumber is added to it, like a wet one,’ he complained.

There’s no risk of a soggy sandwich at our most esteemed establishments. London’s Claridge’s serves an estimated 22,000 afternoon teas each year, slicing some 58,000 loaves into neat, crustless fingers. Cucumber-sandwich recipes vary, from a version with cream cheese, dill and horseradish root to a summery take with lemon crème fraîche. The perfect sandwich, it suggests on its menu, is ‘a delicately balanced two-thirds bread and one-third filling’. Meanwhile, in Marylebone, the Langham’s indulgent variations have included cucumber enveloped in clotted cream or pickled in Champagne and elderflower.

The sandwiches enjoyed by Elizabeth II also had a special twist. ‘The best cucumber sandwich I’ve had was at a Buckingham Palace garden party,’ recalls Country Life Editor-in-Chief Mark Hedges, who has been a guest on several occasions. ‘The added chopped mint makes all the difference.’

As Clarissa Dickson Wright noted in her 2011 book A History of English Food, afternoon tea’s ‘delicate little sandwiches’ are ‘a culinary art form in themselves’. It was a lady’s maid who taught her how to cut slender slices of bread by heating a sharpened steel knife in a jug of boiling water and then wiping it dry. Sir Winston Churchill, who insisted ‘the bread must be wafer-thin, nothing more than a vehicle to convey the filling to the stomach’, would have approved.

The cucumber, too, should be sliced ‘very finely,’ Dickson Wright recommended. ‘Leave it to stand with some salt on it, then rinse the salt off and add a little oil and pepper.’ Mrs Beeton added ‘vinegar or lemon juice’ for acidity; and, in her 1894 tome Sandwiches, the pioneering American domestic scientist Sarah Tyson Rorer took the art form to extremes, requiring us to soak the sliced cucumber in iced water for one to two hours to make them ‘crisp and brittle’.

Let no one say that the cucumber sandwich is simple or ordinary. Food writers Hilda Leyel and Olga Hartley were surely on the right path when they proposed in The Gentle Art of Cookery of 1925 that such delicious morsels warrant a degree of formality. ‘The proper accompaniment of a sandwich is not the schoolboy’s ginger beer or railway station coffee,’ they assert, ‘but a glass of Champagne.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There are few addresses in London more exposed to the city’s relentless pace than Hotel Café Royal in Piccadilly. Outside, tourists mill underneath flashing billboards. Inside, however, the caramel-hued marble walls of the original entranceway off Regent Street give the space a calm, decadent quality, totally removed from the urgency of the world beyond.

This tone continues seamlessly into the main lobby, designed by Piero Lissoni, with its double-height ceilings, dramatic chandelier and restrained palette punctuated by bold floral arrangements.

The building itself has lived many lives. Most famously, it was home to the Café Royal, which opened in 1865 when Daniel Nicols transformed a former oilcloth warehouse into something altogether more glamorous. London society’s answer to a Parisian salon, Café Royal became one of the capital’s great meeting places. Oscar Wilde dined here, Sir Winston Churchill entertained here, David Bowie celebrated here and figures as varied as Virginia Woolf and Muhammad Ali passed through its doors.

When the property reopened as a hotel in 2012 — after a renovation overseen by Sir David Chipperfield — the neighbouring buildings were absorbed into the development, expanding its footprint into the sweeping site it occupies today. Part contemporary luxury hotel, part custodian of a remarkable history, it balances old-world grandeur with modern expectations.

The rooms

My room followed the familiar neutral palette: tranquil and understated. Although, one element that was by no means understated was the freestanding marble bath.

I have a deep appreciation for a bath, and this marble masterpiece did not disappoint. Few things rival a piping-hot soak, a glass of Laurent-Perrier Champagne in hand, and the pleasure of feeding oneself grapes like a Roman empress. It is the kind of bath in which one could happily lose all sense of time. I very nearly did, forgetting for a moment that I was not, in fact, Roman nobility, but a Country Life employee rapidly running late for a drinks reservation.

The rooms broadly follow two design styles: Portland and Mansard. The former mimics the Portland stone of Regent Street, the latter favours fumed oak panelling. The signature suites, however, are the jewels in the hotel's crown, each with a distinct character — my favourite being the Dome Suite.

As its name might suggest, this suite sits beneath a vast domed ceiling, which, I am told, can transform into a star-filled night sky at the flick of a switch. Beneath it lies every conceivable comfort: an enormous bed, a double-sized bath, a colossal television and sound system, not to mention expansive terraces offering spectacular views across London. It is a room overflowing with sex appeal, equally suited to a romantic hideaway or a raucous party.

Eating and drinking

Guests at Hotel Café Royal are spoiled for choice when it comes to eating and drinking.

There's Alex Dilling which serves refined French cuisine in an intimate setting, and Café Royal Grill which offers classic British dishes and afternoon tea. While dining here beneath gilded ceilings, a pianist tinkling in the background as we sipped wine and polished off the last of our sticky toffee pudding, we felt as though we had stepped back into an era as golden as the room itself.

Other options include Cakes & Bubbles by Albert Adrià and The Gallery, for an informal breakfast.

The Green Bar was our watering hole of choice — moody and atmospheric, its name and colour scheme nod to former patron Oscar Wilde and his fondness for absinthe. It’s not the only bar to reference a former patron: Ziggy’s Bar was inspired by David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust farewell party.

How they’ll keep you busy

The Akasha spa is a destination in itself, spanning three floors and more than 1,200 square metres. Expect a full menu of treatments, alongside a pool, jacuzzi, sauna and steam room.

And then there’s the location. Right in the heart of the West End, the city is at your disposal: the energy of Soho, the elegance of Mayfair, and London’s best-known landmarks, theatres, restaurants and bars are all within easy reach. Deluxe Suite guests can even explore in style with a chauffeur service available for up to five hours a day, as well as a house car for local drop-offs.

Who it’s for

Hotel Café Royal positions itself as a modern grand hotel — one that genuinely tries to be all things to all people. The result is a broad, international mix of guests with an atmosphere and clientele that shifts with the seasons. Put simply, a businessman could feel as comfortable here as a family enjoying a holiday or a couple on a romantic city break.

What gives it the wow factor?

It’s the personal touches and precision that set it apart. From Champagne, fruit, chocolates and a welcome message on the mirror on arrival, to monogrammed pillowcases — every detail felt carefully considered.

Triple-glazed windows shut out the city entirely, while the turndown service included a soft mat beside the bed so your feet never met the floor — my own cold, harsh bedroom floorboards have felt jarring ever since.

Add to that the fact that the hotel welcomes dogs, and it's hard to find fault.

The one thing we’d change

If there's one question mark, it's whether the hotel tries to be too many things to too many people, both in its aesthetic and offering. With so many styles and identities woven together, its sense of cohesion occasionally feels diluted.

Rooms at Hotel Café Royal start from £600 a night; the Grand Regent Suite starts from £3,165. Visit the hotel's website for more information and to book.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

Charlie the smooth black-and-tan dachshund

Charlie — aka King Charles or HRH — is an extra-large dachshund with an extra-large personality and appetite. He is most likely to be found stretched out in a patch of sunshine or occupying the exact chair you vacated three seconds earlier, preferably while it’s still warm.

His greatest talent is interior design: using his remarkably strong snout to rearrange chairs into strategic positions from which otherwise inaccessible food can be reached. This ingenuity once resulted in the consumption of an entire packet of Marks and Spencer's Outrageously Chocolatey Dark Chocolate Rounds and a frantic Friday night trip to the emergency vet. He has taught me many things, but vigilance is chief among them.

Despite being permanently starved — according to Charlie, not his vet — he is outrageously cuddly. His most prized possession is Stanley, our tiny, blind and deaf 14-year-old dachshund, whom he absolutely adores. Life, according to Charlie, would be perfect if I were more generous with snacks and stopped mentioning the word ‘diet’.

Florence Allen

Zippy the Australian kelpie

Despite her breed’s reputation as Australia’s most dependable sheepdog, my 13-year-old kelpie is inexplicably terrified of sheep and cows. She will swim across fast-flowing rivers or commando-crawl through hedges to avoid crossing paths with them.

Her favourite game involves stealing golf balls in play from the course near the beach in Devon and racing off towards the water with them in her mouth. She's always utterly baffled when the golfers don’t cry out with delight and join in.

Her most impressive talent is her ability to escape. She once jumped a five-foot fence in order to embark on an adventure aboard a longboat down the River Thames. What has my dog taught me? That not all dogs calm down with age.

Even when we're nowhere near a beach, Zippy will somehow find one. Despite her escape artist antics, she is utterly irresistible (except, perhaps, her breath). She only wishes I took sticks as seriously as she does.

Bella Fulford

Dominic the cocker pug

When Dominic was a (long-legged) puppy, and to some extent even now, he totally destroyed anything he could get his teeth and paws on.

We previously had a homely, ie untidy, farmhouse kitchen, but today it is minimalist due to Dom. Some of his 'activities' have included eating everything in the fruit bowl, including bananas in their skins, ripping the blinds (now there are none), chewing a hand off the clock despite it being hung high on the wall, pulling the air fryer off the surface and completely separating the electric plug from the wire once it was on the floor, plus grabbing milk bottles in his mouth (the ones that were soaking in the sink to be washed later) and jumping down and smashing them on the floor.

He's more recently taken to jumping off the (high) garden wall and out into the road. He'll then do a 'circuit' around the road and jump the five-bar gate back into the yard where he is 'secure' again — until the next time. His favourite day to do this is Monday because this is recycling day.

His most prized possession is his bed (he can't, of course, have a lovely fluffy bed or he would eat it). He sleeps in his crate with a blanket and because he's so frenetic during the day by 10.30pm he's so ready for bed he can't wait to get there. He sleeps like the living dead.

In the last few months he's become slightly less naughty and extremely appealing. He has the most gorgeous face, and he's soft and squishy and wouldn't hurt a fly (although he loves chasing my six cats). He's also highly intelligent and knows instantly when he's done something naughty. We don't even need to tell him.

Julie Harding

Chequers the Jack Russell

Chequers can do plant recognition. If he sees nettles or thistles or gorse from several paces ahead, there is no way he will proceed without being picked up. He can also detect a hedgehog through 18-inch-thick walls and shut windows.

He once killed an enormous rat. I was worried he would let it go and was rushing around after him, swearing and wielding a shovel, but he despatched it and then did a victory lap of honour around the garden. Because of him, I've learned to run ever faster.

He's most likely to be found watching the BBC News at Ten. He takes it very seriously and likes the racing and tennis as well.

I love his long nose (like Beatrix Potter's Pickles) and short legs, his markings (especially the spot by his tail) and his way of snuggling up under your arm. He can pay a visitor no greater compliment than to fall sound asleep on them.

Kate Green

Dolly Parton the (suspected) kokoni

I knew Dolly was mine the moment I saw her little clown face peeking out at me from the social media account of a respected animal-rescue charity in Romania, after I had been considering dog ownership for some months.

I had always said that my first dog would be called Dolly Parton; this one was already christened Dolly. It was meant to be. 'That dog is far too ugly to be named after Dolly Parton,' offered a friend, clearly unaware that one must never say this about someone's baby (to their face).

The dog who had lived off Romanian street rubbish and arrived so hungry she once swallowed a rat whole soon settled in beneath my desk at the Country Life offices and learnt that she was now too good for dry dog biscuit. A saint with children, but a devil on the lead, I will never have another dog as devoted to me as this one.

Victoria Marston

Nimrod and Rocky the black and yellow labradors

My partners in canine crime are Nimrod, an eight-year-old black labrador, and Rocky, a four-year-old yellow labrador. Although they’re both (allegedly) working dogs, who excel (ahem, are you listening, Nim?) in the shooting field — in truth, they are pets, sofa slugs and my most treasured companions.

They follow in the pawprints of fellow black labs, Boot, Dinky and Sock, and I’d be utterly lost without them. Nimmy specialises in stealing the toys belonging to our neighbours’ obliging sprocker, Wilson — his favourite is a fluffy capybara, which he will only retrieve to hand in return for a spoonful of Greek yoghurt. Rocky, meanwhile, has 37 field-trial champions in his pedigree and will actually give you the game bird you asked him to fetch without demanding a snack tax.

Despite being rather too officious about border patrol around my cottage — the postman gets shouted at every time he approaches — both are first-class cuddlers and emotional-support operatives. If they could, they’d abolish my job so that, at 4pm, they would not have to stare so intently, willing me to step away from the laptop to feed them. As I constantly remind them, however, one of us has to work if we’re to afford their twice-daily equivalent of Cheerios.

Paula Minchin

Daisy the working cocker spaniel

Daisy is an expert thief and often works as a tag team with Ernie the cat who will bat items off the kitchen table with his paw and then jump down before Daisy has golloped up all the spilt milk/ham/toast etc.

When young there was nothing Daisy could not consume with no repercussions other than human rage — an entire pat of French butter; an almost full packet of chocolate bourbons, a dish of lasagne from the cafe opposite and, over the years, numerous slices of Colin the Caterpillar birthday cake.

She got her comeuppance though when she swallowed a packet of rat poison. The vet nobly left off watching the Rugby World Cup final to administer an emetic and when we picked up her from the surgery declared her to be the most stupid dog he had ever treated because she wagged her tail throughout the procedure. But then she did win a red rosette in the village fête Waggiest Tailed Dog competition.

Tiffany Daneff

Patzy the Patterjack

Patzy didn't have the best start in life. She was abused (the vet thinks she's blind in one eye because she was kicked in the head) and abandoned, went on the run for three weeks, and is fearful of most men, especially if they're wearing big boots.

Despite being dealt a very bad hand, her most endearing quality is her determination to try and make the most of every day. She's now 14 (probably), but still gets the daily zoomies and likes to help with most activities (at the moment it's putting out buckets of water for wild animals; she's also partial to a yoga class). In recent years she's even warmed to strangers and, as long as things progress on her terms, will use their legs as a scratching post.

Her favourite thing in the entire world is my parent's bed (she's evicted my dad from it — he has to sleep in the guest bedroom) and running water. She will happily wreck a perfectly good hose and turn it into a sieve, or stand in a stream for hours and hours and bite at the water in a vain attempt to stop it — sort of like King Canute and his waves. How she hasn't waterboarded herself is beyond me.

Rosie Paterson

The late 17th century witnessed a fashion for deeply moulded plasterwork decoration incorporating festoons of naturalistic flowers and foliage, treatment echoed in the contemporary sculpture of Grinling Gibbons. Inspiration for all this work came from Dutch art of the period, including still lifes. Few places show this work off better than the spectacular decorative plaster ceilings at Thirlestane Castle.

Thirlestane Castle was transformed in the 1670s by the Duke of Lauderdale, then the effective Regent of Scotland. His work to the castle was undertaken by the mason Robert Mylne and the architect Sir William Bruce, both of whom were concurrently employed by Lauderdale in the renovation of the royal palace at Holyrood, Edinburgh.

The ceiling of this room — formerly the dining chamber, and now part of the drawing room — is one in a series in the first-floor chambers at Thirlestane created by George Dunsterfield, a member of the London Company of Plaisterers, who came to Scotland at government expense in October 1673 to work at Holyrood.

This example, notionally supported at each corner on the backs of eagles, was completed by January 1676.

The brilliant white finish of plaster ceilings was ideal for reflecting light into rooms. Here, the detailing is lightly picked out in gold — and the other rooms show similar levels of workmanship.

Edward Maitland-Carew — whose family has been here since the 13th century — stands beneath this magnificent work and marvels.

‘These ceilings are wonderful works of craftsmanship,' he says, 'and, with their rich detailing, bring these rooms to life.’

Thirlestane Castle is open to visitors, and regularly hosts weddings, events and film shoots — see the website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Histories of whisky often start with romantic waffle about Irish monks, misty glens or even Arabic alchemists. I’m not going to include any of that, because the truth is that uisce beatha, the Gaelic for water of life from which we get ‘whisky’, would have been nothing like the complex, golden spirit that is appreciated around the world today.

Whisky’s origins are also neither ancient nor mysterious — they are rooted firmly in the Victorian era. High-alcohol spirits made from cereals have been produced in the British Isles since at least the 15th century. These would have been flavoured with herbs and much closer to herbal liqueurs such as Chartreuse or a rough kind of gin.

Whisky as we know it came about when distillers sold their goods to taverns, merchants or private houses, which kept old barrels that had once contained Port, rum or sherry and used them to store the spirit. People noticed that the wood had a positive effect, softening the fiery liquid and adding sweet and spicy flavours. It would, however, be a long time before ageing in this way became systematic.

Two distinct styles of spirit emerged in Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the Highlands, small-scale distillation using only malted barley was the norm and, most of the time, this was done illicitly to evade the taxman.

In the more urban Lowlands, production was industrial and made use of other cereals, including oats, wheat and rye. Much of the end product was sent south to London to make gin. This was probably the best use for it: Robert Burns described Lowland whisky as a ‘rascally liquor’.

In Ireland, a different tradition developed, based on spirits made from mixed cereals, but produced to a higher standard than the rudimentary Lowland product. When George IV visited Scotland in 1822, he asked to try the fabled — but illegal — Glenlivet. The former Prince Regent, notorious for his gluttony and womanising, proved quite a hit north of the border, parading down Princes Street in Edinburgh in Royal Stuart tartan ‘to the roaring cheers of the loyal Scots,’ according to the historian Sir John Plumb in his 1956 book The First Four Georges.

The following year, 1823, was a momentous one in the development of Scotch whisky: it saw the passing of the Excise Act, which liberalised distilling and provided greater resources and powers to excise officers. Glenlivet, under Capt George Smith, became legal and, in the years that followed, dozens of distilleries were officially founded, among them Macallan in 1824 and Talisker in 1830. They were appreciated by Scots connoisseurs, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who saluted ‘The king o’ drinks, as I conceive it, Talisker, Isla, or Glenlivet!’ in his 1887 poem The Scotsman’s Return From Abroad.

Most, however, encountered whisky in a rather different form: the growth of Scotch whisky was driven not by distillers, but by blenders, who ‘not only created the blended whiskies that still dominate sales around the world, but also shaped the style of the single malts that enthusiasts relish so much,’ says Nick Morgan, author of the Johnnie Walker history A Long Stride.

These blends owed their existence to an invention in 1830 of the Coffey Still, which enabled cheap, reliable alcohol to be produced. Although the results lacked the flavour of the Highland spirit made in a traditional pot still, shopkeepers such as John Walker in Kilmarnock and John Dewar in Perth discovered that blending them with malt whisky created a consistent product. Those plentiful sherry casks had an important role to play, as confirmed in 1864 by William Sanderson, creator of the VAT 69 blend, who wrote that ‘it is well known that whisky stored in sherry casks soon acquires a mellow softness’.

For most of the 19th century, however, the whisky capital of the Empire was not in Scotland — it was in Ireland. The big four Dublin distillers, Roe & Co, Powers, John Jameson and William Jameson, had giant pot stills in which they distilled a mixture of malted barley and other grains. They were ahead of the curve: the Irish were ageing their whiskies in sherry casks at a time when much Scotch was still being drunk unaged. The big distillers did not market their own products directly; instead, they sold to so-called whiskey bonders, who aged and sold it on (it is telling that two of the greatest Irish whiskey brands, Gilbey’s Redbreast and Mitchell & Sons’ Green Spot, were created by wine merchants).

They were also rather dismissive of marketing altogether, explains Irish historian Fionnán O’Connor: ‘John Jameson did not want to advertise at railway stations. Could they not drop off cards at better addresses in London?’ Contrast that with the energy of a firm such as Dewar’s. Founded in Perth in 1846, its White Label whisky was targeted at fashionable London society and designed to be drunk with soda water.

The Scots were cashing in on a gap in the market left by Cognac, which was in short supply following the outbreak of phylloxera in France in the 1870s. The company’s marketing was cutting edge: in 1898, Tommy Dewar commissioned the world’s first cinema advertisement for whisky. It was made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and featured paintings of Scotsmen in tartan regalia coming to life when the laird of a castle pours himself a wee dram.

Like much of whisky advertising at the time and, indeed, ever since, it plays on romantic stereotypes of Highland culture. Dewar’s London headquarters on the South Bank had an enormous electric sign installed in 1911 depicting a Highlander in a tam o’ shanter raising a glass of White Label; when he drank, his beard and kilt swayed. The Irish were left behind by such high-tech methods.

Even before the War of Independence (1919–21), the industry was in decline; then came Prohibition, which wiped out the American market, and a disastrous trade war with Britain in the 1930s. By the 1970s, Ireland was down to two distilleries: Bushmills in the north and Irish Distillers in Cork, which continued making Powers and Jameson.

It wasn’t all plain sailing for Scotch whisky either. The boom years were interrupted by the collapse of Pattisons in 1898, a whisky blender owing millions of pounds to distillers. The firm had inflated its profits through dodgy book-keeping, like the Enron of whisky.

Many distilleries went bust then or later when the industry was hit hard by the First World War, the Depression and the prohibitionist tendencies of the teetotal Welsh prime minister Lloyd George. However, the government also passed legislation in 1916 stating that Scotch whisky had to be aged for a minimum of three years, which guaranteed quality. The industry consolidated into larger groups, the most dominant of which was the Distillers Company Limited (DCL), which by 1925 owned both Dewar’s and Johnnie Walker.

Whereas Ireland was in decline and the Americans had wrecked their own industry with Prohibition, Scotch was in good shape to conquer the world. Light, fruity whiskies — J&B, Cutty Sark — were developed to appeal to the American palate, which wasn’t used to the bold flavours of heavier blends. Europe and Latin America took to Scotch in a big way, as Johnnie Walker achieved iconic status in India and the Arab world. Indian drinks consultant Ruchira Neotia notes that everyone in India has an opinion on Johnnie Walker the way they do about cricket.

In Japan, an emerging industrial giant, Scotch whisky became the ultimate status symbol in the 1950s and 1960s: younger Japanese were looking to forget the privations of war and embrace Western culture exemplified by American sports such as baseball and, naturally, Scotch whisky. However, the Japanese were not content simply to drink whisky — they imitated it with a domestic industry that dates back to when chemist and businessman Masataka Taketsuru studied in Scotland between 1918 and 1920. He brought that expertise home, first at Suntory, today the dominant force in Japanese whisky (as featured in the Bill Murray film Lost in Translation), and then to his own company, Nikka. Japanese whisky was rarely seen outside of its home country in the 1960s and is treated as a novelty in the 1964 James Bond novel You Only Live Twice.

Blended Scotch still bestrode the world, but change was afoot. Single malts — whiskies from a single distillery — were yet to venture far from Scotland, as they were thought too distinctive for wider tastes. William Grant & Sons believed otherwise and, from 1963, began promoting its Glenfiddich malt, followed by others, such as Glenlivet and Macallan. ‘There was a lot of overproduction [in the 1980s], which led to more availability of aged stock,’ explains Dawn Davies of the Whisky Exchange. ‘Single malts were a way to stand out from the crowd and present a more premium product.’

A rival, however, was being developed closer to home. Whisky-loving Norfolk farmer James Nelstrop noticed how much of his barley was going north to Scotland to be distilled and wondered why he could not do it himself. He duly built a distillery, hired an ex-Laphroaig distiller and released England’s first whisky of modern times. It’s a curious historical footnote that some whisky was made in England during Victorian times, but the last distillery in the Lea Valley in east London closed in 1905, unable to compete with the Scots.

Nelstrop wasn’t the only one. A Cornish company, Hicks & Healey, began distilling in 2003, but didn’t release a whisky until 2011, and in Wales Stephen Davies founded the Penderyn Distillery in 2000. He encountered some difficulties explaining his wares, once encountering a man at a whisky show who kept referring to Penderyn as ‘Scotch’, before asking if Wales was ‘an island off Scotland’.

All over Britain and Ireland, small distilleries sprang up in the 2000s and 2010s, seeking to offer something different from the legacy Irish and Scotch industries. Whisky boomed as never before and the giants such as Jim Beam in America, William Grant & Sons with Glenfiddich and Irish Distillers dramatically increased production. Speculative money flooded in all over the world, driving prices to ludicrous levels, so that, in 2023, a bottle of 1926 Macallan sold at auction for £2.1 million.

Japanese whisky became highly sought after when Jim Murray, author of the influential Whisky Bible, selected a Yamazaki single-malt sherry cask as his World Whisky of the Year in 2015, describing it as ‘near-incredible genius’.

It felt as if the good times would never end. They did, however. Falling demand caused by an ageing clientele, an inability to recruit younger drinkers and stagnating economies in its largest markets were exacerbated by rising interest rates, higher energy costs and global instability. One whisky executive commented bitterly on the Ukraine war that ‘my biggest export market invaded my second biggest’.

The perennial problem with whisky is that because it takes time to mature, a minimum of three years, distillers always have to anticipate future demand, which means the industry is prone to cycles of boom and bust as production over-shoots. We are in a low phase now, with the American industry particularly badly affected. However, as Georgie Bell of The Heart Cut, an independent bottler that buys interesting whiskies to sell under its own brand, observes: ‘We talk about whisky being in dark times, but perhaps we should take a more global approach to that. When you look at certain whisky markets, such as Nigeria, India and China, things are booming.’

Whisky has come a long way from the wild days of illegal stills and smuggling, thanks to the energetic Victorians who marketed their wares with such élan. If it can channel some of their spirit then, despite the current troubles, it will remain the world’s most popular spirit for years to come.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

A week or so ago, as the sun blazed in Italy, and the temperature displays outside the pharmacies headed into the 40s, I made a deal with myself. Next summer, we'll be holidaying in Scotland.

The only issue I imagined I'd have is deciding exactly where where to go — or so I thought. As it happened, immediately on my return I immediately came across the perfect Scottish home in which to take refuge from Europe's increasingly-brutal summers: Ronachan House.

It's a home that looks perfect for the climate change-era, a place from where I'll be able to enjoy the beauty of Scotland, bask in the perfectly temperate, not-too-hot and not-too-cold weather, and enjoy a sun that warms pleasantly without turning you lobster-red within 15 minutes.

It's even a perfect spot for dreamy sunsets: the house is on the west coast of the Kintyre Peninsula, about 40 miles directly north of the Mull of Kintyre, less than 20 minutes from Tarbert, and about a 35-minute drive from Campbeltown.

All that now separates me from my dream home in Scotland is the small matter of the £2.1 million I'll need to buy Ronachan House in Clachan, through the nice people at Strutt & Parker.

This Category B-listed in Clachan is as fine inside as it is outside. The place has been meticulously restored over the past 20 years, ensuring it offers luxury accommodation across three levels, retaining architectural grandeur together with chic decor.

The 13-bedroom house, dating from the Victorian era, is constructed from warm sandstone and features steeply pitched gables, tall clustered chimneys, finely detailed stonework, symmetrical bay windows and generous sashes from that time.

The agent refers to the three-storey Ronachan House as ‘a celebration of original period detailing’. The main house has seven bedrooms in total, with the principal suit sounding like a true joy, 'comprising a spacious bedroom, separate sitting area overlooking the bay and a beautifully appointed bathroom with roll-top bath and marble-tiled walk-in shower.'

The kitchen forms the heart of the ground floor, centred around a generous island and thoughtfully designed to lend itself to both entertaining and the daily rhythms of family life.

It barely needs pointing out, of course, but we'd be remiss not to add that the views from this 10½-acre property, set in a secluded position on the west coast’s Kintyre Peninsula, are exceptional. You can look out across the sea to the Inner Hebrides islands of Islay, Jura and Gigha.

There are also three dwellings beyond the main house: the Coach House, the Look Out and North Lodge, with three, one and two bedrooms respectively. A grand main house, and plenty of spots for guests? This really is a property that pretty much ticks every box.

There's a small chance (ok, quite a large chance) that I won' t quite get the required funds together in time to buy Ronachan House, so if it's if you who ends up buying it first, please feel free to pop me an invitation via Country Life. And I'll see you there next summer.

Ronachan House is for sale through Strutt & Parker — see more details.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

In an increasingly digital, mechanised world, it’s hard to resist anything that bears the mark of slow and considered craftsmanship and deep cultural symbolism.

Traditional Kuba cloth, a distinctive, graphic textile from the Congo region, is a fine example, admired by designers for its abstract pattern and textural beauty, which can be layered into rooms as wall hangings and cushions.

Hand woven from local raffia palm fibre — split into fine strips — on hand-operated looms using centuries-old techniques, Kuba cloth is known for its bold, geometric and often intricate design. Vegetable dyes enliven the natural tawny colours of the fibre.

There are two main types: flatwoven cloths with embroidery or appliqué and cut-pile ‘velvet’ cloths. The result offers a window on Africa’s rich textile history and specifically the artistic legacy of the Kuba Kingdom, which flourished from the 17th to the 19th centuries in Central Africa, now the heart of today’s Democratic Republic of Congo.

Made for everything from sleeping mats to prestige pieces, as well as ceremonial and funerary attire, Kuba cloth has had a lasting influence on art and design and is widely considered a precursor to modern abstract art. Henri Matisse (1869–1954) acquired examples of Kuba cloth and he is said to have remarked: ‘I never tire of looking at them for long periods of time, even the simplest of them, and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry.’

Some early examples of Kuba cloth still exist, as Bryan Reeves of gallery Tribal Gathering London explains. ‘Although things made from fibre don’t last forever, it is still possible to find late-19th-century pieces,’ he says. ‘They have the distinctive geometric quality, as well as a lovely sense of movement and a free-flowing design, less structured than later pieces, which is what I look for.’ Reeves recommends reading Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa by Vanessa Drake Moraga (The Textile Museum).

Recently, the striking, graphic quality has inspired contemporary designs, such as printed cushions by Raj Tent Club, linen by Titley and Marr and cotton by Warwick Fabrics. Yet, Kuba cloth remains a deeply artisanal product, woven on traditional hand looms and finished with layered surface decoration to create the distinctively graphic result.

The demand for Kuba cloth in modern interiors is helping to preserve the techniques of its craftsmanship, as Ben Nel, co-founder of Botanical Boys explains. ‘Every cushion sold helps keep this weaving tradition alive,’ he says. ‘You can feel the hand in every thread — a kind of soul no machine will ever copy.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside.

Do your wurst

The loyal and dashing little dachshund is rapidly growing in popularity. Smitten owners tell Matthew Dennison of their fondness for the sausage dog

Once more into the breeches

Madeleine Silver assesses the distinctive school uniforms that add to the allure of our top educational establishments

Changing gears

Some service stations are miles ahead of the competition, as Will Hosie discovers when he hits the road in search of the best — and worst — in Britain

It was their day in the sun

Kate Green looks back over 65 years of Burghley Horse Trials in Lincolnshire to showcase equine winners of all shapes and sizes

The king and I

Titian earned a reputation as a money-chasing mercenary, but was he merely seeking what he was owed, asks Carla Passino

Tabish Khan’s favourite painting

The art critic and curator picks a work that has been a constant image in his life from childhood

Country-house treasure

John Goodall admires the 500-year-old French Gothic arch that welcomes visitors to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire

A temple of Art

Steven Brindle visits the neo-Classical Lady Lever Art Gallery on Merseyside, home to one of the great British collections

The legacy

Kate Green still finds food for thought in Jocasta Innes’s The Pauper’s Cookbook from 1971

‘Your English summer’s done’

John Lewis-Stempel is breath-less as he contemplates the season’s last lingering days

Luxury

Amie Elizabeth White on bags and Burberry, plus a few of Scott Brash’s favourite things

Interiors

Show your home in its best light with Amelia Thorpe’s pick of stylish outdoor illumination

High-summer splendour

Charles Quest-Ritson marvels at the six spectacular acres at Cedar House in Warwickshire

Travel

It’s a done Deal for Richard MacKichan as he visits this born-again Kent coastal town

Arts & antiques

Painting is poetry in motion for Rory Hutton and Dan Llywelyn Hall, as they tell Carla Passino

And much more

There is much to see and do in Monterey in August during car week, and many of those things to see and do involve looking at, or driving, very expensive cars. It is also a time for manufacturers to show us new cars, with the Sauron-like gaze of the world’s smartphones beaming down on this small slice of central California.

It is perhaps indicative of the world we now live in that you can feel extremely present at an event occurring more than 5,000 miles away simply by clicking follow on a few Instagram accounts and letting the algorithm do the rest. Koenigseggs, Lamborghinis and whatever else doing burnouts along various beach-side roads while people chatter excitedly on voice-overs about just how impressive said car is and valuable and rare. Sheets are pulled off new designs and prototypes to various oohs and ahhs of assembled Ozempians. Cutting through is not easy, because at Monterey, there is always a bigger four-wheeled fish lurking right around the corner.

The McLaren McL 6GT is not the biggest fish, but it was certainly the most prized reveal of the week. Rumours had been swirling for some time that McLaren were releasing their first ‘manual’ car since the F1 ceased production in 1998. Those rumours swelled to a crescendo on August 14, when the McL 6GT blinked into existence and the internet roared its approval.

If such a thing as a prevailing wind exists in the world of car design, then it is surely blowing towards the past. The McL 6GT is inspired by (and takes most of its name from) Bruce McLaren’s own M6GT, the ‘genesis of McLaren’s road cars’. In the words of McLaren Automotive CEO: ‘The McLaren McL 6GT imagines what our inspirational founder had wished to complete but with six additional decades of innovation and passion woven through every element, creating a modern icon of driver connection.’

That 60 years of innovation might be found underneath the car's clean Can-Am lines, but the exterior is very much a celebration of the past. If you could criticise McLaren (and indeed many other sports- and supercar manufacturers), it would be that too many of their machines look like they were born on computers and grew up in wind tunnels; 3D-printed steaks wrapped in carbon fibre.

What they have lacked is provenance — a story, a feeling, something to talk to a petrol-station admirer or a dinner-party guest that is more than just numbers. The irony is, of course, that McLaren has plenty. It feels like it's finally manifested in the McL 6GT, a machine that looks like it was designed by a human with a pencil. There is a sense of heritage to the whole thing that feels timeless. A Kammback tail certainly helps.

And, of course, the manual gearbox. McLaren has always taken great care in trying not to overindulge their drivers, eschewing endless screens and buttons in order to keep the driving experience pure. And now with a full manual in the range, the experience is complete. Surely it will only be a matter of time before customers are asking for manual boxes in their own cars.

Could this be the beginning of a new dawn in the direction of design for the gang at Woking? It’s too early to say, but there is so much to like with the McL6GT that it feels the pressure will be hard to resist. The vintage McLaren badges, ‘Speedy Kiwi’ details and proper big headlights all feel like the beginning of a counter-revolution. McLaren will always make spaceships that people will buy, but so much of the joy of the brand is the story. Competition comes in many forms, but the most compelling argument will never be numbers, but sensations, heritage and style.

So, here is your answer. In between the palm trees, Pacific Ocean and plastic, what stood out wasn’t something new, but something quite obviously old. Not a race to the end of a quarter mile, nor bending the physics of drag in a wind tunnel. Rather, a carefully thought-out piece of human design, drawing together the many elements of a business and philosophy that began for so many of us on a bedroom wall. If you want to win Monterey Car Week, the solution is to keep it simple.

Nick Paluch of Savills is excited. The reason? A house called The Lookout, with what the agent describes as 'the most extensive views in Guernsey.'

‘The Lookout is one of the most exciting properties I have been involved with in recent years,' says Nick. 'Opportunities of this nature simply do not come to the market.' So let's take a look at what's got him so pumped up.

As its name implies, The Lookout — which is for sale at £2.95 million — is based around a striking 66ft high tower. Originally a, 19th-century granite mill, it's set in just over 2¼ acres of grounds near Bordeaux Harbour, on the north-eastern corner of the island.

The views are fantastic, naturally, but just as exciting as the tower and millhouse is the lake — created from an former quarry — that's included, giving rise to all sorts of possibilities for the new owners, and a series of CGI pictures on the listing show images of people happily paddleboarding and so forth.

No doubt you've already spotted the catch, courtesy of those three letters C, G and I. The Lookout hasn't yet become a home of any sort, much less one with a handsome timber deck from which to paddleboard. It's very much a work in progress, rather than a finished-and-finalised contemporary home.

The fact that it hasn't been done yet does also mean that there is, subject to planning approval, flexibility for the new owners. The agent and vendor have very much leaned in to that, supplying a host of examples of what could be don here: there are terraces, bridges, walkways, stairs and jetties that give the whole thing a sort of Swiss Family Robinson vibe. And also something of a Bond villain vibe.

That's not to say that the place is a starting-from-scratch job, for extensive work has taken place already at The Lookout to get the ball rolling, in terms of the site and existing buildings. But this is absolutely a project for a new owner blessed with both vision and deep pockets.

Formerly known as Vale Mill, the Lookout was originally built from wood in 1770, before being rebuilt in 1854 in granite. It operated as a flour mill until the Germans occupied the island in 1940, whereupon they used it as an observation tower (hence, The Lookout). It was purchased by James Ridout’s father in 2008, and James has been restoring the site ever since.

James has also secured planning permission for the renovation and extension, and managed to get the house on Guernsey's Open Market (meaning it can be bought by anybody with UK residency, rather than just Guernsey residents).

The prize at the end of all the work done by the new owner will be a home with about 7,000sq ft of accommodation, together with a triple garage and a floating summerhouse.

If dealing with the headaches of getting that done sounds a bit too much like taking on a second job, James is offering the option of a full-build contract, subject to separate negotiations.

‘It’s taken a lot of hard work and perseverance to get to this point — and it’s not been without its challenges — but we’re now in a position where we feel the mill and surrounding site are ready to be taken to the next stage,’ James says.

The planning permission (secured in 2020) is for a four-bedroom house, featuring a kitchen/dining area, utility room, and breakfast room, as well as a substantial basement extension that would cantilever out over the adjoining quarry. Surely you would need an underground tunnel of some kind to connect the two, in true Bond-villain style? Don’t worry, it’s already been planned. Ernst Stavro Blofeld would be proud.

‘There’s nothing like it on the island. It’s a one-of-a-kind property and the views from the top of the tower are beyond compare,' James adds.

'They’re the best in Guernsey. You can see out to sea for miles around.’

The Lookout is for sale with Savills for £2.95 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

Carolyn Rose Ramsay can finally enjoy a Jersey Royal potato salad again.

The artistic director of Ballet d’Jèrri has just moved into new premises in St Helier, having hitherto worked out of potato grower Albert Bartlett’s packing shed, where a sprung floor was installed among the pallets. The fledgling company was grateful — large indoor practice spaces are hard to come by in the Channel Islands — but dance had to pirouette around harvest.

Now, there’s no being sidelined by spuds, as Ballet d’Jèrri has taken up permanent residence at the recently refurbished Jersey Opera House. With about 1,000 applicants from around the world competing for nine positions within the organisation, Ramsay had her pick of talented dancers, who are currently working with community groups to create a new production of The Nutcracker (November 26–29).

It has been a long time since Jersey put on its own version of the Tchaikovsky classic. The festive favourite is part of a new year-round programme of theatre, music, talks and other events now possible due to the opera house’s renovation.

Originally opened in 1865, the venue suffered several fires — a common issue in wooden buildings that relied on candlelight — and was rebuilt in various forms. The cream façade with its arched windows and Art Deco style places this latest version firmly at the turn of the 20th century.

The 2020 pandemic closure provided an opportunity for necessary refurbishment, and the opera house ‘went dark’. (Historically, theatres used to leave a candle in the centre of the stage during such fallow periods, probably contributing to those ubiquitous fires.) Now, with the £12.7 million project complete, the opera house has reopened.

‘The theatre is a cultural crown jewel for the Channel Islands,’ says Sebastian Warrack, Jersey Opera House’s CEO. ‘The building work involved essential maintenance, such as structural repairs and installing low-carbon heating systems, but what’s most obvious to visitors is the auditorium, which has new seating, carpets and improved accessibility.’

I last visited the venue in 2011 during the Liberation International Music Festival, an annual event that marks Jersey’s freedom from German occupation. The balding red velvet has since been replaced by a sleek blue pile, the colour tastefully reflecting the lapis-lazuli and gold-leaf ceiling. The original Edwardian and Victorian plasterwork details across the horse-shoe balconies have been carefully reinstated, with the gilt garlands gleaming once more.

At a glance, the theatre is not that far removed from the venue Lillie Langtry opened in 1900. Warrack became the custodian designate of this shiny-as-new building a few months after the lights went back on, taking up the appointment at the start of this year. Many elements are complete (including the island’s only purpose-built dance studio, home to Ballet d’Jèrri), but there’s still work in progress as the government-funded refurbishment did not include technical equipment. ‘I’m glad to say that we have raised more than £1 million, largely thanks to an anonymous independent donor, so we can make further improvements to the lighting and sound equipment,’ Warrack says.

These include additions that Langtry would never have imagined: a state-of-the-art fly tower, razzle-dazzle lighting and all the digital wizardry needed to host touring productions. Hiding behind the opera house’s proscenium arch is a complex history, coloured recently by the same challenges affecting the performing arts everywhere. All of these, and more besides, are known to Warrack, who previously served as joint chief executive of Wiltshire Creative (co-managing the merger of Salisbury Playhouse, Salisbury Arts Centre and Salisbury International Arts Festival), a tenure that overlapped with the Novichok poisonings.

Then, just as Salisbury was getting back on its feet, covid arrived. The appeal of relocating to the Channel Islands is easy to see. Warrack was wooed by the beautiful, often near-empty beaches. ‘Being able to get to the sea in five minutes is a rather lovely perk,’ he says. ‘I encourage our visiting artists to book here at the end of their tour. Coming to Jersey is coming for a jolly.’

Ramsay, originally from Vancouver, Canada, settled in the Channel Islands in rather more unusual circumstances. Having danced with Miami City Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo and the Norwegian National Ballet among others, an injury led her to move into Arts administration and she took up a role in Jersey. It was 2020 and, with the borders closed: ‘I got stuck here,’ she says. ‘It was fantastic.’

Jersey Opera House is a misnomer: there has never been a full-time Jersey opera company, although opera regularly features. When I speak to Warrack, the venue is about to screen Opéra de Rennes’s production of three-act comic opera Robinson Crusoe by Offenbach, performed by Orchestre National de Bretagne and conductor Guillaume Tourniaire.

However, programming is wide: vocal quartet G4 brings its ‘Phantoms of the Popera’ show (September 12–13) and Jersey Chamber Orchestra plays Mozart by Candlelight on October 10.

Body-builders are also as likely to be encountered as bassoons. Events such as the UKBFF Channel Islands Wellness & Physique Competition take place at the opera house. ‘I want all of Jersey to feel welcome here,’ says Warrack, comparing the venue to Derbyshire’s equally multi-purpose Buxton Opera House, which hosts the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival together with comedy such as Harry Enfield shows.

Inviting newcomers to a potato shed or Fort Regent, Jersey’s medieval bastion that has been everything from a garrison to a leisure centre and Arts venue, always required ‘a bit of explanation,’ Ramsay says with a smile. Now, whether it’s for panto or Puccini, there’s a more traditional space awaiting audiences. The artistic director is delighted: ‘It gives me so much pride when we bring visitors to the opera house for the first time and say: “This is our National Theatre.”’

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

Country Life has joined forces with London Square to present an evening promising rather more sparkle than the average drinks reception.

On Wednesday, September 23, from 6pm until 8pm, readers are invited to 25 Bruton Place — the newly established private venue of London Square and parent company Aldar, whose reputation for delivering some of the capital’s most covetable addresses precedes it — for a showcase of Kiki McDonough’s fine jewellery.

Holder of a Royal Warrant and a long time favourite of The Princess of Wales, Kiki McDonough has built her eponymous house on a simple, joyful premise: that a coloured gemstone, chosen for its character as much as its beauty, need never apologise for delighting the eye.

Guests will hear the story behind the brand’s founding and view a selection of her bespoke and signature pieces at close quarters.

London Square has gained a fine reputation for the sensitive restoration of heritage buildings, giving them renewed purpose for the 21st century.

Among its notable projects are the remodelling of the Grade II-listed Royal Star and Garter Building on Richmond Hill, the renovation of Toynbee Hall in Spitalfields and the conversion of a former pickle factory and a tannery in Bermondsey.

The occasion marks the latest grand project for London Square: the transformation of the former Surrey County Hall, a Grade II*-listed essay in the classical manner, set upon 5.2 handsome acres in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.

Long the seat of local governance, the building’s stately bones now shelter boutique apartments and duplexes of considerable quality, complete with contemporary new builds. Completion is anticipated from late autumn 2026, with prices starting from £450,000. Two show homes now stand open for viewing.

Residents shall want for little: a round-the-clock concierge, a yoga studio, a private screening room, a games parlour and co-working spaces besides.

Glasses will be kept topped up throughout by Gusbourne, which will be providing the sparkling wine for the evening. The estate planted its first vines in Appledore, Kent, in 2004, with a vision to craft the world’s finest sparkling wines. That ambition has shaped a quality-obsessed approach, continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible in English wine, and Gusbourne remains unwavering in what makes it distinctive: producing vintage-only wines from estate-grown, hand-harvested grapes.

Country Life readers wishing to attend the Bruton Place event on September 23 please RSVP@londonsquare.co.uk.

Those interested in arranging a private viewing of County Hall Kingston may contact the London Square Sales Team on 0333–666 0107, write to countyhallkingston@londonsquare.co.uk or consult countyhallkingston.co.uk

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

They say you can't have your cake and eat it. While that might be true for cakes and other perishable items, it is very much not the case for nice houses in the countryside. Thanks to the wonders of technology and taste, you can have a house that, from the outside, looks like a lovely period home, but on the inside is a contemporary and comfortable family home with all the modern trimmings.

One such example would be the delightful Westfield House.

Edward Douglas-Home of Knight Frank in Edinburgh is seeking ‘offers over £2.5m’ for Category B-listed Westfield House, which is set in 18 acres of elegantly landscaped gardens, woodland and paddocks between Harburn and Calder in fashionable West Lothian, 21 miles from Edinburgh and 30 miles from Glasgow.

The handsome, early-19th- century country house sits centrally amid its grounds and is approached, like all good things must be, via a long tree-lined drive. The property itself offers more than 6,400sq ft of stylish, light-filled accommodation on three floors, including a conservatory, sun room, office, three reception rooms, a vast kitchen/dining room, six bedrooms and four bathrooms.

The interiors have been finished to an exceptionally high standard, featuring a joyful mix of contemporary and period touches throughout. Highlights are the spacious conservatory, which comes with its own attached bar space. When it comes to entertaining spaces, this is right up there.

Another highlight is the principal bedroom suite on the first floor, which features an en-suite bathroom with free-standing copper bath and a steam room, dressing room and nursery room.

Outbuildings include barns, garaging, workshops and excellent equestrian facilities, such as a 40-metre by 20-metre dressage arena with a sand and rubber surface and 12 loose boxes in either barns and purpose built stables.

The gardens contain sweeping lawns, terraces and well-stocked borders, while further afield from the house, woodland, paddocks and a pond edged with low planting, reeds and a timber-decked seating area to enjoy the tranquility of the water.

Situated just south of the town of Livingston, the property is flanked by Edinburgh to the east and Glasgow to the west, occupying one of the more desirable parts of southern Scotland. When it comes to the best of both worlds, location matters as much as style. Thankfully, Westfield House has both.

Westfield House is for sale with Knight Frank for £2.5 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

‘Gold has taken me to places I’d never have otherwise visited,’ Vincent Thurkettle says, as we stand on the deserted platform of Sanquar train station in Dumfries and Galloway. Like Bilbo Baggins, wrenched from his cosy home in The Shire, I have traded my loyal sofa for a remote Scottish river. The destination is the same — a cornucopia of riches. With Vincent as my Gandalf, I am going on an adventure. We are hunting for gold.

The journey begins with my housemate’s engagement. On returning from her holiday she held her left hand aloft and a ring sparkled tantalisingly. Beyond the congratulations, I wondered: where did that gold come from? Why do we prize it so highly? And what had it gone through before ending up on her finger? That is why I am in Scotland.

On our walk to Vincent’s car to begin our day’s panning, he notices a five pence piece on the floor. It is this Gollum-like pull to shiny objects that led Vincent, aged 49, to quit his full-time job. Ever since, he has been battling an incurable sickness: gold fever.

On our way to Wanlockhead, the (often debated) highest village in Scotland, Vincent tells me his story. He worked for the Forestry Commission for 28 years as the deputy director for the East of England, before chucking it all in to pursue gold panning full-time. He found the largest gold nugget (at the time) in Britain, worth an estimated £50,000, off the coast of Anglesey in 2012; it weighed 97 grams. It was pipped to being the largest by a 121.3 gram nugget found in 2019.

He also came fourth in this year's gold prospecting British championships, losing out to the current British champion Daisy, his daughter. Now, he has written a new book. Finding Gold: My life-changing treasure hunt with nature, in which he tries to explain civilisation’s magnetic draw to this honey-coloured metal.

Gold is 4 billion years old — older than the Earth itself. It was formed when massive stars exploded and when neutron stars collided. This became mixed with cosmic dust and rock when our solar system formed, which is how gold came to be spread deep within the Earth’s crust in small quantities. Landslides, volcanic activity, high pressure and erosion have brought it closer to the surface, and our tools for finding it have become much more advanced. It is usually found in quartz and river deposits (like the one we are searching today) where it has been washed by erosion.

In its pure form gold is very malleable and non-reactive. It is also very heavy — it has a specific gravity of 19.3, meaning that a piece of pure gold is 19.3 times heavier than the exact same volume of water, which makes it sink to the bottom of our rivers. It is this heaviness that allows for panning.

‘It is a treasure hunt,’ he says. ‘The river has hidden a few tiny specks of gold, and it's an incredible challenge to find them.’

He also runs gold prospecting courses for those wishing to acquire the Midas touch — telling them about how to gain licences to legally pan for gold, where to go to do so, how to use a gold pan, and so on. ‘On YouTube, half the people finding big gold nuggets are lying. They're painted stones. There are a lot of charlatans,’ Vincent explains. Everyone from divorcees to the dying attend his courses. Gold seems to give people hope. ‘It’s an enormous range,’ says Vincent. ‘Maybe 25% of people who come on the course are hurting.’ On a happier note, many are also looking to propose with a ring made, at least in part, of gold they’ve found themselves.

We arrive at the river and gather the various tools needed from Vincent’s car. Equipped with two gold pans, a pick axe (that I admit, does worry me at first, given that I am in a remote location with a man I have never met before), water pump, vials for our spoils, and Wellington boots, we trudge into the water. His favourite way to pan for gold is by lying face down in the river in a wetsuit with a knife, chipping away for nuggets. I decide sitting on a rock will be sufficient for today. After a bit of deliberating, Vincent chooses a spot — a reasonably shallow cranny where he thinks gold may be lurking.

He uses the pick axe to break away a few rocks, then, with the pump, extracts a pan’s worth of residue from the river bed. We will work this particular part of the river bed until it’s ‘clean’, Vincent says. I sit on a nearby rock and watch as he rakes the lighter material off the top of the surface with his fingers. Then begins the painstaking process of swirling the material around the pan and gently sifting off the lighter debris into the river. Eventually, small shiny things begin to reveal themselves amid the rubble. ‘There, there!’ I shout excitedly.

With the weariness of a man that has heard this many times before, Vincent informs me: ‘There’s a phrase in gold panning: If you think that it's gold, it isn't.’ He is, of course, right. I have spotted a shiny stone, not a gold nugget.

After a while, Vincent gets down to the real dregs of his pan. ‘Are you ready not to be impressed?’ he asks, pointing towards something that I can barely see, perhaps a quarter of the size of a grain of sugar. ‘To be a gold prospector in Britain you need to have good eyesight,’ he jokes.

Excitingly, we have found gold on our first attempt. Less excitingly, it is miniscule. ‘They’re not the size of baked beans — they’re the size of full stops,’ Vincent explains, of the nuggets to be found in the UK, before adding: ‘A full stop would be a generous one.’ Our tiny bounty, however, proves that the spot Vincent has chosen is worth plundering.

We return to the crevice and suck up a new load of rubble. It is my turn. Holding the gold pan on my knee, I carefully sift and sort for what feels like hours as the baking sun beats down. I am growing weary until one swirl reveals an unmistakable semi-circle of yellow shininess.

‘It’s gold. It is!’ I shout to Vincent, sure this time that I can’t have been mistaken. He starts to repeat the old adage until he spots my glowing haul. I have struck gold on my very first try and, compared to our previous haul, it is practically a mine. Around 20 small nuggets, all considerably larger than our first find, wink up at me. The feeling is exhilarating and all thoughts of my aching back, wet socks, and surely sunburnt neck are banished. Vincent beams, his smile almost as bright as the gold in my pan. ‘You’ve experienced the best of it,’ he says to me, safely ushering the precious cargo into a vial. ‘That’s yours to keep.’ I feel myself come over by something almost incurable. The excitement is almost unbearable. Gold fever is catching.

Panning with Vincent in a remote Scottish river isn’t the only way to find gold, otherwise people would have to propose with Haribo rings. Many do it on a more industrial scale. John Reade is a senior market strategist at the World Gold Council, a membership organisation that champions gold’s role as an asset. Their members are large scale gold mining companies that ‘produce’ gold around the world, of which there are 29 in total. Newmont and Barrick are the biggest and most famous.

‘These are very, very different from your Scottish gold panners,’ John confirms. ‘These are companies that that mine millions of tons of rock a year — hundreds of millions of tons — and produce, each of them, millions of ounces of gold.

‘They concentrate it to 70%-80% pure. It then goes to refineries that turn that concentrated gold into pure gold, and those refineries turn it into coins, bars and jewellery industry feedstock.’

How sustainable is this practice? According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, each year about 3,000-3,700 tons of pure gold is mined. ‘There’s around 55,000 tons of gold in reserves — that’s gold that is known to mining companies,’ John says, but he is confident that we will continue mining gold ‘for the foreseeable future’. However, he warns, it is ‘getting harder to find gold and to get the environmental and social permits you need to start a gold mine’. Gold is mined on every continent except Antarctica, but less than 1% of global gold production comes from Europe.

It’s clear that John could talk about this all day. ‘You’re literally just scratching the surface,’ he says, ‘talking to someone who used to work 2,000 metres below the surface. That gold in the ring on your friend’s finger could contain gold that was mined by the Incas, it could have been on the fingers of pharaohs’ — it could also have been, theoretically, a gold tooth that was chewing jellied eels in the mouth of an East End gangster. Nevertheless, I am keen to move onto the next stage in my journey from river to ring. For this I need to talk to a gold trader.

‘Gold is a continually fluctuating commodity,’ says Jon White, who launched Gold-Traders (UK) Ltd in 2008. ‘It’s no different to oil or wheat or any other commodity that is traded on the open markets, so every minute of the day, just like stocks and shares, the price goes up or down.’ In 2026, the price of gold hit an all time high. ‘Primarily because of international conflict going on overseas… but gold is the primary commodity we come to in times of instability.’

The irony is that gold is technically almost ‘useless’. ‘Obviously it’s used in jewellery and recognised as a store of wealth, but from an industrial perspective it has very little reuse,’ Jon says. ‘But it is the safest way that you can tie up your assets in times of instability, because there will always be someone who wants to buy it from you.’

Unfortunately, the trading of precious metals is entirely unregulated, meaning it’s down to the consumer to determine whether they’re being offered a fair price for their gold, although Jon is campaigning to get the law changed to introduce more transparency in the market. Much ‘recycled’ gold also has a tragic history. Plenty was mined by slaves, and plenty of innocent blood was spilled to acquire it. Nevertheless, our demand for it endures.

Perhaps this is because we associate it with gods and kings. Perhaps it is because we associate it with tangible coins. Maybe it is because gold cannot truly be destroyed, as it is a noble metal it doesn’t tarnish, corrode or rust and cannot be broken down by a single acid. I imagine it also has something to do with it being rather beautiful. Either way, it seems a fitting metal with which to pledge a lifelong devotion.

‘Every single gram of gold that has ever existed since the Big Bang, when planet Earth was first created, still exists on our planet — apart from the gold that's now been sent up into space, that’s floating around in satellites or sitting on the surface of the moon,’ says Jon.

Cassandra Goad, who makes fine jewellery in London, is likewise smitten with the metal. ‘It’s the magical brilliance, for me, of nature producing this metal from the earth, and then this holding of stories and history within it that is so important.’ But the gold market has not been kind to jewellers this year. ‘Inevitably one is affected by the price of gold. Of course you are. I mean it was terrible at the beginning of the year because the price just went ridiculous,’ she says. Her fellow jewellers agree.

In January, I spoke to Cece Fein-Hughes of Cece Jewellery. ‘It’s really stressful,’ she said. ‘We are going to increase our prices soon. We have to. It makes me really upset, because it just suddenly cuts out a whole market of people for fine jewellery.’

In the same month, Sheherazade Goldsmith, the brains behind Loquet London, agreed. ‘Being a jeweller, because you're affected so much by the price of gold, you know what's going on. I sort of know when the price of gold is going to go up again just because of what's happening in the news,’ she said. ‘We opened the year with war in Venezuela, and the Chinese looking at Taiwan, and basically with the Americans deciding that they can just go and depose anyone they like.’

Cassandra, however, is still doing lots of business. Her customers either have gold jewellery they'd like turned into something new, or want a new piece entirely. ‘Most gold nowadays is, by definition, recycled,’ she says. ‘Gold, in its purest form, is almost as soft as silver, and therefore it's completely useless to have a ring made of 24-carat gold because it'll just bend all over the place.’ In order to change the mechanical properties of the ring, it is alloyed with different elements like copper, zinc and silver, to improve its hardiness. The highest and most expensive carat that is really used in jewellery making is 22. Eighteen-carat gold, for example, has 75% pure gold in the alloy.

Cassandra begins by melting down the gold in a small crucible, then pouring it into a steel skillet. This creates a rod of gold, which she’ll then ‘pickle’ in some acid, clean and hammer it and then run it through rolling mills. She will shape the ring and size it, soldering the joint on the band, before sending it off to be assayed.

This is the final step in our journey, before a ring gets into the sweaty anxious palm of someone set to propose. Will Evans, the director of the London Assay Office at The Goldsmiths' Company, is responsible for making sure gold is what its makers say it is. ‘We've been testing precious metals here at the Goldsmiths’ Company for almost 700 years,’ he says.

‘Gold is the one thing that you can't really judge by looking at it. Nine carat and 22 carat and brass all have vaguely similar visible properties, so somebody has to check, and in the UK, the person who checks is not the same person as the one who made it or is selling it to you.’ This process is called hallmarking.

First, the assay office tests the gold product, in this case our wedding ring, using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry — a non-destructive technique used to determine the elemental composition of materials. ‘Sometimes, especially if people are mixing various types of new gold and old gold, they get their calculations wrong,’ Will says. ‘Sometimes people may do it nefariously to try and pass things off as a higher standard. So that's what we're doing. We're making sure that when you buy a piece, you're getting what you pay for in terms of the precious metal.’ Once the hallmarking process is complete, and pieces stamped with the legal seal of approval — at Will’s company their emblem is a leopard’s head — the pieces are ready to be sold.

‘There is no diamond fever or sapphire fever or palladium or platinum fever, but there is a gold fever,’ Vincent said to me, as we left the river behind, and now I see why. It is a multi-faceted element. All at once totally useless and at the same time enduringly desirable. ‘People get obsessed about gold, and it seems like almost every civilisation on Earth has, throughout time,’ he said..After all, Bilbo wouldn’t have gone all the way to Erebor if the dwarvish treasure trove was made up of platinum. Likewise, I’m sure my friend would’ve said yes to a wooden ring, but the fact that she has a gold one makes it just that bit more special.

The only surprise about Methley Hall’s demise is that it didn't come sooner. Demolished in 1963, the writing had been firmly etched on the wall of the West Yorkshire property since at least the Victorian era. 

Methley Hall was purchased by John Savile in 1588. His descendants who go on to become the the Earls of Mexborough.

Despite being extensively remodelled by Anthony Salvin in the 1830’s, the property was regularly left unoccupied and fell into a state of considerable disrepair. However, it was to be offered a brief reprieve from one of industrial Victorian Yorkshire’s greatest figures. 

Titus Salt — the Bradford mill owner, politician and renowned philanthropist who created the Victorian model village of Saltaire — moved into the hall on a vastly reduced rent in 1858.

Salt, with all his entrepreneurial vigour and connections, took on the task of repairing the dilapidated mansion, enlisting architects, joiners and craftsmen. The roof was made sound, the gardens made more pleasurable and the rooms were redecorated. The deer park was fenced with smart new iron railings to keep the aforementioned gardens clear of ruminating bucks and does.

According to a census, Salt had moved back to his beloved Bradford by 1871.

Country Life’s 1907 architecture feature on the lofty pile was far from optimistic about its situation. It opened: 'Methley… is a great house in a park, caught, to its misfortune, by a net of railways that make for Leeds, Dewsbury and Wakefield. All the discomfort of Yorkshire prosperity is at hand; the drift of smoke comes down the air from far-distant chimneys, collieries throw up their dark mounds and the water of the Calder flows inkily foul from the washing of shoddy [a recycled wool product].'

This far-from bucolic scene was worsened by what was going on underground. Somewhere underneath the hall's castellated towers, miners were toiling day in, day out to bring precious coal to the surface of the Savile Mine. 

In 1916, the 5th Earl died. The 6th owned the more practical and pastoral Arden Hall in Hawnby, North York Moors, and did not move in. Instead, it was used to entertain visiting royalty and for shooting parties.

It must have been kept in a fairly good state because, in 1935, newspaper reports indicate that Queen Mary popped in for tea, following a visit to an antique shop in Pontefract where she was much amused by a clock that chimed God Save the King.

Four years later, Methley Hall was, like so many other great houses, requisitioned for the war. By the time it was returned to the Mexboroughs, it was in a bad state.

In 1949, it was reported that the Ministry of Fuel and Power were to begin open-cast mining in Methley Park. It was hoped that the 60-room, 15th-century mansion could be bought and repurposed as a school or hospital, but just nine years later, mining activity had made it all the way up the park and to the front door.

Suffering from considerable subsidence, dry rot and, to add insult to injury, the theft of lead from the roof, a decision was reluctantly made to bring the grande dame down.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

A month ago, preparing this magazine’s London Life pages for August, I wrote that the city is at its most verdant in summer. Our trees usually reach their apogee this season. How wrong I was.

The prolongation of the heatwave, despite last week's intermittent rain, means the trees are now experiencing so much stress that they have started shedding their leaves. Autumn has come early.

Perhaps none has suffered more than the apple tree. Orchards across the country started losing their fruit in July when the trees were forced to redirect wilting water reserves to their roots in order to survive. It is forecast to be one of the worst apple harvests in history — a nightmare for cider-makers. ‘The effect won’t be seen until 2027,’ says Nick Showering, whose family has been making cider in Somerset for 180 years, ‘when this year’s yield translates to sales.’

Last year produced one of the richest yields on record. Although not as voluminous as in previous years, 2025 benefited from last summer’s then record-breaking sunshine and produced an unusually, delightfully sweet mixture. Apples of exceptional potency translated to top-notch drinks. The fine cider on sale this summer has been phenomenal.

Too much heat, however, can be fatal. Until last week, it hadn't rained properly in the West Country — cradle of British cider-making — since late June. Producers are expected to make a heavy loss in 2027. Suggestions, from some, to diversify a specialist industry are as oxymoronic as they seem inconceivable.

Importing apples, meanwhile, offers little in the way of compensation. ‘Producers in Europe are most likely experiencing similar issues,’ Nick explains. ‘It would constitute an additional cost to import and potentially dilute [our] product’s quality.’ A fine cider, akin to the one made by his family, prides itself on using local ingredients. For more mass-market brands, a few things could still be done. ‘Instead of importing apples,’ Nick says, ‘they might look to import apple concentrate’: that is, transporting a higher density of product across borders at a lower cost.

As is the case for other, equally water-reliant industries, creating infrastructure to capture the winter rain is paramount to preserve our orchards’ future. Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992: the result of red tape and resistance from residents near suggested sites. This is neither fair nor right. Cider is one of our greatest and proudest creations — an industry with huge potential as changing tastes lean in favour of lighter booze and national produce.

Supporting our makers goes beyond merely buying their products: it demands a proper strategy. Even our most robust trees need deep watering in times of drought.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It’s easy to feel sorry for French presidents of late. I’m not talking about the constant strikes; resistance to raising the retirement age and lifting the cap on the 35-hour working week; the rise of the far-right and the radical-left; debt, immigration, Islamic terrorism, hi-viz-wrapped rioters, and wildfires. I’m talking about the official state cars they have to squeeze into the back of.

Governing the Fifth Republic is no easy task, made worse by some of the pretty awful motors seen parked outside the Élysée during the past half century. Poor Jacques Chirac suffered the brunt. His presidency (1995-2007) spanned the Citroën XM, the Renault Safrane and the Peugeot 607.

Things weren’t much better for François Mitterand, his predecessor, who did his best to maintain dignity in a Renault 25 and the particularly wretched Renault 30 hatchback. Imagine if Margaret Thatcher had been driven around in a mk1 Vauxhall Astra and you get the idea. It doesn’t exactly whisper ‘CEO of the nation’.

If you’re the premier of a country that doesn’t have a recognised car industry, the answer is simple: You get a Mercedes S-Class, specifically its armoured 680 Guard derivative. If you’re the Chancellor of Germany, the answer’s even simpler. If you’re the President of the USA, you get the 9,000kg Cadillac Beast, which is actually built on a truck chassis and maxes out at just 60mph. If you’re Vladimir Putin you get the Russian-built Aurus Senat limousine, which goes some way to explaining his anger management issues.

And if you’re one of our many recent Prime Ministers, you have a choice of Range Rover Sentinel or, if you insist on a saloon, the long-wheelbase Audi A8L. That’s because Jaguar haven’t built a saloon since 2019. The shame is not entirely France’s. I say stick Burnham in a Bentley, although if he had his way he’d probably be on a Lambretta.

Things started off pretty well for our Gallic chums. Before the Second World War, France was a leader in luxury automobiles. In the 1910s, the official car was the Panhard 20V, followed by the Renault 40CV in the 1920s, and in the 1930s les présidents had Renault’s Reinastella convertible and Nerva Grand Sport. After the war, President René Coty was chauffeured in Citroën’s iconic Traction Avant.

Charles de Gaulle followed him in 1959 by ushering in the Fifth Republic and the elegant Citroën DS, which became a big part of his image, mainly because it saved him from a hail of gunfire. Next, Georges Pompidou commissioned two special open top Citroën SM’s. This was peak avant-garde. And then, in the late 1970s, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing approved the Peugeot 604 and France could never be taken seriously as a superpower ever again.

France makes decent family cars. They’re not as stylish as the Italians do them, nor as well-built as the Germans, but they tend to be jolly and relatively cheap. What they have always struggled with since the 1970s is luxury, which is weird when you think Cartier, Chanel, Hermès, Dior and Louis Vuitton are [checks label], yep, definitely French. Every 10 years, Renault and Citroën will have another go, wheeling out the avant-garde tropes, never entirely convincingly. Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s successor, had the quirky Renault Vel Satis and the handsome Citroën C6, but they were replaced by François Holland and the equally bloated and disappointing Renault Espace V.

So what of the current incumbent, Emmanuel Macron? His ride to the top table of western diplomacy has been SUV crossover-shaped, in the form of the DS 7 Crossback, the Renault Rafale, and the car I’ve been driving this week: the all-electric DS No.8.

Citroën have taken the name of the car with which De Gaulle escaped assassination, and made a whole new brand out of it. It’s pronounced ‘Day Ess’, and is a sort of Lexus to Citroën’s Toyota. The flagship’s name is No.8, which makes it sound like a perfume. I shall refer to it as the Numero Huit.

Is it a saloon, a hatchback, a fastback or an SUV? Everything, all at once! There’s a lot going on in the amalgamate design. A mix of lines, folds and strakes going in lots of different directions. In the flesh, the Numero Huit looks quite stylish, but if it snatched your phone you’d have a dickens of a time describing it to the police e-fitter.

Inside, it’s smart but also quite eccentric, as if Jean-Paul Sartre were clad in Nappa leather and had eight speakers bolted onto him courtesy of French audio specialists Focal. The X-shaped steering wheel looks like it’s been liberated from a concept car. I tested the top-of-the-line Étoile spec Numero Huit with all-wheel-drive and a 97.2kWh long-range battery that’s good for 430 leisurely miles. The dual electric motors produce 350bhp. That’s more sensible than existential, but results in a respectable 0-62mph in 5.4 seconds. Top speed is 118mph — faster than Mr Trump’s obese Caddy, at least.

The emphasis is not on shifting, but wafting. This car is as smooth and silky as a Charvet shirt and tie (as worn by De Gaule, Mitterand, Pompidou and Macron), and yet the car I drove is £63,290. That’s pretty impressive for this amount of space and presidential refinement. It’s a budget Bentley. Bentley’s Flying Spur starts at £190k — and would cause the proletariat to dig out the guillotine. Whereas the Day Ess Numero Huit will save your neck, at least until the next union action grinds everything to a halt. And it will do so with more than a soupçon of French veuve.

So felicitations, Emmanuel, things in the Élysée car park stakes are finally looking up again.

‘Ugh! What hideous brutes!’ was the remark overheard by Country Life’s correspondent attending the Bulldog Club show in 1904. However, as the magazine reported only five years earlier, only the ‘uninitiated’ call a bulldog ugly, and ‘those who are admitted to the privilege of a bulldog’s friendship know that no other cast of features is so expressive of all the kindly and good emotions’.

It may be that the bulldog’s rugged appearance is a ‘cultivated taste’, stated the magazine in 1939, ‘but at second glance we understand that he is not half so bad as he looks. He is reliable partly because he has a quiet confidence in his own powers, and, like most strong men, he is not going to presume on his own strength.’

Of all Britain’s native breeds of dog, the bulldog is the one most associated with our desirable national characteristics. Staunch and stoic, whether at home or abroad, matter-of-fact John Bull is not correctly depicted unless there is a bulldog at his side. Indeed, synonymous with ‘tenacity, courage, and determination’, the bulldog is the very symbol of Britain and, as Country Life noted in 1995, ‘in times of national peril, the bulldog appears in cartoons, festooned in the Union Jack, jaw thrust forward with determination, eyes indicating that not an inch of ground will be yielded’.

As their name suggests, they were originally bred to bait bulls, a brutal pastime that would be enjoyed by many in Britain, including Henry VIII, both his daughters, and James I. The earliest recorded bull-baiting took place at Stamford in Lincolnshire in 1205. William, Earl Warren, of Stamford in Lincolnshire, is said to have enjoyed watching a recalcitrant bull being chased and chivvied through the marketplace by a butcher’s dogs. He granted the town a piece of land so the tussle could take place annually.

Derived from the same line as mastiffs, bulldogs were referred to in The Mayster of Game (1413) as the ‘alaunt of the boucherie’ and described as being large, short-headed, pugnacious, and inclined to hold on when attacking. The bulldog is first mentioned in literature under various names in about 1500 — Bondedogge, Banddogge and Boldogge — and by 1630 it is quite clear from letters of the period that bulldogs and mastiffs were certainly different breeds.

The gladiatorial heavyweight may have had a disreputable past by modern standards, but it certainly did not put off would-be owners. Lord Byron liked powerful dogs — perhaps a reaction to his own physical shortcomings, having been born with a club foot — and in 1807 he acquired two bulldogs at Cambridge. The first was Savage, and then Smut, an animal bred for bullbaiting and considerably nimbler and more ferocious than his modern counterpart.

During Lord Byron’s time in Italy, it is said that he pestered continually for English-bred bulldogs to be sent to him, claiming that the Italian variety lacked ‘the tenacity of tooth and stoicism of his canine fellow citizens’.

The 19th century sounded the death knell for the old bull-baiting type of bulldog when, after much controversy and discussion, Parliament passed the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1835, abolishing the ‘sport’. In Dogs: Their History and Development of 1927, Edward Ash wrote: ‘When bull-baiting ended, the dog was bred for “fancy”, and characteristics desired at an earlier time for fighting and baiting purposes were exaggerated.’

The increasing popularity of dog showing would give the breed a second chance. However, the pages of Country Life would record the debate about the ‘modifications’ to the bulldog’s appearance.

In 1931, Arthur Croxton Smith would note that: ‘In some respects they improved the appearance, replacing the repellant-looking head with one that is distinctive and rather fascinating with its ruggedness. Since the War, however, in many instances we have lost the old body properties, especially the tapering hindquarters and tucked up belly, and here breeders have ample scope for their abilities. Most emphatically, bulldogs ought not to be shown in a condition in which hard muscle is replaced by fat.’

However, Stonehenge pleaded for the perpetuation of the pure breed: ‘If it is allowed to drop, the best means of infusing fresh courage into degenerate strains will be finally lost, except with the addition of extraneous blood, which may not suit them; for I believe that every kind of dog possessed of very high courage owes it to a cross with the bulldog.’

The modern breed was accepted by The Kennel Club in 1873 — the Bulldog Club is the oldest single breed club in the world — and the bulldog remains a Churchillian symbol that has captivated Lewis Hamilton, David Beckham, Ozzy Osbourne and Brad Pitt.

The title of a 1960 comedy starring Norman Wisdom remains one of the most resonant bits of alliteration in our language — The Bulldog Breed.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

Argyll and Bute — £6.5 million

Why just get a house when you can get an entire island? That's what's on offer at Eilean Righ, otherwise known as the King's Island. With 261 acres of land all to yourself, and two three-bedroom homes.

The list of amenities is a mile long, and includes a helicopter hangar, boathouse, garage, workshop and a private shooting range. Wildlife is, of course, abundant.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

Stirlingshire — £2.25 million

Dating from the 1930s, Levern Towers is a distinguished Scots Baronial home set in an expansive rural estate.

Accommodation includes six bedrooms, multiple grand reception rooms and an indoor swimming pool, as well various semi-detached lodge houses. Set in nine acres, which includes gardens, sweeping lawns, tennis court, petanque area and a mini waterfall.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Perthshire — £5.25 million

Balvarran is a glorious estate in the heart of Highland Perthshire of some 2000 acres, that can trace its lineage back to 1554.

The estate, which features a wealth of homes and cottages, is centred around Balvarran House, a B-listed mansion of some nine bedrooms, remodelled and extended by Sir Robert Lorimer.

For sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details and pictures.

South Ayrshire— £3 million

If there was a prize for 'Castle that looks most like a castle', beautiful B-Listed Cloncaird would surely win it.

The estate extends to some 143 acres, and the main castle features 15 bedrooms, a grand event space, various outbuildings and nine further cottages.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Argyll and Bute — £2.1 million

Set above the shores of Ronachan Bay and with sweeping views over the Inner Hebrides, Ronachan House is perfectly positioned to enjoy the best of Scotland's scenery.

The property has been comprehensively restored and refurbished in recent years, and features 13 bedrooms and various cottages on the 10.5 acres of land. Plenty of room for everyone.

For sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details and pictures.

Our understanding of early country estates comes largely from written chronicles rather than maps, but the Elizabethan era marked a turning point. In the second half of the 16th century, Dutch Protestants brought advanced drafting skills and new measuring instruments that honed cartographical accuracy.

These developments coincided with the transformation of the old medieval feudal order under the Tudors: Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries blurred boundaries and created a demand to survey and establish distinct ownership over tracts of land. Enter the estate map, a declaration of status and possession.

Suffolk-born Ralph Agas (1540–1621) is largely known today for his town plans, especially the one he created of Oxford. However, he was also one of the first cartographers to map landed estates, such as Henry Cheney’s Toddington estate in Bedfordshire.

More than 100 years later, the 3rd Duke of Richmond employed Dutch engraver Thomas Yeakell — who had served under him in the army — as his personal surveyor to the Goodwood estate in West Sussex. Yeakell was joined by surveyor William Gardner and the duo became celebrated cartographers, embarking on the first complete mapping of an English county: Sussex.

After Yeakell died, Gardner worked with Thomas Gream to complete the map, which was published in 1797. A precursor to Ordnance Survey maps, it includes a detailed rendition of the medieval park at the Duke of Norfolk’s Arundel Castle and the estate’s Rewell Wood. Every farmhouse, barn and garden is carefully depicted, as well as the type of fence in each enclosure.

‘The map illustrates the area before it became the home farm in 1797, showing the landscape as a mix of ancient woodland and deer park,’ explains Dr John Martin Robinson, librarian to the current Duke. ‘It’s a valuable record of the evolution of the estate and is a landmark in British mapping.’

A 1788 map by Claude Joseph Sauthier, meanwhile, shows Alnwick Castle in Northumberland and its domains. Born in Strasbourg and the son of a saddler, Sauthier trained as an architect and surveyor before sailing to America, where he carried out military mapping for the British colonial government.

In New York, he met Hugh Percy, the future 2nd Duke of Northumberland, who was serving as a British officer during the American War of Independence. When Percy returned to England in 1777, he brought Sauthier with him. Sauthier completed more than 20 maps of the ducal estates, which are still in use today.

‘The forestry department will refer to Sauthier’s maps showing the layout of Capability Brown’s planting efforts in order to guide plans for replanting, for instance,’ notes Ralph Percy, the 12th Duke of Northumberland. ‘They are used in registration of ownership, particularly mineral registrations, and are relevant in relation to planning applications for developing land.’

Modern-day equivalents continue to be commissioned, physically documenting land-holdings of all shapes and sizes. This may seem surprising in an increasingly digital world — yet to many this is the attraction.

‘You may have a 1,000-acre-plus estate, but only a handful of people have a deep knowledge of it and how it works,’ points out sixth-generation Hampshire farmer and owner of Rural Maps Anthony Pelly, who creates maps of all kinds for private landowners worldwide. ‘As that knowledge is being steadily eroded, it needs pinning down. Despite the availability of digital versions, physical maps are still very much in demand: I have been in a room with Gainsboroughs ignored as everyone crowds around an estate map. They invite comment and engagement in a way nothing else does.’

Although estate maps serve as tools for land management, in their decorative form they also present intimate family portraits. Often personalised, today they are more likely to feature a leaping salmon for the keen angler or a ruined Roman temple for the antiquarian than an array of heraldic flourishes.

‘My maps have included cherished details such as a wedding marquee on a hill, a beloved dog or children jumping ponies in the corner of a field,’ continues Pelly. Actual portraits are rare, but this was ever the case: the estate map of Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, of about 1607 is highly unusual in having a medallion portrait of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, at the top of the title cartouche.

Securing their owner’s place in the long line of custodians of the land, these maps serve as a time capsule for future generations. ‘It’s early days, but I would like to see the profession evolve so that when someone buys a significant estate for the first time, they not only employ a gardener, an estate manager and an architect, but a cartographer as well,’ says Pelly.

Estate maps can also reveal hidden features that could present difficulties for owners. ‘We were once instructed on a Cotswolds estate that had been deliberately left to run fallow for 30 years,’ he adds. ‘On site, we found hidden pools of water no one knew about, even the local shepherds. It explained why some of the fields became waterlogged and allowed for drainage to be improved.’

There can also be a poignancy in what is captured. ‘Within field names, you get glimpses into the past,’ observes Edel Fenelon, an artist from Co Carlow in Ireland who draws rural landholdings. ‘They categorise functions, preserve the names of families long gone or record events: you might have Kiln Field, where the bricks were laid out, or Kelly Field, even when the Kellys haven’t lived in the area for hundreds of years.’

The idea for her business sprang from a map she created of her childhood farm as a birthday present for her father. ‘Growing up on a farm, you see how much work and dedication goes into its upkeep and that’s not only one lifetime: you have three, four, maybe five generations working the land for that estate to still exist. The maps show heritage and roots.’

Although many estate maps include farms as part of the demesne, the earliest dedicated farm maps in England and Wales were mid-19th-century tithe maps. An extraordinary achievement, depicting almost every landowner, farm and field — noting whether it was arable, meadow, pasture or woodland — they were commissioned to create a nationwide record so that tithes (payment in kind through crops or livestock) could be replaced by cash.

Today, with more people owning farms than estates, farms are core drivers of the aesthetic map resurgence. ‘On the rural consultancy side, we are seeing more and more people looking for “real-artist” produced plans of their ownership, in particular the owner-occupier farm owner rather than the larger estates,’ confirms Jamie Evans-Freke, who heads the rural asset management team at Knight Frank’s Horsham office in West Sussex.

Capturing the essence of a place is a significant undertaking and, when the artist Aengus Dewar was asked to draw an estate in the north of England, he did detailed research into its history. Uncovering that a Second World War US B17 bomber returning from the infamous Schweinfurt Raid had crashed on the borders of the estate — unknown to the owners — he recorded the event by depicting the plane in the spot where it landed. ‘We live in uncertain times,’ he says. ‘The desire to connect with history and imprint yourself on the landscape, which is enduring, is very natural.’

These maps were reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection and the County Archivist, West Sussex Record Office; Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

On August 10, 1783, the vast forecourt of Curraghmore was the scene of a family tragedy. The 12-year-old son and heir to George, Earl of Tyrone, was killed — according to Joseph Hansard in his History, Topography and Antiquities of the County and City of Waterford (1869) — ‘whilst attempting to jump with a spirited horse, a low wooden paling, which at that time ran across the entrance to the courtyard’. The family was devastated and on a hillside above the house began — but never finished — a memorial that was clearly intended to take the form of a monumental Irish monastic ruin with a commanding round tower and incorporating the medieval west window of Waterford Cathedral.

One cruel irony of this terrible accident was that it occurred at a moment when the family was enjoying enormous public success. The parents of the Earl — Marcus Beresford and Catherine de la Poer, whose transformative alterations to Curraghmore from the 1720s were described last week — had produced a large family of three sons and six daughters.

This is the second in a two-part series on Curraghmore — read the first part here.

Collectively, by marriage and ambition, they established themselves at the heart of the Anglo-Irish political establishment, then at the height of its prosperity, independence and confidence.

One telling reflection of their dynastic assurance is a large family portrait by John Astley of about 1760, modelled on van Dyck’s celebrated depiction of the Herberts at Wilton, Wiltshire, that hangs in the entrance hall of the house.

When the Earl inherited Curraghmore in 1763, he confronted substantial family debts, which he partly satisfied by his marriage to the wealthy heiress Elizabeth Monck in April 1769. As the letterist Mary Delany observed, there was ‘no beauty between them but very good fortune’. Recent research by William Fraher shows that the Earl almost immediately turned his attention to remodelling the house and not in a way that answered his father-in-law’s prudent sense of economy. A letter dated January 25, 1772, shows the Earl in detailed correspondence with the 24-year-old architect James Wyatt about the decoration of different rooms in the house.

This letter is remarkable in part because it pre-dates by two days the event that properly launched Wyatt’s career, the opening of the Pantheon on Oxford Street, London (‘the most beautiful edifice in England’, wrote the dazzled Horace Walpole).

That in turn raises the question of how the patron and architect were introduced. Perhaps they met in Rome, where Wyatt trained. No less remarkable, it establishes Curraghmore as the first of Wyatt’s numerous Irish country-house commissions and already fully formed by his Italian experience in the elegant neo-Classical detailing that had catapulted his rival, Robert Adam, to architectural celebrity in the 1760s.

To his English clients, Wyatt was a brilliant, but exasperating figure, expensive and chaotic. In Ireland, however, which he only visited once in 1785, he worked in partnership with professionals who proved much more reliable. Using the rapidly improving links with England, he was not only able to communicate through the medium of drawings, but send out materials such as Coade stone, manufactured to his designs in Lambeth, London. The result was a series of Irish buildings of superlative quality, including his masterpiece Castle Coole, Co Fermanagh (which he never saw).

Wyatt’s executant architect at Curraghmore was Thomas Penrose, a Quaker from Waterford who, early in his career, had ambitions as a landscape painter. He completely transformed the interior of the house and its main reception rooms within the existing shell of the building. Work continued for a decade and a visitor, Daniel Beaufort, in 1779, described the building as ‘modernised, not quite finished’. Wyatt’s external changes included incorporating the attic level of the house as a third full storey. He must also have inserted the broad tripartite front door and fan light in the medieval castle tower shown in views of about 1800. A Coade stone armorial and stag of St Hubert — the family crest — were also installed above.

From the barrel-vaulted outer hall in the basement of the castle tower, a flight of steps rises to a top-lit corridor that extends to the main staircase hall (Fig 3). Its volume was slightly expanded into the central courtyard of the house to accommodate a single, sweeping stair to the bedrooms above. All the polite rooms are arranged at ground level around three sides of this space. They preserve a rich collection of family paintings and furniture. Some were sympathetically, but extensively restored after a serious fire in 1903.

The grandest interior, on account of its sheer scale, is the dining room (or ‘Eating Room’, as it is termed in the 1772 letter to Wyatt), presumably created by knocking earlier spaces together (Fig 2). Set amid delicate plasterwork around the walls are images of the Olympian gods. In the ceiling are images of the seasons by a different hand, possibly Antonio Zucchi or his wife, Angelica Kauffman. Scarcely less magnificent is the Blue Drawing Room (Fig 5) in the centre of the garden front. Its spectacular ceiling incorporates lunette paintings of Classical gods by Zucchi and tromp l’oeil roundels by the Flemish artist Pieter de Gree (Fig 6).

As Wyatt’s changes to Curraghmore drew to a close, the family basked in success. In 1780, one of the Earl’s younger brothers, William Beresford, who had entered into the church, secured his first episcopal appointment. The following year, the second son, John, who was closely involved in the Georgian rebuilding of Dublin, succeeded in getting work to the city Customs House designed by James Gandon under way. Finally, on February 5, 1783, the Earl attended the splendid celebrations of the newly established chivalric Order of St Patrick in Dublin Castle as one of its 15 founding Knights. Six months later, he was mourning the death of his eldest son.

Whatever the private griefs of the family, the Earl’s good fortune otherwise persisted. He was created Baron Tyrone of Haverfordwest in 1786, a title that brought with it a seat in the English House of Lords, and then Marquess of Waterford in 1789. Between these two events, in December 1787, Prince William Henry (later William IV), came to Curraghmore on an impromptu tour of southern Ireland and was entertained with a ball. The diarist Dorothea Herbert, who lived in neighbouring Carrick-on-Suir, gives a giddy account of the event in her Retrospections of an outcast, praising the newly completed interiors of the house. A fall of snow that night left several carriages stuck in the woods afterwards. Of those returning from the ball, she wrote ‘some lost their shoes, some their caps, and not a few their hearts’.

In 1800, the title passed to the eldest surviving son of 1st Marquess, Henry, who soon afterwards married Susanna Hussey, an heiress of the Seaton Delaval estate in Northumberland. Their eldest son, another Henry, who inherited the title in 1826, was notorious for his wild exploits and practical jokes. They included stealing the birching block from Eton College, where he was educated (it sits in the stair hall of Curraghmore), and literally painting Melton Mowbray red one night with his drunken friends. His greatest obsession, however, was with horses and he hunted long, hard and often.

The repeated judgement of early-19th-century visitors to Curraghmore was that the setting was stupendous (Fig 4), but the house ugly. Presumably, it was to rectify this that, in 1833, the architect Daniel Robertson was invited to draw up proposals for recasting Curraghmore as a sprawling, Tudor Gothic mansion. The plan came to nothing, but, in reflection of Lord Waterford’s driving passion, a vast riding school was constructed beside the entrance court by 1835. It was briefly transformed into a ballroom in 1865 and has clearly been remodelled since.

In 1839, Lord Waterford met his future wife, Louisa, at the famous revival of medieval chivalry undertaken by an exclusive and aristocratic Tory circle of the young and beautiful, the Eglinton Tournament. She was one of two remarkable daughters of Charles Stuart, Baron Stuart de Rothesay, a diplomat and from 1831 creator of Highliffe Castle, Dorset. Her sister, Charlotte, married George, Lord Canning, the last Governor-General and first Viceroy of India. Both were remarkable figures, well travelled, highly articulate and accomplished amateur artists. They were also devoted to each other.

Contrary to almost universal expectation, Louisa’s marriage was settled and happy. She toyed with transforming Curraghmore into an Italian Renaissance palazzo, the newly popular style of the moment, and employed the architect William Burn for the purpose. All was set for the work to begin when Lord Waterford was killed in a widely reported hunting accident. She retired as a widow to Ford Castle, Northumberland, where she famously turned her artistic talents to the decoration of the village school (Country Life, January 15, 2014). The estate now passed to her brother-in-law, a clergyman, and then, in 1866, to John Henry, the 5th Marquess, who — according to a plaque attached to the exterior — ‘restored and renovated’ Curraghmore ‘in the year 1874 at a cost of £25,000’.

His far-reaching work included the creation of a new wing on the garden front, the modernisation of services, the addition of balustrades to the external parapets and the re-fenestration of the building with plate glass windows. He also refronted the tower entrance and added a pediment to the garden façade (Fig 1). The architect was Samuel Ussher Roberts and a report in The Clonmel Chronicle of August 24, 1872, adds that the ‘old-fashioned rough-casting of the entire pile has given place to a coating of the finest Portland cement’. The main contractors involved were from Dublin.

The 5th Marquess had eloped with his first wife, a divorcée, Florence Grosvenor Rowley. She died in childbirth in 1873 and is memorialised in Clonegam Church in a striking top-lit memorial by the sculptor Joseph Boehm (Fig 7). Boehm also added a replacement sculpture of St Hubert’s stag above the front door. More changes to the house followed the succession of Henry, 6th Marquess, in 1895, including the addition of several new chimney pieces commissioned from Mrs Kennedy’s Stone Works in Waterford. Much more significant, however, were the repairs that followed the fire in 1903 that burnt out the top floor of the house.

The 19th-century development of Curraghmore took place against a steadily gathering tide of social unrest in Waterford and Ireland as whole. In 1798, the house was placed under guard and in 1848 cannons and guns were stolen from the property. At this time, the architect William Tinsley, who otherwise developed buildings around the estate, helped fortify the property. During the Great Famine, the Marquess and Viscount set up soup kitchens on their estates, avoiding the deprivation and violence witnessed in some areas, but tensions over tenants’ rights built steadily and the Land Acts from 1870 to 1903 gradually reduced the value of the estate. In 1881, the then Marquess sold the hounds of the Curraghmore Hunt in disgust after several meets were violently interrupted.

The property miraculously survived the house burnings of the Irish civil war in the 1920s and the 20th century was not otherwise an easy one. Nevertheless, it has now emerged into happier times. Curraghmore remains one of the very few great Irish houses still in the hands of its owning family and with its collections intact. For readers of Country Life it is additionally intriguing as the family home of Mark Girouard’s mother, Lady Blanche. After her tragic early death in 1940, Dr Girouard spent regular holidays here and with his aunt at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. These experiences laid the foundations for his interest in architectural history. He wrote up Curraghmore for Country Life in three articles on February 7, 14 and 21, 1963.

The estate is presently in the care of Henry, 9th Marquess and his wife, Amanda, who took responsibility for it in 2015. Their most recent project has been the restoration of the roof, undertaken with the financial support of The Apollo Foundation and overseen by the architect David Sheehan. Other initiatives include the launch of Curraghmore Whiskey by their son, Richard de la Poer Beresford, Earl of Tyrone. As this article appears, the estate is being used for the All Together Now Festival, now in its seventh year, evidence of the ongoing and vibrant development of Curraghmore in the 21st century.

See the Curraghmore House and Gardens website for more details, and to arrange a tour.

Acknowledgements: William Fraher, John Martin Robinson, David Sheehan and Julian Walton

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Inspired by a conversation on sustainable building materials with the designer and presenter Kevin McCloud, Jonathan and Sara Banister built a house made from straw bales and lime plaster on the site of a 1960s bungalow in North Yorkshire. Taking nearly two years to complete, the project was finished in 2018 and features in the revised edition of The Buildings of England: Yorkshire.

Straw-bale construction results in super-insulated, highly sustainable and breathable buildings and this structure features stonework crafted by a York Minster mason and handmade bricks. The four-bedroom house, which is set in 4.5 acres, is now on the market through Savills for £2.75m.

The Lime House, which is set in an H-plan over 2.5 floors (there is a mezzanine), is a home designed for entertaining. The heart of the home is a large kitchen/dining/living room that is attached to the entrance hall, while a barn to the rear of the property is adjoined by a studio, providing further space for fun, games or work.

What is so impressive about the Lime House is how it looks like it’s always been there. Inside, a stone staircase is paired with a vast stone fireplace in the entrance hall, while wooden panelling covers the walls and the ceiling. Throughout, the fixtures and fittings are of a period farmhouse style, and it is quite clear that plenty of reclaimed materials have been used throughout.

But while on the surface the house looks old, it is of course very new. The property embraces modern technology throughout, such as a mechanical ventilation with heat recovery system, triple glazing, underfloor heating, a rainwater harvesting system, solar panels, and PIR lighting. It looks like the old vicarage, but without the bills.

Outside, the property benefits from 4.5 acres of gardens and grounds, including a new natural pond fed by rainwater collected from the house that supports a wide variety of wildlife. The gardens close to the house are formal, before blending into the rolling countryside that surrounds the property, and a small courtyard overlooking a ha-ha makes a fine place for al fresco dining and hosting.

The Lime House is for sale with Savills for £2.75 million. For more information and images, click here.

Highland folklore relates that, upon attending the Braemar Gathering in Aberdeenshire, Queen Victoria was disconsolate to discover that her sporting favourite, Donald Dinnie of Balnacraig, had already taken his turn in the stone-throwing competition, the event with which Braemar was most closely associated.

Hurriedly, an official was sent to ask the strapping Scot if he wouldn’t mind putting the 28lb stone again, for the benefit of the Queen Empress. ‘Aye,’ Dinnie replied. ‘For £2 and not a penny less.’ He got his money. That the Widow of Windsor and the stonemason’s son from Aberdeenshire should be linked in this likely apocryphal tale is apt, for the mismatched pair had done much to make the Highland Games — which had been outlawed for more than 30 years under the 1746 Act of Proscription — into something not only respectable, but fashionable, too.

Queen Victoria had been an enthusiast for Highland sports since attending an early iteration of the Games in 1848 (an event for which she would become patron in 1867). Braemar was convenient for Balmoral Castle and Her Majesty would remain an enthusiastic attendee at the gatherings for more than 50 years. Dinnie, meanwhile, lays claim to being the UK’s first global sporting superstar. Brilliant not only at putting the stone, but also tossing the caber and throwing the hammer, the great Deesider’s world tours ensured that he was recognisable to sports fans from New Zealand to Canada and from San Francisco to Cape Town.

In the late 19th century, the remarkable Scot was as much an international paragon of our island’s athletic prowess as Sir Roger Bannister and Sebastian Coe would later become. Although running, jumping, dancing and the music of bagpipes, fiddles and Gaelic harps play their part in the Highland Games, much as they did in the ancient Olympics, the cornerstone of the games are the ‘heavy events’ at which Dinnie excelled.

As their collective name suggests, these involve throwing mighty objects: hammer, stone, weight or caber. The heavy events have a power, grandeur and simplicity that echo the landscape in which they were created and, although there are subtleties to them that please the expert eye, even those watching for the first time can understand them.

There are no complex offside laws, bewildering umpiring decisions or video assistant referee (VAR) reviews. With a history dating back to the reign of Malcolm III (1058–93), the heavy events are as wreathed in legend as the local glens and lochs and they have created many heroes.

Dinnie was the first of them — a wonder of the Victorian Age to compare to Stephenson’s Rocket. Born in 1837, the Scot could sprint, hurdle, jump (long and high, possibly both at the same time) and pole-vault, as well as toss the caber, putt the stone and throw the hammer. He was Highland Games Champion for 21 straight years, from 1856 to 1876. The man from Balnacraig stood about 6ft tall with 15in biceps, a 48in chest and a bristling moustache. ‘He carried his sixteen stone of bone, flesh and muscle with an ease, grace and elasticity of motion rarely if indeed ever seen in a man of his proportions… his dark, finely moulded features revealed intellectualism of the highest order… his flashing penetrating eyes a sharp native wit,’ gushed the correspondent of The North Star.

He also had a swagger that bordered on arrogance. Often, he was so confident of victory he would toss the caber without bothering to take off his jacket. On other occasions, he issued a challenge to beat any other man’s two throws with one of his own. Bets and challenges added to his prize winnings (Highland Games competitors were and would remain professionals) and it’s said that, during his 50-year career, he won more than 11,000 events.

His global tours earned him about £25,000 (the equivalent of about £2 million today). Sadly, as many great sports-people did, he spent merrily and invested unwisely. Shortly before his death in 1916, he was reported to be ‘eking out a bare existence in Croydon’ — a cruel fate for any man.

The tartan-clad gladiators who followed in Dinnie’s considerable shadow might not have enjoyed the same global celebrity, but they were no less colourful. There was the ‘Highland Adonis’, who would go on to have an ill-fated assignation with a Hollywood film star. This was dark-haired Jay Scott, who stood 6ft 2in in his stocking feet and had powerful muscles developed from rowing himself to school across Loch Lomond from the family farm on Inchmurrin Island.

Scott was a superb all-round athlete who excelled not only at the heavy events, but also at running and jumping. Handsome and charismatic, during his 1950s heyday, the rugged farmer was as unstoppable as a runaway train. At the games in Tobermory on the Hebridean island of Mull, he once carried off first prize in all the heavy events, as well as the 100yd and 200yd, the triple jump, long jump, high jump and pole vault.

Scott was handed the award for best athlete at the Aboyne Games seven times on the trot and, if his performances often seemed to be accompanied by the sound of music, that was likely the vibrating heartstrings of watching ladies. Little wonder he was said to have inspired the burly hunk on the Scott’s Porage Oats box (porage, incidentally is an amalgam of porridge and potage that was adopted by the makers in 1914).

The great athlete married the glamorous English actress and singer Fay Lenore after the couple’s eyes locked at the Braemar Games, but she had competition. At the peak of his fame, her husband toured the US and Canada, where his powerful physique and matinée-idol looks attracted the attention of Jayne Mansfield, a film star of such improbable proportions she made Sophia Loren look like Twiggy.

A romantic tryst on Mansfield’s heart-shaped bed seemed set, but, when the Scotsman tried to shoo the blonde bombshell’s yapping chihuahuas from the boudoir, she took umbrage. Her minders were summoned, lifted the thwarted paramour into the air, carried him down the stairs and dumped him in the swimming pool.

In the days when athletics in Britain was strictly amateur, the prize money on offer at the Highland Games made them very attractive to strong men from south of the border, too. Cambridgeshire policeman Geoff Capes was a double European and Commonwealth shot-putt champion and was pretty invincible during the 1980s Highland Games heavy events. Bearded and fearsome, he stood at 6ft 6in and was built like an oak tree. He might have come from the flat country of the English Fens and bred budgerigars as a hobby, but, in kilt and vest, he was every US film producer’s ideal of a Highland chieftain.

Capes followed a trail blazed by another shot putter 20 years earlier. Arthur Rowe was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and worked in a coal mine, training for athletics behind his local pub using weights made from the wheels of pit wagons. He was British champion five times and also won golds at the Commonwealth and European Championships in the 1950s. However, things went sour for Rowe at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Tipped to win a medal, he suffered a terrible upset stomach, lost close to 10lb in weight and failed to qualify for the final. Disillusioned and broke, he quit the rarefied world of amateur athletics and headed for the Highlands, where the best performers were paid in cash.

The gruff Yorkshireman made his debut at the Braemar Games in 1962 wearing a borrowed kilt and promptly broke the all-time record for putting the stone. The offers and money soon flowed in. At his peak in the mid 1960s, the former pitman was being paid £30 appearance fees per event — a substantial sum in the days when an experienced office worker might take home £15 a week.

The burly Yorkshireman struck up a fierce yet amiable rivalry with ‘Big’ Bill Anderson, a mighty slab of a fellow from Bucksburn, Aberdeenshire, who trained on a diet of mince and tatties, worked out in his garage during the winter months lifting tractor tyres and was the first competitor in history to throw the heavy hammer more than 150ft. The mismatched pair pushed each other to greater and greater performances and became firm friends in the process. In one celebrated incident on a rainy day at Lochearnhead, the two giants lifted up a car that had got stuck in the mud ‘as easily as if they were popping a cork from a bottle’. It was a sight that would surely have amused even Queen Victoria.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.