The world is divided into two groups of people, those who have never been on a cruise and cannot hide their horror at the idea and those who have actually been on one. More than 80% of people who have been on a cruise intend to do it again. These are remarkable figures. I first went on a cruise some 20 years ago, with my son Charlie. My main memory of it was of 1,000 people singing Tom Jones’s Delilah as they entered the main restaurant. It was a truly remarkable sight — people swayed on tabletops, clutching at their cocktails and new best friends. I decided, at the time, that it was not something I should write about for Country Life because I wasn’t sure it would appeal to the readers — but I couldn’t deny that all the guests were having a wonderful time.

What the cruise critics need to understand is that there is a type of cruise for everyone. To deny one is like saying that you would never go anywhere ever in Spain because the Costa Blanca didn’t appeal. This time around, my trip was from Rome to Monaco, on Evrima, part of the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection. Evrima has 149 suites and accommodates only 298 guests. She was dwarfed by other yachts when we were in port, but seemed big to us, with a lift to 10 different floors.

The size provided spaciousness and a relaxed sophistication, with both a good spa and a well-stocked cigar humidor on board — you can take your pleasure in many different ways. The food was of remarkably high standard, especially in SEA, designed by three-Michelin-starred chef Sven Elverfeld. My wife, Rachel, and I both agreed it was one of the best dinners that we had had anywhere — on land or at sea. Better still, there are no buffets among the yacht’s four other restaurants.

After boarding Evrima on our first afternoon, we slid out of port so gently that we didn’t realise that we had left — it was like being in The King’s Rolls-Royce leaving Royal Ascot after a day at the races — and headed to the Italian island of Elba. By the morning, we had arrived and caught a tender to the shore. It was at this moment that I ‘got’ cruising.

What it does, at its best, is take you to places that you wouldn’t normally go to, but have always sort of wanted to. The sort of places that you only need a half day or a whole day to explore so, therefore, never plan a whole holiday around. The smaller the yacht, the smaller the place you can visit. I knew Elba from my history teacher at Summer Fields, who delighted in a palindrome attributed to Napoleon who was exiled there for 200 days: ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’, which reads exactly the same forwards and backwards. Elba is a sleepy place; men play cards outside cafés, little fishing boats dot the harbour and, above, the land folds into green hills.

We were taken by car — our excursions were created just for the two of us, with a guide — to Tenuta delle Ripalte, a winery on the east coast of the island where they make the famous Aleatico Passito dell’Elba, a ruby-red dessert wine that is quintessential to the island. From here, we could see the flat island of Pianosa, known as the Alcatraz of the Tyrrhenian Sea, where top-ranking Mafia bosses were once held, and the Toblerone-shaped island of Montecristo that inspired Alexandre Dumas’s classic adventure novel of counts and hidden treasure.

Our next sunrise was in Bastia, Corsica, on the day the French were celebrating the end of the Second World War in Europe. This is a place with a remarkable history, from Genoese rule and Napoleon’s birth to, most interestingly, its role as a laboratory for Enlightenment under the inspirational Pasquale Paoli. He established one of the world’s first modern democratic constitutions in the 18th century that included early female suffrage. This golden age inspired everyone from Rousseau to Voltaire.

Onwards to Florence, about 60 miles from the ugly port of Livorno. Florence doesn’t need any further gloss from me, except to say that through the guides we were able to visit an ancient mosaic workshop still practising the skills that Michelangelo drew upon so wonderfully in the Cappelle Medicee, as well as the Giardino Torrigiani. The latter is an almost unknown 17-acre, English-style garden within the city walls, steeped in Masonic symbolism, with ancient statues, a large Gothic tower and an escape tunnel for if you needed to get away from the Medicis in a hurry.

Then we had a bit of luck — that night, the wind got up and it was decided that we couldn’t stop at Portofino, and would have to head for Genoa instead. I had never been before, but I would now arm wrestle anyone who disagreed that Genoa is the most underrated city in Europe. Without being on a cruise (and having the fortunate storm), I would never have seen The Caruggi, the vast maze of medieval alleyways, visited the black-and-white cathedral or strolled down Strada Nuova, a UNESCO World Heritage-listed street filled with 16th-century aristocratic palazzi to rival its great enemy, Venice. This is the birthplace of pesto, focaccia and trofie pasta — the food is the rival of anywhere in Italy and there are very few tourists. Go Genoa.

After Genoa, Cannes was a disappointing traffic jam of people attending the film festival, from which we retreated to the sanctity of Evrima and then finally along the coast to Monaco, where our trip ended.

Would I go on a cruise again? Yes, but on a boat such as Evrima. A smaller craft that can go to smaller places. The whole point of cruising, to me, is to discover places you don’t know much about. You will get what you pay for, but luxury onboard is important. Plan your shore visits; be adventurous; make sure you do what you are interested in and tell your guide what that is.

A similar, seven-night journey with Ritz-Carlton, from Rome to Monaco, starts from £9,900) per person per suite, based on double occupancy. The fare includes a private terrace, dining, beverages, access to water-sports equipment and a suite ambassador service to help with tasks such as unpacking, garment pressing and in-suite dining.

The gardens at Highnam Court, west of Gloucester, began to take shape when the estate was bought in 1838 by Thomas Gambier Parry, a rich young man with inherited wealth from his family’s East India Company connections. He found the grounds around the rare Commonwealth house in a desultory, part-formal, part-Capability Brown condition. The stew ponds and ‘Great Pool’ shown on an estate plan of 1757 had been reduced to a series of rectangular canals below the house, flanked by two slim lakes bordered by tree belts, with a serpentine plantation of trees cutting down and through an expanse of bare grassland.

Gambier Parry was a hyperactive artist, collector of early Italian paintings and philanthropist. He commissioned Henry Woodyer to design a new parish church as a memorial to Parry’s first wife, Isabella, its High Victorian interior enriched by frescos painted by Parry himself. He also added a rectory, a school and five lodges to the estate and re-routed the drive to make the blank, north side of the house its formal entrance. The old entrance front became the garden façade facing south, with a balustraded terrace added by the architect Lewis Vulliamy, who oversaw the alterations. A formal East Garden with a conservatory, a sunken South Garden, a Winter Garden Terrace and Winter Garden were added, this last one of the earliest and most engaging Pulhamite gardens in the country.

In 1992, however, a survey and report by Singleton Landscape found the house unused, the lakes silted and eroded and the gardens sadly neglected and overgrown. Highnam’s saviour was Roger Head, a local Gloucester businessman, who bought the estate in 1994 and set about a miraculous restoration of the house and the Pulhamite garden. Thirty years on, his transformation of Highnam is almost complete — although he keeps planning new garden extensions — and in sunshine the place almost dazzles by its colour and orderly perfection.

Driving in by the Chepstow Lodge off the A40, a visitor hears the cheerful sound of a picturesque waterfall, plunging down Pulhamite stone under the bridge that arches over the river that waters the grounds so generously. The drive then threads through a typical Victorian parkland of specimen trees — pines, sequoia, ash, oaks, liriodendron, cedar of Lebanon, one majestic plane — a restless muster of green silhouettes, interspersed with Dr Head’s favourite acers.

Entry to the grounds from the house is via a brick wall into the East Garden. Set into a niche, which was once within a demolished conservatory, is Oliver Cromwell, half-nude, half-Roman, posing as Hercules. The statue was originally in the niche over the south door, but political considerations banished him after the Restoration of 1660. He was brought here from exile in the stable court in 1920 and now looks out over a formal garden punctuated by Parry’s Irish yews. His place on the south façade was taken in 1962 by a statue of Flora, which formerly stood on the Winter Garden Terrace. The lawn down to the lake is now a circular blaze of roses, laid out in concentric box-edged beds.

Every path at Highnam is of golden gravel and their grass borders are shaved to perfection. Throughout, a wonderful neatness and cleanliness refreshes every view. The wisteria-clad arbour of the Broad Walk leads west towards the walled former kitchen garden and passes a new orangery, which Dr Head has added to the house to balance the former billiard room on the east side. Outside the orangery there is a knot garden, whereas inside are two survivors of the Pulhamite urns from the Winter Garden Terrace.

The firm of James Pulham and Son of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire was brought in by Parry in 1849 and worked here until 1862. James Pulham had devised an ingenious process for making lightweight, but natural-looking boulders by applying Portland cement to bricks and clinker, colouring it, spraying tiny pebbles to imitate sedimentary deposits and then laying out ‘rocks’ in imitation of natural stratification.

The firm would often mix its anthropic rockwork with real stone from the area; one of the pleasures of Highnam is trying to distinguish Pulhamite from Forest of Dean sandstone. It is not easy. Pulham was so proud of one of his arrangements at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire that he signed it as a work of art. There are further Pulhamite outcrops on the approach to Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. These artificial rockeries were not intended for planting with delicate flowery alpines, but with ivy, ferns, conifers, rhododendrons, brooms and even gorse.

The Winter Garden Terrace is bordered by the kitchen garden wall on one side, with more Irish yews, and on the other by a row of sentinel polycarbonate obelisks by Robert Bryant, which appear to change colour as you pass, backed by roses. Further out, there are more deep borders with more roses.

The gravel path leads to the Pulhamite Owl Cave and down into the Winter Garden, which is really a vast rockery of mazy paths licked by ferns and threaded by tiny streams crossed by a rockwork bridge. The paths skirt a central pool with an island on which is a secret grotto. Shrubs and flowers are present, but not intrusively so; there are swamp cypresses, bamboo, acers and eucalyptus. The charm of it all is to follow the steps and golden gravel to catch glimpses of the grounds outside. The excellence of the planning is that it draws a visitor in to lose their sense of direction and make sudden discoveries.

Beyond a rocky Pulhamite outcrop, where the brickwork armature of the artificial stone can be seen, a lake has been made from a withy bed, its graceful bridge a replica of Monet’s at Giverny. Dr Head is planning a new garden alongside and has already laid out a Spiral Mound Garden topped with a shell sculpture by Mat Chivers, carved from Kerry limestone. The mound itself is a beehive design by the late Carolyn, Lady Elwes, of nearby Colesbourne Park. It is encircled by beds planted with 12,000 plants, pastel shades in the inner beds and hot colours in the outer.

Walking back past the Winter Garden and the Rose Garden, the new Lower Lake comes into view. This was illustrated in Rudder’s 1778 History of Gloucestershire (Country Life, May 12, 1950), but had eroded beyond recognition by the time Dr Head arrived. He had a battle to get permission for its reinstatement, but Tewkesbury Borough Council overruled English Heritage, agreeing with Dr Head that it would complement, rather than disfigure, the Highnam landscape. It fits so perfectly into the grounds that, like the Pulhamite rockery, it could easily be mistaken for the genuine article.

One other leitmotif of this remarkable transformed landscape are the animal sculptures, carved by David Bytheway from dead trees, that enliven the views. The most impressive is one of leaping horses commemorating a visit made by the then Prince of Wales in November 2010. It also celebrates composer and musician Hubert Parry, Parry’s second son, famous for his setting of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, who succeeded to the estate in 1896. A fitting tribute to Dr Head would be to quote that great choral anthem — he has achieved at Highnam a brilliant evocation of England’s ‘green and pleasant Land’.

Highnam Court is open on select days throughout the year for the National Garden Scheme — see their website for more details. The garden also

This feature originally appeared in the September 30, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Here at Country Life, our roots are very much in Britain, but we still appreciate the finest things that the rest of the world has to offer.

Quite often, this revolves around the swankiest spots in New York, heartbreakingly pretty coastal retreats in Italy or, er, flying donkeys in France. But once in a while our friends just across the North Sea in Norway become the focus for our tales, from exotic libraries and life aboard converted minesweepers to a ski lodge so perfect that it temporarily granted my colleague James Fisher the gift of clairvoyance.

And right now, Norway is back in our sights because there's a property for sale that fits rather neatly into that 'finest things around the world' bracket. It's a mountain villa that's called, with typical Scandinavian understatement, Gulsviksetervegen 1476.

The house is located on a mountain called Høgevarde, in the Hallingdal valley a couple of hours' drive north of Oslo. And as you'll no doubt have seen already from the pictures, it's pretty breathtaking, inside and out. As you'd very much expect for 74 million Norwegian kroner — the equivalent of just under £6 million.

The villa was a four-year labour-of-love for the owner, who visited Høgevarde in 2009 and decided he absolutely had to build a home here. Four years of planning, architectural headaches and construction followed, and now it stands proud as a six-bedroom villa that fits perfectly into this unspoilt landscape.

It's not hard to see how the vendor fell in love with the place. There's an edge-of-the-world vibe amid these mountains that makes it feel like a set from Lord of the Rings, with grassland and woodland, peaks and lakes, and wide open skies.

Every effort has been made to make the most of those views, with picture windows, strategically-placed terraces and more.

The agent, Lars Jakob Aarak, calls it 'much more than a conventional mountain retreat,' and the facilities here really back that up. The space that combines gym, spa bath and sauna, for example, is the stuff of high-end hotels. And I particularly love that fact that the wine cellar is in one corner, so you can soak in the tub while glancing across to mentally pick out your next bottle of the weekend.

As well as the main house there's also an annexe, barn and garage, which seems to be set up as a sort of workshop for getting your outdoor gear ready for a fresh adventure in the mountains.

As beautiful as it is, there's one key element: the price. Though there's plenty of space — more than 5,500sq ft — the plot of 2,249sq m equates to little more than half an acre.

The same sort of purchase price in Scotland would buy you this magnificent highland retreat with almost 12,000 acres. It's not just us making the comparison: an article about the lodge in Norway's biggest newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv, led on the fact that this is a record price being sought for a Norwegian mountain home.

Aarak's answer is that this is not any old house, but instead a home 'where timeless craftsmanship meets magnificent nature', and, 'an ambitious personal vision, brought to life through substantial dedication, architectural planning, craftsmanship, carefully considered materials and extraordinary attention to detail'.

For sale through PrivatMeglerern — see the details in English here, and the sales listing here.

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After Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in Florence in 1492, the best specimens from his collection of cameos were valued at a considerably higher sum than his best Botticelli paintings.

Mademoiselle Avrillion recalled that the Empress Josephine’s greatest pleasure when in residence at Château de Malmaison was to sit by the fire showing off hers. For George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, who had nearly 800 superlative examples, they were, according to Sir John Boardman, ‘a solace from his busy sister, wife and many children’.

Tragically, Marlborough’s collection was broken up at auction in 1899. To date, less than one-third of them has been accounted for and, ever since I became ‘cameo conscious’, it has been my dream to re-discover one of those fabulous missing jewels.

I came to appreciate cameos late in life, having always associated them (foolishly) with my grandmother’s Wedgwood imitation cameo brooches and dull, dusty exhibits in provincial museums. What changed my mind was a 2,000-year-old Roman agate cameo of an elegant hound still set in its original gold ring displayed in the window of Bernardo Antichità, the only proper jeweller on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

For the two years we lived in that city, I visited that ring more or less daily. How I longed to possess it. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to enter the shop and try it on. Our twins don’t know how close they came to being moved from the international school (costly) to the local state school (free).

I may not have acquired the ring from Signor Antichità, but, thanks to the hour or so he spent showing and telling me about his stock (for he had many other exquisite pieces), I did acquire a passion for cameos.

There are two types of glyptics: intaglio, which are cut into stone, and cameos, which are carved in relief. The oldest intaglios — Mesopotamian cylinder seals — date to about 3500BC, whereas it wasn’t until about 500BC in Greece that we see the earliest examples of miniature sculptures being carved out of gemstones, such as jasper, carnelian, rock crystal and amethyst.

When the first multicoloured, multilayered sardonyx was imported from India, it allowed, to quote expert James David Draper, ‘artists to manipulate the strata of the stone in relation to the design, exploring the stone’s depths to enhance its visual impact’.

Figures or objects could be picked out in one or more colours against a solid or translucent ground. Interestingly, the cutting method has barely changed in two and a half millennia. Instead of using a chisel or riffler as you might expect, the carving is achieved with the point of a drill, which is used to rub abrasive powders into the stone.

Cameos feature in every period of Western history. Initially, they spread from Greece to the rest of the ancient world. From the fifth century onwards, cameos went primarily into church treasuries and were used to decorate reliquaries, crosses and book covers. After about 1400, wealthy patrons of the Arts began to build impressive private collections.

The popularity of cameos grew and grew throughout the Renaissance and into the 17th and 18th centuries (no Grand Tour shopping list could be said to be complete without a cabinet of cameos). Elizabeth I gave Sir Francis Drake an enamelled gold locket set on the front with a sardonyx cameo of two heads. Catherine the Great owned a staggering 10,000 examples. Queen Victoria commissioned a cameo with the jugate heads of herself and Albert for the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert.

What makes these tiny gems so desirable? The skill required to create a well-executed cameo is clearly sufficient reason in and of itself — in other words, their allure could be explained solely on the grounds of the workmanship involved. Yet there are other, complicated reasons.

In the same way that a cook can make a sauce stronger by reducing it, an artist can make their subject more powerful by shrinking it. A cameo is not only a miniature work of art, it is a concentrated work of art. A minute cameo portrait or scene can engender as great an emotional response as the most magnificent, large-scale drawing, painting or sculpture. Interestingly, many of the world’s most famous artists, from Botticelli to Sir Joshua Reynolds, feature cameos in their pictures.

However, where cameos have the advantage over, say, Michelangelo’s David or Picasso’s Guernica, is that you can wear them. You can set them into rings, pendants, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tiaras and even, as Napoleon’s Crown of Charlemagne (which incorporates cameos taken from the treasuries of Bourges, Arpajon and Saint-Denis) proves, a crown.

Small is, indeed, beautiful.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When Nigella Lawson published Nigella Bites in 2001, a minor media storm ensued in the lifestyle supplements, based on one chapter she had titled ‘Trashy’. Featuring recipes based on her love of what, at the time at least, were considered ‘lowbrow’ foods, one of her most surprising creations was a deep-fried Bounty bar with pineapple. Had Lawson gone too far this time?

Perhaps, but it’s hard to imagine her publishing a similar recipe starring a deep-fried Mars bar or KitKat. Since its debut on the confectionery shelves of British grocery stores 75 years ago, the Bounty bar has always had a slight aspirational edge over its competitors, thanks to its chief ingredient. Coconut may be a divisive taste, but Mars’s advertising campaigns have always associated the Bounty with a brand of sun-smothered tropical luxury with which, frankly, the likes of the Double Decker and Toffee Crisp can’t compete.

Forrest Mars, son and heir of Mars founder Frank Mars, drew inspiration from the American Mounds bar, also a coconut-and-chocolate combination, to create a version tailored for the British market. Introduced here in 1951, Bounty arrived in a country still under the carapace of rationing and Britons were immediately appreciative of a treat that promised a life beyond bomb sites and Workers’ Playtime.

You certainly can’t accuse Bounty of losing its identity over the decades. Competitors have flirted with modernity, minimalism and celebrity endorsements, but Bounty has persisted with its palms, sea and sunshine. In the 1970s, the slogan ‘The Bounty Hunters: They Came in Search of Paradise’ turned its fans into adventurers, albeit ones whose greatest hardship was deciding where to tie the hammock.

The blue-wrapped, milk-chocolate version is the most commonly seen, although there was once an alternative, something of a cult item. The dark-chocolate Bounty, long favoured by purists, came in a red wrapper and, to its fans, was a superior product due to the more bitter casing balancing the sweetness of the coconut. However, these admirers were a committed few: in 2023, Mars paused production of the red bars, claiming they had been temporarily delisted ‘for operational reasons’. Three years on and with no sign of its return to the newsagents of Britain, it has to be concluded that the dark-chocolate Bounty has gone the way of winklepickers and the SDP.

Yet there are few chocolate bars that inspire quite such tribal loyalties. One either joins the coconut camp or one does not, with no discernible middle ground. Today, 75 years after its launch, Bounty remains British in spirit. Not because it resembles Britain, but because it embodies our instinctive native desire, usually realised on a drizzly Sunday afternoon in November, to be as far away from home as possible.

This article first appeared in the October 14 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

'When Christine played Songbird, grown men would weep. I did every night,' said John McVie of Christine McVie, his ex-wife and Fleetwood Mac bandmate, of one of the best-loved hits written by Christine while she was part of one of the greatest bands of the 1970s and 1980s.

McVie didn't even 'write' it in a conventional sense: 'I woke up in the middle of the night and the song was there in my brain, chords lyrics melody, everything,' she once explained. Turning what was in her head into the song took her half an hour — and the hardest bit was staying up all night waiting for the studio to open, as she had nothing at home to record it on to.

'I've never been able to figure out how I did that,' she said. 'I don't know where that came from. I wished it would happen more often, but it hasn't.'

Songbird lives on today, thought not just as the original, and Eva Cassidy's classic cover version — it's also the name of one of the cottages at The Quaives, the 17th century home in Kent that was McVie's home for 25 years, and which is now up for sale at £3 million through Harding Green.

McVie, like so many of the best rock stars, left LA and bought this English country house in 1990, located in the village of Wickhambreaux, not far from Canterbury. She lived and worked here happily for 25 years, refurbishing the place completely, and to this day her care of the house shines through.

Fleetwood Mac are one of the most successful bands of all time (and Rumours is the eight-best-selling album ever recorded), and McVie clearly had the luxury of saving the house without worrying about costs. We won't go in to how much she made, but here's a picture stepping out of Fleetwood Mac's private jet in 1975.

The present owners — who came here when McVie relocated to Belgravia in 2015 — have also done a fine job, keeping the place up and upgrading. Not the least of the additions is a yoga studio in one of the barns, currently run as a business (the house is also used to host events).

Set in 18 acres, this seven-bedroom, Grade II-listed home is full of character, with exposed timbers, panelled walls, casement windows and handsome fireplaces throughout. The reception rooms are cosy and relaxed — in the words of Harding Green's Mellony Morgan, 'a succession of spaces for both entertaining and relaxed family life.'

It's huge, too, with more than 6,000sq ft over three floors. The ground floor, arranged in a U-shape, has a drawing room, sitting room, family room, dining room and a huge kitchen-breakfast room.

The master suite, with its dressing room and en suite bathroom, is on the first floor, as are three further bedrooms and two family bathrooms. Three more bedrooms and two more bathrooms are on the vaulted second floor above.

The cottages and other outbuildings amount to 5,000sq ft of extra space, bringing The Quaives' total to more than 11,000sq ft. But the grounds are perhaps just as much of a draw for buyers: there are formal gardens and terraces, woodland and a lake.

In short, it's a picture of bucolic bliss that's about as far as is possible to imagine from the hard-living peak of Fleetwood Mac's heyday. Mick Fleetwood started the band in the 1960s with John McVie — the Fleetwood and the Mac — but there was a revolving door for band members until the line-up settled down with the McVies and Fleetwood plus Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks from the mid-1970s until well into the 1990s.

Those peak years saw them based in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s where they wrote, recorded and toured — as well as negotiating endless parties, the machinations of the music business (they were one of the few big bands of the era to manage themselves) as well as blizzards of cocaine and rivers of champagne.

The timing of McVie's purchase of The Quaives isn't accidental: by the time the band recorded the 1987 album Tango in the Night (for which McVie wrote the biggest hit, Everywhere) several of her bandmates were in various forms of recovery. Indeed, Nicks missed many of the album's recording sessions as she had checked in to the Betty Ford Clinic.

McVie came out relatively unscathed (throwing a cake off a balcony was about as wild as it got), though she had just as much of a share in the band's complicated on-again-off-again relationships as any of them. One of the songs McVie wrote for Rumours, called You Make Loving Fun, was written about an affair she was having with one of the band's technicians. She was still with John McVie at the time, and apparently told him she'd written it about the dog.

As well as the music and the house she left behind, the greatest tribute to McVie is that she kept on such good terms with the bandmates throughout the years that followed. The outpouring of love and grief from her bandmates after McVie died from a stroke is incredibly touching to read.

The Quaives is for sale through Harding Green — contact the agent for more details.

'In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different,’ said Coco Chanel. David Hicks (1929–98) was certainly both — a highly creative dynamo with a unique talent, who cut a distinctive figure, even in the rarefied world of interior design in the last half of the 20th century. His deft skill for bravely furnishing classic spaces with lively colours and bold patterns, his fabrics and books, had a lasting impact on British taste.

At the outset of his career, Hicks made a conscious decision to plough his own furrow, diverging dramatically from disciples of John Fowler, of whom he commented ‘he had the country-house look all sewn up’. He was exposed early in life to a broad range of aesthetic influences; the chapel designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott at Charterhouse School, Surrey, which he attended until the age of 16; the elegant sitting room of the priest’s lodgings at the Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street, London (where his mother rented a room when he was studying set design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts); the lavish interior of No 5, Belgrave Square, the London home of the politician and author Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon; and the Palladian villas of the Veneto in Italy, which he visited when was freed from National Service in 1951.

Having learnt the rules, Hicks set out to break them. His masterstroke was injecting touches of modernism; although his interiors rested on the firm footing of robust classic principles, they remained unburdened by historicism. Unable to find fabrics and carpets in large-scale, graphic patterns (many hexagonal) and vibrant colour combinations, he designed his own and they became a trademark of his style that was in demand worldwide, including the USA and Saudi Arabia, where he furnished King Fahd’s yacht, Prince Abdulaziz.

Back home, Hicks decorated the London houses of Mary Lee Epling, the wife of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, and Mrs Rex Benson, former wife of Condé Nast. He also designed the Buckingham Palace apartment of the then Prince of Wales — proving to be an inspired and highly progressive choice.

Hicks’s rigorous architectural style extended to the garden he created at the Oxfordshire home he shared with his wife, Pamela, daughter of Lord and Lady Mountbatten of Burma, where he insisted on painting the swimming pool black because he considered the more popular option of blue to be ‘vulgar’.

He firmly believed in a visual coherence between inside and out, ensuring that flowers were out of view. ‘What will never have space in my garden are herbaceous borders. When I plant flowers, they are never seen from the house and will only be used as cut flowers.’ He preferred the strong profile of topiary in a linear design and has been referred to as ‘a straight-line gardener’.

This article first appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Where was it?
In a village on the edge of Cornbury Park estate in Oxfordshire

A quick description.
It must have been one of Charlbury’s oldest cottages, built of Cotswold stone with a slate roof. I’m 6ft 3in and the main bedroom door was only about 5ft high. There were two further tiny bedrooms, a large attic, which was used as an office or spare room, and a small garage that I sometimes used as a sculpting workshop.

How did you find it?
Through an estate agent in Chipping Norton.

What made you buy it?
It was quite a lot of house for the money and was conveniently close to a friend who had a barn that I rented as a studio for my work.

Best memory of living there?
Two of our three daughters were born when we lived there and the house had a really good vibe, which both my wife, Laura, and I could feel from day one. I also owe it a favour. One night, a tree fell down in the garden during a storm and the cost of having it chopped up for firewood prompted me to buy a chainsaw — the ultimate boy’s toy.

Anything unusual?
Our dog, Pepper, would regularly wee at night if left alone in the kitchen, which had steps down to the cellar. It turned out that the cellar had once been used as the village morgue.

Why did you sell?
It was always intended to be a stepping stone and was never going to be big enough for our whole family. I also really wanted somewhere I could actually stand up in. We eventually found a derelict barn in Cropredy near Banbury, a bit closer to the foundry in which I used to cast my work. The property had trees growing out of a shed and an ancient Land Rover rusting in the yard, but when I walked to the perimeter and put up a snipe, I knew that it would be our next home.

Hamish Mackie is an award-winning wildlife sculptor known for working in bronze, silver and any other castable metal using the lost-wax casting method. Find out more at the Hamish Mackie website.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

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Everyone grows cyclamen. We start with a gorgeous pot of winter-flowering Cyclamen persicum, which we usually kill by over-watering (memo — no cyclamen tolerates waterlogged soils). Later on, when we get the gardening bug, we grow some of the hardy species that flower prolifically in dry and difficult corners of the garden. Nothing can match the sense of effortless achievement conveyed by an ever-expanding patch of C. hederifolium in autumn or C. coum in winter.

There are 23 species of cyclamen and some of them are very rare: pepper-scented Cyclamen libanoticum exists only on a couple of mountains north-east of Beirut in Lebanon, whereas C. somalense, discovered as recently as 1986, is native to the inaccessible Cal Miskaad mountains of Somalia and has not yet been introduced into Britain.

Cyclamen is a member of the primrose family — a fact not obvious to most of us — but it grows from tubers that can survive the heat and drought of a Mediterranean summer. Many species flower shortly after the arrival of rain in autumn, but others start by growing their leaves, which then form an attractive background for the flowers in spring. Some have a limited natural distribution: autumn-flowering C. cyprium in Cyprus, for example, and spring-flowering C. creticum in Crete. Endemism is the botanical word for the phenomenon.

The first species to be introduced to Britain in the late 16th century was Cyclamen hederifolium, which is widespread in Italy, the Balkans and Greece. It is now naturalised in much of southern England, wherever conditions suit its preference for dry shade. Cyclamen seeds are carried off by ants, which are attracted by the sticky covering. When they have licked off all the sweetness, (thereby rendering it ready for germination), the ants abandon the seed. Opportunist plants of C. hederifolium turn up as much as 300 yards from their parents. ‘Go to the ant,’ said Solomon, ‘consider its ways.’ What did Solomon know about the germination of cyclamen?

One of the surprises of growing cyclamen is that anything so small could be such an eye-catcher. The flowers are seldom more than 4in high, although always produced in great quantities; an established plant of C. hederifolium may bear as many as 100 flowers. The cheerful, nodding flowers have distinctively upright petals, sometimes with an elegant twist. After flowering, the stems of many species coil up like a spring — a curious development that draws the seedpods down to ripen on the tuber, beneath the leaves, where the ants find the seeds and spread them about.

Cyclamen have always been prized by plant collectors and, until recently, millions of wild-grown plants were dug up in Eastern Mediterranean countries and exported to Dutch wholesalers. In 1969, the super-rare Turkish species C. mirabile (its petals have pretty frilly tips) was mistaken for C. hederifolium and almost completely wiped out in the wild. Its fate precipitated the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1975 and the eventual listing of all Cyclamen species as plants that may never be collected in the wild.

The leading grower of hardy cyclamen in England is John Massey, who saw the arrival of CITES as an opportunity to grow them professionally in England. He began to collect the plant 50 years ago and set to acquiring every species and distinct form that he could find. Research and experience taught him how to grow them well, although his Ashwood Nurseries near Kidderminster is perhaps even more famous for its hellebores and hepaticas.

A steady flow of gold medals from the RHS bears witness to his success. In 1994, at a Westminster show, Ashwood was awarded the first RHS ‘double gold’ for nearly a century — one for hellebores and the other for cyclamen. It is largely through Massey’s success in cultivating cyclamen that many of the species are available for cyclamen lovers today.

Massey knows the history of every plant in his collection — where its ancestors came from. A form of C. coum with a patch of green, shaped like a Christmas tree, in the centre of its silver leaves dates back to the RHS’s Bowles Scholarship Botanical Expedition to Iran in 1963, collected along the way in northern Turkey. Some of his original stock plants still flourish in the vast glasshouse and polytunnels that he dedicates to improving their range and growing them for sale.

Over the years, Massey has singled out his best cyclamen seedlings (no two are exactly the same) and used them to develop new strains. The day-to-day development of his collection has for the past 10 years been entrusted to his observant and discriminating colleague Hayden Worton. Most of his work focuses on C. hederifolium and C. coum because they are hardy all through the British Isles and the easiest to grow.

Both Cyclamen hederifolium and C. coum have pink flowers and dark green leaves, usually green for C. coum, but marbled with grey on C. hederifolium. Both have fine white forms, sometimes with a pink ‘nose’ to the flowers, as well as darker pink forms. Cyclamen leaves are also infinitely variable in both pattern and shape. C. coum usually has kidney-shaped leaves, but selected forms are almost round. C. hederifolium are normally heart-shaped, but some are much more slender, with arrow-shaped patterns. You have only to plant a couple in your garden to see immense variation among their seedlings.

Cross-pollination between chosen parents also leads to new flower shapes and dependable uniform colours when grown from seed. C. hederifolium ‘Ashwood SilverRose’ is a new strain with silver leaves and dark-pink flowers. Most seedlings will flower in their third year, but Massey will not release a plant until it has flowered and he can see that it is true to type. A vagrant bumblebee in his breeding house can undo a whole season’s work.

Cyclamen coum and C. hederifolium are hardy everywhere and C. cilicium and C. repandum survive outside in much of southern England. Massey also grows C. graecum, C. intaminatum, C. purpurascens and C. pseudibericum in snug corners of his West Midlands garden. Almost all the others prefer an unheated greenhouse, although the most spectacular require a frost-free glasshouse, including robust C. africanum from the coast of Algeria and rugged C. rolfsianum with angular leaves and large flowers from Libya’s Jebel Akhdar mountains.

Massey grows some of his Cyclamen hederifolium collection under a tree, interplanted with polypodium ferns, but cyclamen are quickly smothered by over-exuberant perennials. The usual advice is to grow them on their own, preferably under a deciduous tree where they will benefit from the annual mulch of fallen leaves. There is one exception to this: C. coum flowers in late winter at the same time as snowdrops and the two combine most beautifully.

Planting cyclamen tubers calls for a strong heart because, generally speaking, they should be placed only just beneath the surface of the soil or actually on top of it. Nevertheless, they quickly find their correct level and settle in. The tubers are small when young, but expand with age. A venerable old specimen of C. hederifolium can live up to 100 years and may have a tuber the size of a dinner plate.

Find out more about Ashwood Nurseries in Kingswinford.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Nomadic societies seldom have much to offer the world of interior design. Decluttering and travelling light are the essentials of life on the move. For the Ottoman Turks, however, the last stop was Istanbul. The imperial family liked the city so much, they stayed in one palace, Topkapi, for almost 400 years. They moved out in 1853, exactly four centuries after conquering the city. There must be something about the neighbourhood to encourage such high levels of resident satisfaction; the Byzantine rulers had lived in their palace for even longer.

The Ottomans’ first action after taking Constantinople was to repurpose. Hagia Sophia Cathedral became Aya Sofya Mosque. It went from being the largest Christian building in the world to one of the largest Muslim structures. The Church of St Irene — the second biggest — was turned into an Ottoman arsenal and never became a mosque. Many of the weapons were Western European, collected with the same excitement that their Christian opponents collected Ottoman arms and armour.

England’s Elizabeth I was, of course, on the other side. She was known to Sultan Murad III as Sultana Isabel and Ottoman furnishings had entered the British Isles before the Virgin Sultana struck any trade deals with her Continental Catholic enemies’ enemy. Her father had been a great admirer of ‘Turkey rugs’ and, indeed, some of Henry VIII’s most commanding images feature his well-appointed frame anchored to carpets from Ottoman Anatolia. He had hundreds of these floor coverings to choose from. Holbein the painter knew them well. For his less-regal sitters, the Oushak weavings were likely to have an honoured place on a table rather than underfoot.

These were among the first Ottoman products to enliven the interiors of Tudor homes in England. Using ‘Turkey’ rather than ‘Ottoman’ to describe the rugs was in some ways ahead of the times. In 2022, according to the UN, the nation known as Turkey since 1923 became Türkiye, just before the republic’s 100th anniversary, although it must be said that a century of Turkey/Türkiye has not furnished Britain with even a quarter of the previous four centuries of Ottoman interior-design concepts and products. Compounding this is the confusion between the Ottoman Turks, who built an empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and all their Turkic cousins who came out of Central Asia to create shorter-lived kingdoms.

Then there were the Turks whom English Crusaders identified (wrongly, on the whole) as being their foes in the Holy Land. Turk’s Head pubs used to abound in Merry England from the 13th century onwards. Occasionally, the name came closer to home. Folklore says the tavern by that name, which still exists in Penzance, Cornwall, was once thought to refer to an incursion by seasoned traveller Turks from Jerusalem — in fact, it appears that such raids may actually have happened. More certain is a raid by Spaniards in the 16th century. These intruders caused mayhem and even held a prohibited Catholic Mass before heading home.

The Muslim raiders, by contrast, appear never to have got down to Friday prayers in Penzance, if they ever reached there at all. They were an unspecified sort of Turk, possibly Seljuks, who took on the hapless People’s Crusade of 1095 in Anatolia, long before the arrival of the Ottomans, whose engagement with Crusaders was in eastern Europe rather than the Middle East.

A different type of ‘Turk’s head’ — a knot — also entered the English decor lexicon as long ago as the 13th century, in which case it wasn’t inspired by the Ottomans; or it might have been later, when English knot enthusiasts would have seen the full splendour of Ottoman headgear. Among Muslim societies that wore turbans, there were few as flamboyant as the conquerors of Constantinople. Suleiman the Magnificent is topped off with the most towering example of all. In a well-known painting by Titian, it is at least twice the size of the sultan’s head. Every elite Ottoman house would have had turban stands fixed to the walls to display these essentials, some of which were later incorporated into British interiors, without the original purpose in mind.

Shakespeare was, as usual, a pioneer in describing the people of the time rather than the products. Although it is not always clear which type of Turk he was referring to, one near-certain Ottoman appears in Henry IV: ‘This is the English Court, not the Turkish; Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds.’ The Amurath mentioned by the Bard is most probably Sultan Murad III, who killed five brothers en route to the top position.

Shakespeare’s references are less flattering than some of his contemporaries, whose sympathies were more with the warrior Muslim Ottomans than the conniving Byzantine Christians they overthrew. The Ottomans’ real contribution came later, when Britain began to have more contact with them. Until then, it was objects from the Ottoman court that came to dominate the imagination. Together with carpets, there was Iznik pottery. More colourful than the floor coverings, these ceramics achieved a brilliance that eclipsed even Chinese wares. Soon, the English traveller was making his way east to find out more.

It was never easy to meet the Turk in his — and especially her — domestic environment. The word ‘harem’ comes from the Arabic language, but was adopted into English through the Ottomans and remains a jokey byword for everything that a real harem was not. The practice never took off on these shores: English homes didn’t need any more ‘trouble and strife’; instead, additional ladies could be deposited in selected locations, so long as they were not in the same house. One of the few contenders for the title of a British Bey or Pasha would be the 7th Marquess of Bath with his 70-plus ‘wifelets’ installed around the harem of Longleat.

As if one word describing secluded accommodation for women were not enough, there is also the term ‘seraglio’. As much as this alternative name for Topkapi Palace appealed to Mozart, details of what was inside remained a mystery. The best-informed English observer was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. This 18th-century daughter of a duke didn’t gain access to the Imperial Harem, but was welcomed into others. One comment that would have puzzled her audience in England related to how the exterior of a Turkish building was of less importance than its interior.

The harem itself turned out to be less thrilling than the hammam. Lady Mary’s account of glistening bodies at the bagnio made a huge impression on readers in 1763: ‘...all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them. There were many amongst them, as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of a Guido or Titian…’ All they were missing was smallpox scars. As a victim herself, Lady Mary managed to take the Ottoman process of inoculation back with her to Britain, laying the groundwork for Edward Jenner.

The Ottoman-style hammam went on to be the most fashionable leap forward in Western hygiene since soap was brought home from the Middle East during the Crusades. The earliest British bath, the Royal Bagnio, had been built in 1679, probably by Sir Christopher Wren. During the 18th century, the Turkish bath’s influence was so ubiquitous that some English travellers to the Ottoman Empire believed the Turks had taken the concept from Britain. By the 19th century, the biggest and best was opened in Jermyn Street, London, by the London & Provincial Turkish Bath Company. Private homes had them, too, together with that less-wholesome Ottoman import: the smoking room. One of the few that remains, at least partly, is at the Wallace Collection. Built in 1872, it goes full Turkish with floor-to-ceiling Iznik tiles — or the Minton imitation of them.

Furnishings and their names were also indebted to the Ottomans. Not least among these was the so-called ‘ottoman’. The ‘sofa’ and the ‘divan’ were other names that came via Turkey. For England’s country houses, there were also ‘kiosks’ or, more often, tents (yurts). Less well known and taking a more circuitous route is ‘shagreen’. Originally meaning the back of a horse, saghri later became the stingray veneer that was so much a part of Art Deco interiors. It’s one more reminder of the Ottoman Turks’ distant nomadic past, before they found their forever home on the banks of the Bosphorus

From November 7 until May 9, 20207, the V&A Museum will hold the ‘Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires’ exhibition, which will examine two mega-cultures in the ultimate metropolis.

Rupert Brooke was already well-known before the First World War, but it was war that made him famous.

His fame endures today, so much so that the fact that his childhood home is up for sale has sparked plenty of interest. And that fame, 111 years after his death, is all the more extraordinary considering that his most famous work is probably the most divisive poem written during the entire conflict.

Even those who don't recall the name will know the lines:

If I should die, think only this of me,
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

These words, the opening lines of 'The Soldier', were part of Brooke's collection of five poems published just before Christmas 1914. They caused something of a sensation in the days when poetry cut into the collective consciousness in a way that's hard to appreciate today.

With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see his works as misty-eyed idealism, a hopelessly naive viewpoint that contrasts with the bitter, despairing and cynical work of the poets who made it further through the War — Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon being prime examples.

At the time, though, Brooke caught the public mood of bravery, optimism, sacrifice, stoicism and duty that underpinned the early days of the Great War, when long queues were still forming at the enlistment offices, and before the true horror of what was unfolding in the fields of France and Belgium became clear. His lines were cited widely, held up as an inspirational example, and even read out at St Paul's Cathedral in the Easter service in April 1915.

Two weeks later, Brooke was dead.

Rupert Brooke's life had begun on August 3, 1887, at No 5, HIllmorton Road in Rugby, the Warwickshire town where his father, William Parker Brooke, taught Classics at Rugby School. He was the middle of three brothers, though he'd also had an older sister who died in infancy.

The house, then as now, is charming. It sits at the end of a small terrace of fine Victorian houses, in an area of large, similarly-aged villas close to the centre of the town. The school buildings are within a few moments of the front door.

With four bedrooms and three bathrooms there's plenty of space — almost 3,000sq ft of it — and the house has been kept up beautifully while retaining its character. Thus, the encaustic tiled floor in the hallway and ornate fireplaces that Brooke and his family would have known are still in place.

The town centre location and subsequent building mean that there's not much in the way of garden — just a small patch of lawn and an outdoor seating area — but there's parking for four cars at the back of the house.

Brooke spent his entire childhood in Rugby, attending first the Hillbrow prep school and then going on to Rugby as a student — excelling at rugby, cricket and, of course, poetry — before heading for Cambridge in 1906.

There, he flourished. Charming, clever, athletic and dashing — the poet WB Years dubbed him 'the handsomest man in England — life came to him easily. He became president of the Fabian society, was friends with everyone from Yeats and Churchill to Virginia Woolf to John Maynard Keynes, and had a string of romantic relationships with both men and women. He also travelled widely, his poetry, while not regarded as groundbreaking, at least earning him a reputation as one of the up-and-coming stars of the 'Georgian poets'.

Love and nature abound in those early poems, and seems to have enjoyed an idyllic life, spending time in the countryside, skinny dipping in streams and rivers (including at least once with Woolf) , and 'celebrating cozy weekends in flower-wreathed country cottages' in the words of his biographer Dorothy Eder as quoted by the Poetry Foundation. It's not hard to see where Brooke's idealised image of England came from; he lived it at the peak of his powers in his 20s.

The spell didn't last forever. A series of bad turns — especially in his love life — precipitated a mental breakdown, which prompted him to go abroad from 1912 until 1914, travelling as far as Tahiti, before returning a few months before the beginning of the war.

Brooke joined the Navy not long after the declaration, with Winston Churchill — then First Lord of the Admiralty — securing the poet a commission as an officer in the Royal Naval Division, a hastily-set-up infantry arm of the Navy. Initially deployed to help in the evacuation of Antwerp, Brooke had seen no action by the time The Soldier was written, though this and his other poems clearly suggest that he seemed only too happy to be involved. 'God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,' he wrote in a poem called Peace. 'With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, / To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.' This fatalistic idealism seems the very opposite of the wasteful and endlessly tragic war of later work such as Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth, with its descriptions of soldiers 'who die as cattle'.

At the beginning of 1915, Churchill decided to deploy the Royal Naval Division to Gallipoli. Brooke never made it: before even reaching the Dardanelles, he was bitten by an insect, the wound turned to septicaemia, and he died aged 27 on April 23.

Churchill himself contributed to the obituary in The Times: 'This life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime,' he wrote. 'A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other... The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.' Prophetic words.

His corner of a foreign field wasn't in France or Belgium, but on the Greek island of Skyros, where his comrades buried him before moving on to Gallipoli. But there's also in Rugby a corner of an English field that is forever Rupert Brooke's old house.

Rupert Brooke's childhood home is for sale through Knight Frank at £775,000 — see more details.

There are plenty of reasons to watch the new film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The beautiful country houses, the costumes, the romance — and, perhaps most importantly, the dogs.

Director Georgia Oakley was determined to fill Austen's world with animals. 'It was always really important to me to have loads and loads of animals in the film,' she says. Rather than giving them elaborate storylines, she wanted to follow in the footsteps of Austen and make them a part of everyday life — much as our own pets are a part of our everyday lives. It's a nice touch, and one that makes the world of Norland Park and Barton Park feel more lived in.

First up is Phyllis the pug, who appears alongside Fiona Shaw's Mrs Jennings. 'I've had a lovely time with my pug, Phyllis, who behaves well or badly depending on the day,' says Shaw. Apparently, Phyllis even inspired the actress's laugh as Mrs Jennings — quite an achievement for a dog who isn't actually mentioned in Austen's novel.

There's Danny the whippet, a breed with a long history of keeping company with the aristocracy. Dogs of whippet type appear in 18th-century portraits, although they were equally popular in northern mining towns, where whippet racing was once a favourite pastime. Elegant, affectionate and capable of reaching speeds of up to 35mph, they're just as happy tearing across a field as they are occupying the best seat in the drawing room.

Enter Olivia the old English sheepdog. Long before becoming famous as the Dulux dog, the breed was developed in the 18th century to drive livestock across the British countryside. Their shaggy coats, affectionate natures and capacity for chaos have made them firm favourites ever since. Paul McCartney even wrote Martha My Dear about his beloved sheepdog, although, rather sadly, the breed is now on the Royal Kennel Club's Vulnerable Native Breeds list.

The rest of the canine cast includes great Danes, originally bred in Germany to hunt wild boar; greyhounds, whose speed and elegance have endeared them to the aristocracy for centuries; and beagles, those cheerful little hounds with an extraordinary sense of smell and a selective approach to obedience. Elizabeth I hunted with small beagle-type dogs, and Prince Albert later kept a pack.

Mastiffs also make an appearance. These enormous, gentle dogs have guarded British houses and estates for centuries. Shakespeare praised their courage in Henry V, and one is even said to have protected her wounded master at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Despite their formidable reputation, they're famously affectionate family companions.

In the original novel, Sir John Middleton has a favourite hound named Folly, whose puppies he is rather generous with. He even offers one to John Willoughby, before discovering the young man's appalling treatment of Marianne and declaring him 'such a deceitful dog!'

Unfair on the dogs, if you ask me.

A collection of highly sought-after watches will head to auction after being seized by HMRC during a major investigation into multi-million-pound payroll fraud. Their previous owner clearly had an eye for horology, but not for their tax obligations.

The five watches — a Philippe Dufour Simplicity, a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar Split-Seconds Chronograph, two Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks and an Omega Speedmaster Racing — are thought to be worth around £1 million, although the final tally could be considerably higher.

Leading the collection is the Philippe Dufour Simplicity, widely regarded as one of the finest achievements in independent watchmaking and among the most coveted watches on the collector market. First unveiled in 2000, it was a deliberate departure from the horological wizardry for which Dufour was known. His aim was to prove that simplicity, far from being the enemy of sophistication, could be its ultimate expression. Each iteration, like all of Dufour’s other creations, was hand-finished and assembled by him. In 2021, a 2004 model CHF756,000 (about £685,000) against a CHF250,000–500,000 estimate. Not bad for a watch whose greatest trick is making the complicated look deceptively simple.

The rest of the line-up is hardly small change. The Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar Split-Seconds Chronograph combines two of traditional watchmaking’s most demanding complications, while the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak helped turn the humble steel sports watch into a luxury icon. One of the two available to bid on is a Flying Tourbillon ‘Premier’ model, from a limited edition of just 10 pieces. The Omega Speedmaster Racing, meanwhile, brings a little motorsport pedigree to proceedings.

As with all Unreserved Government Auctions, every lot will sell, whatever the final hammer price. For once, time really is money — and the countdown is on.

The Unreserved Government Auction is with Wilsons Auctions. A range of Rolex watches and jewellery completes the sale. Click here for more information and to register to bid.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

Like fine wine, cheese and oh so many other things, the French do a particularly good line in saints. One of my favourites is the 13th-century St Guinefort of the Dombes region, whose story bears remarkable similarity to Gelert of Beddgelert, a pretty village in North Wales.

In both cases, the protagonists are faithful dogs — Guinefort a greyhound and Gelert an Irish wolfhound —and both save their master’s babies, from a viper and a wolf, respectively, only to be bumped off in a regrettable case of mistaken identity.

Gelert, alas, was never canonised and, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, neither was Guinefort, but the locals were having none of it. They believed Guinefort was a true martyr, declared him a saint and began to pray to him in times of need. A dog in Heaven is a concept, I am confident, that many of us could get on board with today.

We encountered another random French saint in Provence this summer. St Quinis was born in about AD500, a time when the religious landscape of southern Gaul was changing dramatically. Educated at the famous monastery of Lérins on the island of what is now called Ile Saint-Honorat off Cannes, Quinis became a wandering preacher throughout the Var region of Provence, encouraging people to abandon pagan practices and adopt Christianity.

When this kind man, venerated for his care of young and old, widows, working people and prisoners died some 75 years later, little did he know that a few centuries down the line his name would become associated with a splendid tale of folklore in the Provençal village of Gonfaron, which claims St Quinis as its local saint.

The story goes that one year — in probably the early 17th century — before the annual procession through the village to mark the Feast of St Quinis, the village authorities demanded that everyone whose house lay along the route should clean the area outside their front door. One unruly fellow refused, allegedly saying something along the lines of: ‘If St Quinis finds my doorstep too dirty, he will just have to jump over it.’ A poor neighbour did the clean-up job instead and the procession went ahead.

However, like all good moralistic tales, there was comeuppance to be had and sometime later, when the man was riding his donkey home from the countryside, a swarm of horseflies attacked the poor beast. Agitated by this, the donkey leapt into the air, threw the rider violently from its back, and flew across the nearby ravine. ‘Aha!’ cried the villagers, ‘St Quinis l’a puni, l’âne a volé’ (or 'St Quinis has punished him, his donkey has flown') — or so at least says the blurb outside the tiny chapel dedicated to the saint on a hilltop above Gonfaron.

There is lots to be marvelled at here, not least the fact that the villagers were given a perfect excuse to start a new annual, non-religious festival — the Feast of the Flying Donkey. This takes place each spring and, alongside the blessing of a few real donkeys, involves the parading through Gonfaron’s narrow streets of a giant effigy of a donkey, which is then, somewhat randomly I feel, set on fire outside St Quinis’s chapel.

This makes me think two things: first, that perhaps a more appropriate scenario would be to burn an effigy of the unpleasant man — a bit like our own Guy Fawkes — and not the poor old donkey, even if the burnt bits of paper floating in the afternoon sky are more symbolic of un âne qui vole; second, that religious folklore, however eccentric, is always a good reason to throw a party and the French are very good at this. Perhaps modern Christianity needs a few more martyred dogs and flying donkeys to help us on our way.

William Montgomery holds a silver cup presented to his ancestor and namesake with an inscription in several different fonts that reads: ‘To William Montgomery of Grey-abby, Esquire, as a tribute of Gratitude and Esteem, for his spirited and disinterested conduct in which JUSTICE, HONOR AND HUMANITY, were eminently conspicuous, in the preservation of the valuable cargo of the Brig Lagan of Belfast, wrecked on Burial Isle, 11th Jany 1813. This cup is presented by the owner of the vessel & the proprietors of the cargo.’

According to reports in the Belfast News-Letter, this small, two-masted vessel was armed with 10 light cannons and was ready to sail to London from Belfast on January 1, 1813. Contrary winds, however, kept her in port for more than a week before she set off on her ill-fated voyage.

The ship must have been trying to weather Burr Point at the eastern extreme of Ireland and part of the Grey Abbey estate; the rocks of the appropriately named Burial Isle lie just beyond the point.

There is no record of the details of the wreck, but the inscription implies that the cargo and at least some of the crew survived. 

‘Wrecking was a frequent occurrence on the east coast of the Ards Peninsula at the beginning of the 19th century,’ explains Montgomery. ‘I enjoy the wonderfully effusive inscription on the cup.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It was with mixed feelings that Athena heard the recent announcement by the Culture Secretary that national museums would ‘remain free for everyone’. The statement came in response to Baroness Hodges’s scathing review of the Arts Council last year, in which she suggested that consideration be given to charging international visitors for access to these institutions.

Her suggestion, it is important to underline, was predicated on the introduction of identity cards, which would have offered a straight-forward means of distinguishing between visitors and residents. The subsequent U-turn on identity cards effectively undermined the whole proposal and arguably made this response a foregone conclusion. That shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that maintaining free access to national museums is not without its complications.

To be clear, in an ideal world, Athena would be delighted for these great institutions —indeed, national cultural institutions of all kinds — to be free for everyone. The problem is that we don’t live in that world. Instead, we have an extremely limited pot of Government money earmarked for culture that provides a small group of heavily visited museums, most of which are in London, with a disproportionate level of financial support. The cash that goes to them, meanwhile, is actually depriving other bodies of funding.

Take the example of English Heritage, which manages a national portfolio of historic monuments on behalf of the Secretary of State. In recent years, to save the Government money, it has been converted from a quango into a self-funding charity. The insistent fiction remains that the charity can be financially self-sufficient, yet, according to the annual report of 2024/25, in only three years its finances have departed from those set out in its optimistic strategic plan to the tune of £19.5 million. This is not a sustainable arrangement.

There are, meanwhile, ironies to the situation of the national museums themselves. The Government support they receive does constitute an essential core of funding. That said, it is already totally inadequate to their needs and has been steadily diminishing as a proportion of their revenue for years. Not only, therefore, do they need to raise ever larger sums from commercial activities, but they are completely dependent on private philanthropic gifts. Those are positive things, but, in the circumstances, can the state claim credit for keeping national museums free?

The Government is now a major financial contributor, rather than sole underwriter of these institutions. Added to which, at up to £33 per adult ticket for the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, it’s not as if the museum’s work is completely free anyway. The slogan of free access for all to national museums has beguiled governments of all political stripes over the past quarter century. Its real costs, however, are not being properly counted. At the very least, in Athena’s view, international visitors should be paying their way. Or perhaps, at a deliberately modest level, so should we all.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

New York is one of those cities where you must always expect to see the unexpected. It’s a cliché for sure, but in the Big Apple it is a pertinent one. You cannot squeeze 8.5 million people into such a small space and not expect to see an odd assortment of things.

That strangeness breeds beauty. As mayor Zohran Mamdani correctly identified in his speech celebrating the NBA Championship winning New York Knickerbockers, this city and its residents are endlessly resilient. They find ways to make things work, in ways you wouldn’t expect. So, for the trained New Yorker, of course it makes sense to build a small New-England style cottage on top of an apartment building in Greenwich Village. Where else would you put it?

This delight is currently for sale with The Full Ask for the sum of $10.5 million. Is it the finest house in New York City? It is unlikely, but it is certainly one of the more interesting and tasteful manifestations of a penthouse that I can remember seeing for some time.

Set over two floors, the property offers a fraction over 3,000sq ft of living space, which translates into four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The majority of the home can be found on the ‘first floor’ (which is actually the sixth floor), where the current owners have created a welcoming and spacious living area ideal for entertaining.

The highlight is a vast and open dining-kitchen-living area, which occupies most of the floor. Three bedrooms are also on this floor, of which one is currently used as an office. The primary bedroom occupies the corner and offers a dual aspect, as well as a walk-in closet and en-suite bathroom. The fourth bedroom can be found in the mezzanine space between the first and second floors.

Of course, it all looks very nice, but the star of the show must certainly be the terrace and roof garden, with its corresponding ‘cottage’. The structure and ‘the meadow’ were built in 2003, to the drawings of the architect Lawrence Tobe. About 1,200sq ft of sedum sits on about seven inches of soil, underneath which are drainage and protective layers.

Sadly, Country Life isn’t the first magazine to discover the beauty of this property. The New York Times covered it in 2006, National Geographic in 2009 and it was photographed by George Steinmetz in 2015, publishing the pictures in Gothamist.

The views over downtown New York are, of course, sublime. To the south, One World Trade Center stands tall and to the north, the towers of Hudson Yards and the Empire State Building. Near neighbours include, but are not limited to, Taylor Swift.

The penthouse at 719 Greenwich Street, New York, is for sale with The Full Ask for $10.5 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

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Imagine you could go into an apothecary and, instead of seeing rows of jars with their cures, there was a display of all the plants from which they came. You’d be able to point down to a tiny snowdrop or up to a very large horse-chestnut tree. There would be an entire herbaceous border, sweet peas and roses, daisies and foxgloves.

On the shady bottom shelf, there would be an array of frogs and snails and even, possibly, puppy-dog tails. Many ailments or dilemmas are serious, others whimsical and then there are those that spring from the kind of lives we lead now.

Nature’s aspirin

The first published account of willow bark’s medical uses dates back to 1763 in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, when the Revd Edward Stone used it to treat malarial fever, common in England at the time. He nibbled on a willow twig and was impressed by its bitterness (he knew quinine, a malarial cure, was bitter), made a powder and was astonished by the results: ‘There is the bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders.’

It would take many more years, and scientists, to turn that discovery into what we know as aspirin. In 1828, scientists isolated what we now recognise as salicin, named after the botanical name of the willow, Salix alba. This was later converted in the laboratory to salicylic acid, which was more effective, and then a way was found to reduce its bitterness. It was sold for the first time as aspirin in 1899 by the German company Bayer.

Burn, baby, burn

Turmeric, ginger and white willow bark are all anti-inflammatory herbs that can reduce pain, but, in the greenhouse, there is something a little bit spicier. There are thousands of kinds of chilli pepper and, mostly, they are used to enliven food. When you bite into a chilli, you immediately feel the burn. That is caused by capsaicin, the active ingredient and, when applied to the skin in a cream or via patches, it can also produce a burning or stinging sensation.

However, it is also thought that the capsaicin is absorbed by the nerve cells, is transported to the spinal cord and then decreases the amount of pain-transmitting chemicals sent to the brain. The types of peppers used tend to be those with the most available, as in cayenne and serrano peppers (both Capsicum annuum), and those highest in capsaicin, which include the ghost pepper, also known as bhut jolokia, a cultivar of Capsicum chinense.

Short arms and deep pockets

There is nothing wrong with wanting to pay only your part of every bill, but it’s when you start to feel you may be tipping over into downright stinginess that you might seek help. There’s being careful, and then there’s being Scrooge. Fortunately, the garden has a cure for this — and it won’t cost much either.

Buy a packet of courgette seeds, sow about 10 and, of those, choose six to grow. Sow indoors in mid to late spring or directly outside from late spring. They will start to produce courgettes from midsummer at an average of three to four per week (more in a good year). From your six plants, you will have about 24 courgettes a week. Steam and sauté them. Make ratatouille until you can’t stand the sight of it. Grate them in salads. Use them in cakes, muffins, quick breads. Don’t forget soup. Give as many as possible to friends and when you run out (of friends) give them to everyone else. Leave them near your gate with a sign that reads: ‘Free to You’ or ‘Deliciously FREE’. You will be the king or queen of courgettes and experience the glow of being generous. You will be a giver, not a taker.

One final word: the following year, plant something else. No one wants a million courgettes two years in a row.

One too many

There is no official cure for a hangover, but the garden has some suggestions. First, coconut water — it’s full of electrolytes to recharge your body and can also help with a headache and nausea. Tomato juice (no vodka) can also be an effective remedy. Of course, tomato juice also includes a lot of water and tomatoes contain beta-carotene, vitamins A and C and the antioxidants lycopene and glutathione. In both these cases, you can pre-treat the problem by drinking a glass before you go out.

Other options are bananas (replenishing that potassium) and ginger (good for nausea). There’s also milk thistle (Silybum marianum), a herbal remedy aimed at protecting the liver. Finally, and this will make for a very interesting breakfast addition, there is the humble artichoke (Cynara cardunculus), which is also a type of thistle, said to improve liver health and digestion.

Pitter patter of tiny feet

If you have a dislike or fear of rodents, it’s important to find their weak spot and, in this case, it’s their noses or, to be more precise, their olfactory receptors. Mice have an acute sense of smell and they also have a secondary organ for detecting smells: the vomeronasal pathway. The garden cure for deterring mice is mint. The stronger the scent, the better, so use the good old-fashioned peppermint (Mentha x piperita) or spearmint (M. spicata).

The key to all of this is menthol. That mentholated aroma — clean and green, some would say bracing — can overwhelm the cold receptors in those tiny mice nasal passages. The battle begins with cotton-wool balls soaked in peppermint oil. Place these in spots (inside) where you think you’ve spotted a mouse: in the eaves, attic or skirting boards. When mopping the floors, add a drop of peppermint oil to the washing liquid.

Feeling bloated

Dandelions are one of those plants that appear indestructible. They grow everywhere and anywhere and, as Nicholas Culpeper noted in his The Complete Herbal of 1653: ‘It flowereth in one place or another almost all year long.’ Every part of it is edible and the toothed leaves are bursting with vitamins A, B, C and D. In Chinese medicine, the dandelion is seen as something of a cure-all, with the Chinese Pharmacopoeia in 2020 listing 40 patent medicines with the Taraxacum genus for use in treating more than 50 diseases.

In the West, it is famous for its diuretic capabilities — its more common name in France is pissenlit and in Britain it has always been known, as Culpeper puts it, ‘vulgarly’, as ‘piss-a-beds’. The leaves are an effective diuretic as they increase urine output without depleting potassium levels. The root has been used to support liver function and (also with leaves) for constipation. The roots and leaves contain inulin, a prebiotic fibre that helps beneficial gut bacteria.

There is no lack of ways to eat dandelions either. The flowers can be used to make tea or add to a salad, whereas the leaves (soak overnight to avoid bitterness) are used in salads or cooked as a vegetable (often with bacon). The roots can be grated into salads or roasted to use as a coffee substitute. A multi-tasking plant on every level.

Aloe there!

Aloe vera has quite the reputation. The ancient Egyptians called it the ‘plant of immortality’ and Cleopatra herself reportedly used it in her daily beauty routine. In ancient Greece, it is said that Alexander the Great was advised by his tutor Aristotle to conquer the island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea to secure supplies of the plant for his wounded soldiers. It was reputed to soothe rashes, heal wounds, settle stomachs and act as a laxative or ‘cleanser’.

The fleshy, pointy leaves have a layer of yellow latex that is responsible for the laxative effect, the use of which has been banned in some countries. They also contain a gel that is mostly water and includes a mix of amino acids, lipids, sterols and vitamins. It’s the gel that interests us here because if you have sunburn (or, indeed, frostbite), it will soothe your skin and, as the pain ebbs, your soul. It is rich in antioxidants and is a natural hydrating moisturiser, which may also help with peeling.

Forget-me-not

The common snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) may look small and delicate, with its slender green leaves and nodding, white, pendant blooms, but it is anything but. All parts of the plant are toxic (no herbivore is going to nibble away at this little one) and it possesses a natural antifreeze that inhibits the ice crystals that kill so many other plants. Plus, its leaves have specially hardened tips that help break through frozen ground. That’s quite an armoury for a flower that looks entirely innocent in every way.

It’s a common churchyard plant and was grown in abbeys to treat mal de tête or ‘headache’. There are now thousands of varieties: it’s one of those plants that has a sophisticated fan base and galanthophiles are serious collectors who will pay large sums for unusual or rare bulbs. It is not known what inspired Russian scientists in the 1940s and 1950s to study Galanthus woronowii, a species with broad, bright green leaves that is native to the Caucasus, and break down its chemical structure. All parts of the plant were found to contain a chemical that they called galantamine, but it is particularly concentrated in the bulbs.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was discovered that the chemical can be used to manage Alzheimer’s disease, as it elevates the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain. This improves memory and cognitive function and has been shown to be effective in managing early to moderate Alzheimer’s.

And so to sleep…

Many plants have reputations as sleep aids. Lavender (Lavandula), St John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum), red Korean ginseng (Panax ginseng), chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) and kava-kava (Piper methysticum), to name a few.

One of the most prevalent is common valerian (Valeriana officinalis), which has tall stems and white flowerheads with many tiny blooms loved by bees. It is known as a herb with calming and sedative properties and has been studied many times for its effectiveness in treating insomnia and/or anxiety. The results of the studies seem to be conclusively inconclusive, as they are difficult to compare, involving different concentrations and settings. However, that has not stopped the European Medicines Agency approving valerian as a traditional herb to aid sleep and valerian dry-ethanol extract being recognised as a herbal remedy for improving sleep.

It is not fully understood how, or why, valerian works, but it is known that GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is a major inhibitory neurotransmitter (think of it as an ‘off switch’) in the central nervous system. Its receptor GABA-A is the key player for many drugs that aim to help sleep (these include benzodiazepines, such as Xanax and Valium). Valerenic acid and valerenol, compounds found in the root, have been shown to bind to GABA-A receptors and could be behind its sleepy reputation.

This is a condensed extract from the author’s ‘RHS The Garden Cure: 100 Remarkable Remedies for the Curious Gardener’ (Mitchell Beazley, £20), which is out now.

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

Are you checking in?

Spend 24 hours in the corridors of Claridge’s, the luxury London hotel that never sleeps, in the company of Emma Hughes

Alpacalypse now

Mary Skipwith speaks to alpaca owners about the comic camelids that serve as woolly wedding guests and living lawnmowers

Luxury

Jonathan Self is captivated by the little miracles of cameos and Amie Elizabeth White seeks out the ultimate silk pocket square

Local heroes

Christian and Jessica Fleming tell Giles Kime how they created a new family home in harmony with its Cotswolds surroundings

The evolution of the office

Leading designers throw open the doors of their modern working spaces for Arabella Youens

New looks for a new season

Amelia Thorpe shares fresh ideas for every room in the home

A passion for pattern

Matthew Dennison reveals how Watts 1874 is building on the legacy of George Gilbert Scott Jnr

It’s a kind of magic

Carla Passino outlines the route to commissioning the ideal artist to paint the perfect portrait

Joanna Scanlan’s favourite painting

The actress chooses a portrait that is a picture of concentration

Country-house treasures

A model ship made by Italian prisoners of war is forever docked at Chavenage. John Goodall sets sail for the Gloucestershire seat

An ideal for living

The spirit of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement is alive and well at Church Rate Corner, Cambridge. William Fawcett investigates

The legacy

Giles Kime hails the influence of the distinctive interior designer David Hicks, who combined modernism with classic ideals

Let’s go coconuts

Rob Crossan unwraps the Bounty bar, a snack that promised a taste of the exotic when it landed on our post-war shores 75 years ago

In glowing colours

Charles Quest-Ritson applauds the ornamental and innovative 11 acres of gardens at Littlethorpe Manor in Ripon, North Yorkshire

The veal thing

‘Keep it simple, don’t skimp on the size and serve it fresh’ is the sage wiener-schnitzel advice from Tom Parker Bowles

Countryside mysteries

John Wright reveals the truth about tree burrs, imperfections highly prized by cabinetmakers

Raising the proof

Poitín, the illicit Irish moonshine, is making a cocktail-bar comeback, reveals Melanie Cable-Alexander

Travel

Rosie Paterson unpacks the latest winter-sun news, Mark Hedges eats out Sydney style and Sam Carlisle finds the essence of Mexico

Arts & antiques

Carla Passino profiles Hokusai, an artist truly made waves

Terracotta tones

Inspired by hand-carved lino patterns, this design by Fiona Howard celebrates the quiet joy of a day by the river. Gone Fishing Wallpaper in Ruddy Duck costs £144 per 10 metre roll.

Elegant mix

Teaming block-printed blooms with a hand-drawn pattern, Floral Block wallpaper in Chocolate and Red on a textured ground is by UK-based fabric and wallpaper studio Barneby Gates. It costs £141 per 10 metre roll.

Bringing the outdoors in

Inspired by the colours of an English garden, interior designer Octavia Dickinson has created three shades for Edward Bulmer Natural Paint, including Hedge Mustard, shown here. ‘Octavia’s palette feels natural, even in deep saturated colours,’ says Edward Bulmer. ‘Our pigments have proved to be a good friend, bringing that softly tonal depth, which she handles so well.’ From £66 for 2.5-litre emulsion.

Earthy warmth

Designed to bring depth and comfort to any room, Burnt Sienna paint costs £59 for 2.5-litre matt emulsion, from Neptune.

Hot news

Paint manufacturer Mylands and cast-iron radiator specialist Castrads have joined forces in a move that sees all Castrads designs available in any Mylands colour, making it possible to blend or contrast a radiator in any room setting. Radiator prices from £800.

Character colour

Made by Fenwick & Tilbrook for interior-design firm Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, Pimlico Green brings depth and joy to this inviting entrance hall, prices from £68 for 2.5-litre pure matt emulsion.

Soft hues

Known for the gentle warmth of her collections, Susie Watson offers an ever-evolving range of paint colours designed to create a harmonious finish. The paint colour fan deck costs £3.50, paint prices from £58 for 2.5-litre emulsion.

Green and pleasant

Fresh Olive brings energy to this kitchen cabinetry, its rich tones paired with softly neutral walls in Lambskin, from £21.50 for 0.94-litre matt emulsion, from Benjamin Moore.

Striking simplicity

Flag wallpaper features graphic shapes in a quilt-like design that has a nostalgic charm. It costs £195 per 10 metre roll from Fermoie.

New take

The Voysey House wallpaper collection reimagines original designs by influential architect and designer C. F. A. Voysey. ‘We’ve taken the essence of his work — his stylised nature, narrative charm and strong graphic structure —and refined it through contemporary scale, colour and materials,’ says Rebecca Craig, head of design at Morris & Co. Papyrus River is a mural wallpaper inspired by The River Rug, dating from 1903, and costs £439 for three panels printed as one continuous roll of 9 metres.

Blossoming beauty

CommonRoom’s collection of Japanese-inspired wallpapers is taken from Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art), a Japanese magazine published between 1901 and 1906. Originally a woodblock print on paper, Sakura by Furuya Kōrin transforms cherry blossoms into a tapestry of form and colour. It costs £185 per 10 metre roll.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'One of the finest, if not the very best, of the small Cotswold Tudor houses,’ was the verdict of the late architectural historian and author Sir Nikolaus Pevsner of Temple Guiting Manor.

Historic England agree: Temple Guiting is one of just a couple of dozen or so houses in the Cotswolds that's Grade I-listed. For several years it's been run as one of the smartest places to stay in the country — with the early 16th century manor house and the five barns amid the 14 acres of grounds available to rent at prices starting from around £1,000 a night. Country Life's Paula Minchin tried out the latter in 2023 and absolutely loved both the house itself, and what owners Jane and Steven Collins had done with the place. 'Manor from heaven' was the headline.

It seems that there's been a change of approach at Temple Guiting, though. It was always possible to book the entire estate for a single party, but it's now been put on the rental market proper, with the agents quoting £55,650 per week.

What does that get you? The house and barns that include 15 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms, the swimming pool, the tennis court, the gardens, the yoga studio, the gym, the children's playground, the boating lake and the intriguingly-named secret cinema, which is built in to one of the two ancient dovecotes. (The other dovecote is home to a hot tub.)

And the gardens? They're the work of genius Jinny Blom, a psychologist-cum-philosopher-turned-garden designer.

There's no doubt that country life doesn't get much better than this. However, there's no doubt that this is a lot of money: the rental price works out at just under £2.9 million a year, which is enough to buy you a pretty fantastic Cotswolds home outright. Such as this gorgeous place in Hook Norton, or this one near Cheltenham. And with a bit of back and forth you might be able to pick up this one near Stroud.

So who is the target renter for a place like Temple Guiting? Quite simply, it's the cost of trying before you buy. Taking on a listed building is worlds away from spending a few hundred thousand pounds to rent one out for a month or two, and no doubt there will be some potential buyers who are calculating that, given the current shaky market conditions, renting for a while could end up saving more than it costs. As well as offering the benefit of seeing if Cotswold life is right for you.

Those taking that opportunity are, for want of a better term, the new jetset. 'The Cotswolds is now competing with the South of France and Tuscany for the international summer crowd in a way it simply wasn't 10 years ago,' says Olivia Conway, director of lettings at UK Sotheby’s International Realty.

'We are seeing American and Middle Eastern families take houses for a month or two, bringing children, grandparents and friends with them. They want privacy, space and enough going on that they can stay put. An estate like Temple Guiting, with separate houses, a pool, tennis court and lake, is made for that.

'There is also a growing "try before you buy" market among international buyers. A weekend at a Cotswolds hotel is one thing; living here for six weeks is quite another. You quickly learn which villages you actually like and whether you want complete seclusion or to be closer to the social scene.'

Temple Guiting isn't alone — there are several landmark Cotswolds homes available for rent at the moment. Kirtlington Park in Oxfordshire is also up for rent, with an even higher asking price of £60,000 a week, and the nearby Ardington House is up at £48,000 a week. That suggests that all those sums do indeed make sense for some.

'If you're considering spending several million pounds on a country house, renting first makes enormous sense,' adds Collins. 'By the end of the summer, clients often know exactly where and what they want to buy. Increasingly for UHNW buyers, the holiday house is becoming the starting point for the house hunt.'

The Temple Guiting Estate is available to rent through UK Sotheby’s International Realty — see more details.

Which city, would you say, is the artistic capital of the world? It’s a billion-dollar question that can be taken either one of two ways. The first: which is the world’s most creatively fertile city? The one home to the highest number of artists and the busiest scene? The second: which city commands the highest art sales? The two yield different answers. The first is probably Mexico City; the second is obviously New York.

London, by contrast, occupies more of a middle ground. The capital’s status as a cradle for artists and art dealers, respectively, has ebbed and flowed; both aspects are currently in flux. Emerging artists are returning to the city’s blue-chip galleries in greater numbers than they have in a while. The art market, disrupted by Brexit, has shifted to Paris and Milan.

Perhaps this is no bad thing. A city is unable to be a bastion of the art market and a well of countercultural activity to the same extent or at the same time. A glance at New York’s creative alumni since the city switched allegiance from artists to bankers in the 1990s reveals a dearth of names on par with those of the Downtown scene, such as Koons, Basquiat or Keith Haring. Basquiat could not have become Basquiat had he been unable to afford even a squalid flat in Lower Manhattan.

Contemporary artists have long been outpaced — and outpriced — by the same gentrifying forces that allow their predecessors to monopolise sales. Yet what goes up must come down. In London, the pendulum is swinging back. Although fewer buyers may be worrisome to dealers, our most prestigious gallerists are using such a moment to pivot towards new artistic subsets.

Pilar Corrias, a blue-chip gallery on Mayfair’s Conduit Street, has started showcasing young talent such as Sholto Blissett. At Halcyon Gallery on New Bond Street, works by Warhol (worth millions) sit alongside those by Wang Tingxin, whose pieces often sell for more modest five-digit figures. Over ten years, the Mayor of London has created what City Hall refers to as ‘ten football pitches’ of affordable studio space, allowing artists to rent these for far below market rates.

It is amid such circumstances that patrons begin to think beyond the household name — and to move the market forward even as they avoid buying a Magritte.

Such dips in the market are necessary for it not to remain static. As Frieze Art Fair returns to The Regent’s Park this month, opportunistic buyers are muscling in to play among the big leagues.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters run from October 14-18.

Every so often we set about to wondering why more people don't live in Northumberland. Wide open skies, gloriously unspoilt countryside and pristine beaches give it 'all the ingredients of perfection', as Viscount Ridley put it in a piece for Country Life last year. 'Most tourists speed through Northumberland heading for Scotland — big mistake, but long may they do so.'

Northumberland's allure is made all the greater by the country houses that dot this landscape, and a wonderful example has come up in the form of Adderstone House, which is being sold by Ryan Eve of Corbridge-based Finest at a guide price of £2.95 million.

This substantial early-Victorian home is set in 10½ acres of wonderful gardens and grounds within the Northumberland coastal plain, 1½ miles from Belford village, 4½ miles from Bamburgh and 16 miles from Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The main house is a solid, stone-built affair that offers some 6,520 square feet of well organised family accommodation on three floors, including three reception rooms, a study, office and a contemporary Smallbone kitchen/diner on the down floor, with a cellar below.

The first floor has six bedrooms, two of which are en-suite while the other two share two further bathrooms.

The second floor is a converted attic that's listed as a further bedroom, but it's enormous — more than 33ft long — and could be used for all sorts of other things. What a playroom it would make...

Yet the main house is only part of the story here, because there's an annexe which has been created in complete contrast to the Victorian principal house.

Built by the current owners, it's a striking, two-bedroom lakeside home, designed with energy efficiency firmly in mind. Set low into the landscape beside the water, its sweeping profile and planted roof allow it to sit discreetly within the gardens.

Those gardens were created from scratch: this was 10 acres of virgin farmland 20 years ago before the current owners moved in. They brought in local garden designer Sean Murray, whose considerable talents are showcased in the now well-established gardens at Adderstone House.

There are mixed borders, a walled garden, orchard, woodland garden, rose walk, formal garden, dry border, boathouse folly, lakeside walk, Japanese garden — with a Tora gate — and a tea house.

In 2009, the Adderstone House team planted a small private vineyard, listed by the national winegrowers’ association as the most northerly vineyard in England. Here, 100 Rondo vines, a Northern European variety, were planted in 2009 and now yield some 150 litres of excellent juice annually.

This is pasteurised and given away (in return for a donation) when the gardens are opened to the public twice a year in aid of hospice care in north Northumberland.

Adderstone House is for sale at a guide price of £2.95 million with Finest — see more details.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of trying a piece of clothing on in a shop — preferably one with good-size changing rooms and flattering lighting — and it fitting like a tailor-made glove. Covid did its best to rid us of such sensory joys, but I'm delighted to report that in-person shopping is making a major comeback.

‘The decision to open our first flagship store in Belgravia was a direct result of customer demand,' says Wiggy Hindmarch, founder of womenswear brand Wiggy Kit, whose pop-ups proved so successful that ‘a permanent space was an inevitable decision'.

I've always believed that in-store shopping gives us a better understanding of fabric, quality details and finishing touches, and what suits our bodies. Plus, it's impossible to tell how something will make you feel from a digital description. The opportunity to judge with our own eyes and hands will always be more fun, fruitful and efficient than doom-scrolling online.

When menswear label Thom Sweeney launched its Autumn/Winter collection, they decided to step away from e-commerce altogether. ‘We wanted to go back to our roots to focus on what we have always done best,' said founders Thom Whiddett and Luke Sweeney, ‘getting to know the client and dressing them in person.' Collections are still visible on the website, but treat it less like a catalogue and more like an invitation to visit the Old Burlington Street, Mayfair, store.

This month, American brands Loeffler Randall, famed for its pleated bow shoes and citing 'British appetite', and Ulla Johnson threw open the doors to their London flagship stores on Chiltern Street and Sloane Street, respectively. DeMellier will follow in their fashionable footsteps this autumn, in Chelsea, and Dunhill is busy putting the finishing touches to its new flagship shop in Mayfair.

Somewhat residential in feel, these retail spaces often comprise gallery walls and spaces to relax in among the rails, and sometimes cafés and gardens. Occasionally, they open inside actual former townhouses — like Audemars Piguet.

I, for one, am delighted and ready to move in. It's goodbye clicks and hello bricks.

When Walter Basset married Cecilia de Dunstanville in 1150, he not only gained a wife, but one of the most important (and profitable) estates in England. And, over time, the Basset family would go on to become one of the most powerful Cornish mining dynasties. In fact, the family, their home and ancestral lands were so well known that Winston Graham wove them all into his epic 'Poldark' series.

When Country Life decided to photograph the gardens in the late 19th century, the Basset estate encompassed land from Redruth to St Ives, and 12 miles of Atlantic coastline.

It's safe to assume that the Editor was not very happy with the resulting images. Fourteen survive in our Archive, but none of them were ever published. Until now.

We own plenty of unpublished photographs of Britain's great country estates and gardens, but what makes this situation unusual is the fact that the photographer would have suffered through an arduous and expensive steam train journey — on what would go on to become the Riviera Express.

On the odyssey — which culminated in a bumpy carriage ride from the station to the house — the photographer would've been encumbered by a heavy camera, lenses and tripod. Plus a number of fragile, large-format glass plates.

In the background of these photographs, there are tantalising slivers and wholes of the now-lost Tehidy House. A myriad houses took it in turns to stand on the Basset's land during their tenure of it, and this one was relatively new.

Tehidy was commissioned by John Francis Basset in 1861 and was a vast expansion of an existing Palladian house by Thomas Edwards of Greenwich.

Edwards’s elegant, symmetrical mansion was built with large quantities of imported Portland and Bath stone, supplemented with granite from the family’s quarry at Carn Brea. His grand design consisted of a central pedimented main block connected via curved, sweeping quadrant wings to four detached corner pavilions.

Inside, the property was decorated with sumptuous Adam style ceilings and fireplaces, and paintings by Peter Lely, Sir Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough.

John Francis's enhancements were overseen by William Burn of Piccadilly — and the result was what is now considered to be Cornwall's first modern manor house.

In just two years, the property doubled in size, eventually comprising a grand entrance hall, seven reception rooms, 21 principal bedrooms, 14 servant's bedrooms and a very generous, for the time, six bathrooms. Plus, electric lights, a hot-water heating system and fire hydrants.

This modernisation, however, came at a cost: £150,000 to be exact, or more than £16 million in today's money.

Unfortunately, the family fortune — built on the tin and copper mining industries, both of which were now in decline — was dwindling. John Francis, however, didn't have too long to worry about things. Six years after the build was finished, he died, aged 39.

His two brothers inherited the estate and its mounting debts, but they too died, in 1888, and so it passed to a son called Arthur.

Arthur’s main passion in life was racing — a disastrous hobby for anyone in financial difficulty, but he clung on to Tehidy until 1915. Remarkably, it did sell — to Cornwall County Council. Their plan to convert it into a much-needed tuberculosis isolation hospital succeeded and by late 1917 the first patients were in place.

On February 26, 1919, Sister Everett — who was comforting someone about to succumb to the disease — noticed an unusual smell and raised the alarm. The building was on fire.

The local fire brigade battled valiantly to extinguish the flames but, by the next day, all that remained of Tehidy were the exterior walls and the quadrant pavilions.

The hospital was quickly rebuilt, but without, of course, the wonderful original interiors. In 1986, it was transformed once again and divided into luxury apartments.

The grounds, and parts of the Basset estate now form Tehidy Country Park.

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J. D. Vance likening Emily in Paris to the work of Shakespeare was not on my 2026 bingo card, although perhaps it should have been. In case you didn’t know, the Vice-President recently decided the best use of his time was to defend a show once called a ‘work scheme’ for ‘people who can’t act’ (its final season airs in December) and laud it as a satire of millennial decision-making and tacit defence of the nuclear family. ‘It’s obvious,’ Vance said, ‘that Emily should end up with the French chef’ rather than wasting her time ‘with random people or [focusing] on her job.’ Such antics are emblematic of our era of PLU politics, where leaders seek to show that they are people like us as well as people, like us.

If the latter is a time-honoured tradition, the former is a novelty of our media-literate age. To be like us (no comma) in 2026 is to be clued into the zeitgeist, akin to members of a club keeping up with a culture that moves faster than Richard Hammond on an A road in Herefordshire. An almost academic obsession with a show about fashion and seductive Europeans is not the same as, say, enjoying the football. The aim is not for Vance to pose as an electable everyman but as an esteemed member of the Emily in Paris fan club: the vox populi has become that of Netflix Et Chill.

Cultural fandom is now the ultimate members’ club—and belonging to one is highly prized. Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, recently found time to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live (‘I love you Jimmy,’ he gushed). Kemi Badenoch, for her part, managed to nab front-row seats to Marks & Spencer’s show during London Fashion Week (supermarket clothing wasn’t enough to entice the noticeably absent Anna Wintour) and party with young Conservatives at the Tory party conference last week in Birmingham.

Even a retired stooge such as Barack Obama compiles a public music playlist each summer, weighing in on the discourse. The question is: why? Uniting around, say, an album, song or television show perhaps is a safer bet in an age where political fractures make it hard to unite around Big Issues. There is another, more left-field theory: people at the top seek to belong because they feel lonely.

Notice how it’s always those in the C-suite who most lament our ‘lack of community’, no doubt the trendiest buzzword of 2026, even as anyone who has recently attended a gig can attest that community is alive and well, neither hard to find nor prohibitive to enjoy. Pity James David Vance, who simply must want an invitation to the season-six premiere of his favourite series. It is, after all, Emily’s grand finale, an outcome he personally hopes to avoid when the midterms roll around next month. Bonne chance!

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

A little over a year ago, a beautiful invitation dropped into my inbox (how millennial) that informed me my dear cousin and his gorgeous fiancée were tying the knot. The setting? A 15th-century barn on Symondsbury Estate, less than five miles from the Jurassic Coast. Naturally, my first concern was not where to stay or what to wear, but what would be the perfect wedding guest car.

All the best wedding cars have been well documented — they’re typically something you wouldn’t get to drive in daily life, be that down to their prohibitive price tag or rarity. Think of your Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, E-Types, DB5s, and so on. Although some to-be-weds opt for old bangers that have a sentimental significance, you can normally, and should, bet on the wedding car being the most impressive chariot on the big day.

However, when it comes to choosing the best wedding guest car, little has been written and perhaps even less understood. You don’t want to upstage the bride and groom's carriage of choice, but equally you don’t want to get lost in a car park of Range Rover Evoques and Sports. It’s a fine line to tread. Ideally, it wants to be something no one else is going to turn up in, but also practical enough to help with any disaster-averting errands.

To determine what makes the best wedding guest car, we must consider the circumstances and the role of the wedding guest. Is it urban or rural? July or November? Maid of honour or ring bearer? In my case it will be Dorset, the August bank holiday and general family member #14. We are hoping for sun, but it will probably be muddy and I could be asked to do anything from ferrying granny back to the Airbnb after one too many Chablis, to picking up the DJ and all their gear after his 1976 VW campervan breaks down.

Having done some reconnaissance a few months before when visiting family (yes, I am fun at parties), I knew the main and overflow car parks were effectively graded dirt and gravel, on an incline, uphill from the venue. With this in mind, and that regardless of the time of year you can always half expect rain as a wedding crasher, we’re going to want something with a two-speed transfer box and diff-lock just in case.

Since it’s the end of August precipitation is likely, but it’s also the last of the summer wine, we'll undoubtedly hit congested roads with holdout holidaymakers and caravans in tow. So, nothing sporty or low slung, as we won’t be going anywhere fast. The aim of the game is riding in comfort, high up to see over hatchbacks and around winding lanes.

Dorset is Land Rover country. Every model year and conceivable configuration retires here after hard yards in the fields, now resigned to doing over-priced faux farm shop runs and chauffeuring cockapoos to brunch. Anything too flash will elicit hypocritical accusations of Chelsea tractors. We want salt-of-the-earth credentials and nouveau-country-folk approval.

Family obligations are the make or break for a wedding guest car, but with a little experience and foresight you can anticipate almost any eventuality, no matter how eccentric or patience testing. If you’re a younger guest like me, driving rather than drinking, you’re going to get asked to ferry the infirm, tiddly or both. That means a minimum of five seats, plenty of room for gifts and headroom for all manner of headdress. But once you’re amenable to transport someone, you are inevitably going to be asked to haul some thing, so boot space for all and sundry is a must.

With these all important criteria in mind, I opted for the Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster Black Edition. Sensible.

As expected, I got caught behind every flavour of tentbox, caravan, campervan and motorhome headed down South for the bank holiday weekend. Crisp air conditioning and an outstanding sound system made the paint-drying traffic tolerable and the start-stop engine meant my wallet wasn’t completely empty after the five-hour drive.

On the morning of the wedding, that auntie (you know the one) pre-gamed the breakfast mimosas a little too hard and needed a shuttle to the venue. Apparently, there was ‘no longer space’ for her in any of the wedding procession cars… And, despite being told multiple times that we weren’t doing fascinators, she still insisted on wearing one because, ‘Princess Beatrice still does'. Fortunately, for both of us, there were no issues accommodating the obnoxious ornamentation.

My weather prediction soon became a reality. The heavens opened and the car park turned to sludge. Elevated on 18-inch alloys and chunky Bridgestones, we had no problem negotiating the rivers and ponds forming in the claggy conditions; and thankfully, the JBL subwoofer in the rear, right under that auntie, drowned out the back seat driving.

The rain was truly torrential. Auspiciously, but quite unplanned, this particular Quartermaster came with a 270 degree batwing awning. Aside from evoking images of Bruce and Alfred sitting on folding chairs in a Caravan and Motorhome Club campsite, sipping tea from the Bat-Thermos, it was a life saver. The wing spanned the entirety of the passenger side so we all popped out dry (save my better half, who extended the awning) and deployed our Bat-Umbrellas for a quick dash to the church.

After the ceremony, the clouds parted, giving everyone enough time to make it back to their cars and onto the reception. A small but growing group of gentleman guests were crowded round the Quartermaster in its tuxedo, which in turn was surrounded by a sea of navy Range Rovers and Land Rovers. The attention was short-lived though. As the bridal car came to collect the newlyweds, the crowd dispersed to fawn over the English White Rolls-Royce Phantom, adorned with matching ribbon and stringed tin cans.

While trying to negotiate the fleet of Rovers Land and Range all trying to leave at once, one of the bridal cars picked up a puncture, which meant I now needed to ferry four new passengers — three bridesmaids and the ring bearer (Pippa the cockapoo), along with a boot load of booze to the reception venue. Which sadly meant that auntie would need to find alternative transportation to the reception. What rotten luck.

I almost made it to Cinderella time without further incident, but there was one final 'Trinity, would you mind…?'. I was introduced to three groomsmen holding each other up like a tipsy-teepee, covered head-to-toe in muck from trying, and failing, to traverse the sodden field standing between them and their accommodation. My other half herded them into the truck bed, shut the tonneau cover and we took a very gentle drive across the field to reunite them with their long suffering girlfriends.

Most will deride the Quartermaster as overkill for the seemingly simple task(s) of a wedding guest car, but much like the people that scoff at the humble doomsday prepper, they’ll all be running to you when the zombies come, begging for shelter and your tins of SPAM.

In 1935, Country Life reported that just two years earlier, an article by Lady Kitty Ritson had appeared in a London newspaper titled ‘What Is a Schnauzer?’ The staunch, sturdy little dogs had arrived in Britain only a decade earlier, and in a short space of time had ‘gained in popularity, that such a question is now scarcely ever heard at a show, and even in the country, as a yokel points to one of these dogs, you may overhear the remark: “Them’s Snorzers, them is.”’

The Duchess of Montrose was one of the first to bring Schnauzers to Britain, keeping them at her extensive kennel at Brodick Castle on the Isle of Arran. A standard bitch called Busserl von der Grünenbaum, imported as a puppy from Vienna in 1924, would deliver her first litter on British soil in January 1926. Arthur Croxton Smith would later credit the Duchess with ‘being the pioneer of a breed that is likely to become popular’. In 1926, she wrote to the magazine about the ‘rare breed’ to inquire if anyone else knew of this dog ‘in England, as [she had not] seen more than [her] own and one belonging to a celebrated soldier, who had his dog all through the war’.

When the breed arrived in England, Country Life reported that it seemed as if they would ‘boom’ in much the same way as Alsatians had done a few years earlier, but the approach of the Second World War prevented the breed’s advancement. Like Poodles, Schnauzers come in three sizes: the standard (or medium-sized) variety; the Miniature or Zwergschnauzer (introduced to the United Kingdom by Mr W. H. Hancock in 1930); and the Giant, Munich, or Riesenschnauzer, a variety that would not appear on British shores until the 1960s.

A common misconception is that Schnauzers are associated with the terrier family; they are, in fact, herding dogs. Von Stephanitz, in The German Shepherd Dog, declares that Schnauzers belong to the rough-haired intermediate form of driving dogs, and expressed emphatically that they have nothing to do with the short and stocky Pinschers or snappers. Schnauzer enthusiast Captain Williams revealed to Country Life in 1937 that he believed the breed originated from cattle drovers from the Württemberg pastures, who had driven cattle up into Germany. Those who had achieved good sales at the carousel sought other means of transport home and left some of their dogs behind. These were crossed with the wolf-grey Spitz, and later with the French Poodle. In the case of the Giant Schnauzer, it would be crossed with the black Great Dane, ‘to make his hair shorter and his body larger and black’.

The Schnauzer was once known in its native Germany as the rauche or wire-haired Pinscher, while ‘Schnauzer’ was more or less a nickname, meaning snout, and refers to the dog’s outstanding feature — the strong whiskered muzzle. The hirsute furnishings of the face are certainly the breed’s distinguishing feature, ‘plentifully equipped with hair about the head, which is strong and long. They have a moustache and chin whiskers, and their eyebrows are beetling’, Country Life expressed in 1937.

Although the breed’s original vocation was that of a general-purpose farm dog and an excellent vermin exterminator, the Schnauzer’s ‘amazing faculty for discriminating between friend and foe have made him the most popular of all dogs in Germany and Austria for the protection of warehouses’. The Giant Schnauzer has been used as a police and army dog and the little Miniature, ‘with a growl which might well belong to a dog three times his size, still guards the bakers’ carts as their masters deliver the bread from door to door’, Country Life revealed in 1935.

Champions of the breed would also note that they ‘adore children as much as they hate rats, and their temperament does not lead them into mischief in the country’ and, as the faithful little dog with a Teutonic yap ages, ‘his beard may go white, his youthful sense of fun never diminishes, and if he has a fault, it is that, when at last you put him to rest, you can only heal the hurt by buying another Schnauzer’.

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

Scottish Borders — £8 million to £15 million

Simply magnificent, Portmore House and its surrounding estate is a breathtaking slice of Scotland centred near Peebles. The 10-bedroom house at the heart is delightful and original. If a mere 1,227 acres isn't enough, a further 2,233 acres are available. And did we mention the organ yet?

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

Hertfordshire — £1.95 million

Five bedrooms and six reception rooms in this house in a private and secluded plot in Letchworth Garden City. Plenty of space at over 4,000sq ft, wonderful privacy, fine gardens and superb access to London via road and rail. That's a lot of boxes ticked.

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

Berkshire — £4.75 million

It's places like this that make you wonder how the clergy used to live: this fine old rectory near Newbury has eight bedrooms, a swimming pool and a party barn. Wonderful.

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

Berkshire – £10.15 million

More than 300 acres of the home counties are on offer at this extraordinary property which runs right up to the bank of the River Thames. There are two listed farmhouses, six further cottages, equestrian facilities, staff flats, an indoor pool, a party barn and much more.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vendors are happy to split this up into three lots.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Buckinghamshire — £750,000

Proving that you don't have to be a millionaire to live in a beautiful country home, this devastatingly pretty cottage in Thornborough has four bedrooms, a thatched roof and a gorgeous garden which (unlike some of the other homes on this page) won't need a team of full-time gardeners to look after.

For sale via Russell & Butler via OnTheMarket — see more details and pictures.

Somerset — £875,000

Rodney Stoke might sound like a boy you went to school with, but it's actually a pretty little village in Somerset where you'll find this country house for sale.

Built from stone, with over 3,000sq ft and fine views, it has space, character and the sort of rural setting that'll make you wonder why you lived in the city for so long.

For sale via Sandersons — see more details and pictures.

One morning in 1970, a peat digger called Ray Sweet was working in the waterlogged wetlands of the Somerset Levels. While cleaning out a trench, Ray spotted something poking from the inky-black peat: a piece of timber. A plank, in fact. It was muddy, but miraculously not rotten, its structure preserved by the anaerobic environment of the peat. Even to Sweet’s amateur eye, it looked old.

Curious about his discovery, Sweet reported it to his boss, and a piece of wood was sent to John Coles, an archaeologist based at Cambridge University. As soon as he saw it, John knew it was important — but even he couldn’t know just how important at the time.

In fact, Ray Sweet had unearthed a piece of the oldest manmade trackway ever discovered — a track that was built nearly a millennia before Stonehenge.

Between 1973 and 1989, John Coles and his partner Bryony unearthed the secrets of this ancient pathway, along with around 40 others criss-crossing the Somerset Levels. Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) dated the timber with pinpoint accuracy to the early spring of 3,806 BC, which means the tree from which it was cut was felled nearly 6,000 years ago. It was named after the man who discovered it: the Sweet Track.

The path was built as a causeway between two high points, the Polden Hills and the island of Westhay, spanning two kilometres of wetland, fen and reed-bed. It was built by Neolithic farmers who were beginning to move from a nomadic lifestyle to settled agriculture. But its purpose wasn’t just practical; it seemed to be spiritual, too. Precious items were deposited in the water alongside the track as offerings: pottery bowls, wooden troughs, flint axes, bows, arrowheads, yew pins and, most surprisingly of all, a polished jadeite axe-head that had somehow travelled here all the way from the Alps.

The Sweet Track became a Scheduled Monument in 1976. To celebrate its anniversary, I’ve come back 50 years later to retrace its story. Outside the Avalon Marshes Centre, on the edge of the Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve, I meet Dr Richard Brunning, senior historic environment officer for the South West Heritage Trust.

‘The Sweet Track provides some of the earliest evidence we have for early farming communities in Somerset,’ Brunning explains, as we trudge along the road from the visitor centre. ‘It shows they were living here for extended periods of time, not just seasonally. It gives us an insight into their culture, the kinds of tools they used, the materials that were important to them. Making a path like this requires knowledge, co-operation and sharing of skills.’

We turn off the road onto a muddy track, shaded by weeping willow, oak, hawthorn and hazel. We follow the trail through the trees, and then Brunning stops and points at the ground. ‘Believe it or not, you’re walking along the Sweet Track right now,’ he announces. ‘Actually, it’s three feet to your left, to be precise.’ I scan the earth for signs of the path. There’s nothing — and there’s a reason for that, Brunning explains.

‘The minute we take the wood out of the peat, it degrades quickly,’ he says. ‘The best thing we can do is to leave it where it is.’ Peat is an amazing preservative, he explains. Its dense, waterlogged structure prevents oxygen from reaching the timber, stopping decomposition and preventing organisms — such as mould, fungi or boring insects — from damaging the wood. As long as water levels stay constant, artefacts, including natural materials, can remain preserved for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Amazingly, the peat has even preserved evidence of running repairs, including the remains of old timbers and post holes, as well as pollen, seeds and nuts from the springtime of its construction.

Two sections of the track were removed for research. One is now on display at the British Museum; the other at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. The rest remains right where its makers placed it, now buried under several feet of peat.

To demonstrate how the track would have looked to its makers, a replica has been built nearby, using the same materials Neolithic people used. Brunning leads me along another path, emerging beside a watery meadow where the replica trackway is suspended a foot above the peat-brown water, snaking off into the head-high reeds.

It’s an ingenious design. Pairs of hazel stakes are driven in at 45˚ angles to make V-shaped cradles. Split planks of oak and ash span the braces. Willow mats made the trackway comfier to walk on. Carefully, we teeter our way along it, windmilling our arms like tightrope walkers: the planks are narrow, only eight to ten inches across, so it takes concentration and balance to avoid slipping off.

‘The brilliant thing about the design is that it allows for fluctuating water levels, which would have been an issue for them, as it is for us today,’ Brunning says. Indeed, the landscape of the Levels has changed remarkably little since the trackway was in use: the boggy, flood-prone ground of the Levels make building and intensive agriculture impractical. ‘For me, that’s what makes this place important,’ Brunning says. ‘The landscape we see today is broadly similar to the one our ancestors experienced. So we’re walking where they walked, seeing what they saw. That’s powerful, I think.’

We head back towards the visitor centre. Overhead, swifts screech past. Reeds rustle like paper in the breeze. Water gloops and trickles. Across the marshes, the boom of a bittern echoes out. It’s strange, a little spooky, to realise these are the same sounds our ancestors would have heard nearly 6,000 years ago.

Back at the visitor centre, we meet John Ette from Historic England, the man responsible for caring for the Sweet Track, along with Britain’s 6,000 other Scheduled Monuments — including those that don’t yet exist. ‘The Sweet Track is the oldest ritual monument we have in Britain,’ he says. ‘It may not be as visually impressive as Stonehenge, but we should afford it the same importance. It gives us an insight into how our ancestors interacted with the landscape on a human, practical, everyday level. It brings them closer to us.’

Scheduling is the UK’s oldest form of heritage protection, dating back more than 150 years to the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882. The Schedule now encompasses everything from Cornish fogous and Iron Age Forts to Anglo-Saxon burial mounds, Georgian engine houses and Second-World-War anti-aircraft batteries. Sites are selected for their archaeological or historical interest; scheduling prevents development, preserves archaeology and ensures the sites will still be around for subsequent generations to enjoy. Theoretically, anyone can nominate a new monument, Ette explains, if they can make a valid case for its inclusion — although the bar is high. ‘Unfortunately, like many organisations, we don’t have the resources to include all the places we might like to,’ he says. ‘We have to take tough decisions on what to include, and what not to.’

Recently scheduled sites include a smelting mill in Northumberland, a menhir in west Cornwall, a Bronze Age farming site in Cambridgeshire, a Neolithic henge in Norfolk and an 18th-century shipwreck in the middle of the Solent. ‘But every day there’s a new suggestion on my desk, a new site to visit. That’s what makes my job interesting.’

And, Brunning adds, there may well still be more trackways to discover. Not long after the discovery of the Sweet Track, a second, even older path — the Post Track — was discovered underneath it. It was built perhaps 30 years earlier, but only fragments of it survived. Brunning thinks there may still be other trackways buried under the peat, preserved in the dark until they see the sunlight once again.

‘Who knows?’ he says. ‘Some of them could be even older than the Sweet Track. All we have to do is find them.’

Whitehall is a name and place synonymous with the British government. Amid its familiar landmarks — such as the Treasury, Foreign Office, Banqueting House and the gates of Downing Street — are several important buildings that continue to serve as offices and are rarely seen by the public. Just beyond Horse Guards, facing a jumble of Victorian frontages and recessed from the road behind high screen walls are three interlocking properties of this kind. They jointly manifest more than 400 years of naval history, and conceal some little-known interiors of great interest.

The youngest of the three, contrarily known as Old Admiralty, is the showiest. It is not seen from Whitehall at all, but forms one side of Horse Guards Parade beyond. Constructed during the 1890s and the early 1900s, it was a major addition to the much older pair of buildings that quietly spans the Whitehall frontage and stands on sites long associated with the Royal Navy.

The connection extends back to 1622, when the 1st Duke of Buckingham took up residence here in a property called Wallingford House, built upon the former timber yard of Whitehall Palace. Buckingham had been appointed Lord High Admiral in 1619 and brought his office with him to Whitehall. In 1628, the year of Buckingham’s death, Charles I converted the office of Admiral of England into a commission, with the control of the Royal Navy passing to the Board of Admiralty. A parliamentary act invested authority upon seven commissioners or Lords of the Admiralty Board. Their roles included a right to a residence and there were several early offices around Tower Hill.

When the Buckingham lease expired in 1694, Wallingford House was demolished, presenting an opportunity for the construction of a new home for the Admiralty (which since the Restoration in 1660 had been operating from Duke Street, Westminster). Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to erect ‘a Sufficient Pyle of Building’, which he provided swiftly and to straightforward design. This was up and occupied by 1695, but was ultimately destined to last no more than three decades.

By 1723, the Admiralty, having purchased and cleared adjacent properties, demolished the Wren building, considering it in bad condition and failing to meet needs. Upon the now enlarged site rose the grand edifice we see today, three-sided around an open courtyard as designed by Thomas Ripley. What is today known as the Ripley Building was conceived as a piazza and was to comprise townhouse residences for the Admiralty Lords in the wings, with the central block providing space for offices and a fine board room. Entrance to the offices was through a giant Ionic portico (Fig 1), its pediment surmounted with the Admiralty badge in a carved cartouche.

The present proportions of the portico are a compromise. In the original scheme, a larger, wider pediment would have limited light to the upper windows. An 11th-hour rejig addressed this, but, as the stone columns were already cut, a proportional concession had to be made, squeezing the hefty columns into the narrower configuration we see today. When it was first completed, the portico was criticised and even mocked, but, since 1761, a screen closing it off from the street has softened its awkwardness (Fig 2).

The screen is Robert Adam’s earliest work in London, a Doric arcade set between pedimented pavilions. In the pediments are carvings by Michael Henry Spang of the prow of a Roman ship and a British man-of-war. Beneath, triple niches were intended for statuary. Central to the screen composition is an entrance archway carved with panels of dolphins and surmounted by beautifully writhing hippo-campi. To either side are pedestrian gates. The present form of the screen, which respects Adam’s original design, actually dates back only to a restoration of 1923. That’s because, in 1827, the Duke of Clarence — later William IV, but then Lord High Admiral — smashed two side entrances through the structure to create more convenient access for his carriage.

Beyond the screen, the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty was in the left-hand corner of the internal courtyard. By 1781, this accommodation was already considered insufficient. A proposal for adding ‘a few rooms’ behind was approved by the Prime Minister and Treasury. Properties immediately beside it on Whitehall were purchased in 1785 by the Naval Commissioners, then cleared to make way for an expanded Admiralty House.

The project, undertaken by Samuel Pepys Cockerell, grew rapidly in ambition. What had begun as a proposal to create a few new rooms gradually transformed into the creation of a grand aristocratic mansion, comprising three main storeys with basement and attic. Cockerell was a student of Sir Robert Taylor, from whom he took on the role of surveyor to the Admiralty. As Taylor resided at Spring Gardens just to the rear of this site, he would certainly have been involved in his protégé’s project, although he died shortly before the building was complete by Christmas 1788.

As the concept had begun life as a rear extension, the approach to the enlarged Admiralty House remained via the existing Ripley courtyard. This left what would have been a large forecourt area between Cockerell’s new building and the street free for a detached, double-height kitchen. A high, blind wall topped with formidable iron railings and scrolled lamp brackets conceals this structure from Whitehall. Despite being hidden, the street façade of Admiralty House is well balanced and polite, of golden stock brick with simple stone dressing. Its centrepiece is a Venetian window framed within a semicircular recess.

The entrance to Cockerell’s mansion remains through Ripley’s front door. Only as the visitor enters the inner hall does the building assume the grandeur of an official residence, with a vaulted ceilingand fluted Doric pilasters and columns (Fig 3). Facing the visitor as they enter is an oversized cast-iron stove in the form of a columna rostra, a Roman victory column ornamented with the prows of ships and celebrating a naval engagement.

At the far end of the inner hall is an arch that frames a magnificent stair. It rises away from the visitor, then divides into paired return flights transcribing a graceful horseshoe curve. This imperial stone staircase maximises elegance in compact perfection (Fig 4); three floors of restrained wrought-iron balustrade and balconied landings, with a glazed dome sailing overhead.

From the inner hall, four grand rooms open to form a suite for formal entertainment. The function of these spaces has changed over the centuries, but today they are named the State Dining Room, Drawing Room, Music Room and Band Room. On the floor above is a matching circuit of rooms intended as the First Lord’s private apartments. Services and stairs are neatly tucked away to resolve this compact plan.

Ornate vaulted and finely decorated ceilings cover the rooms facing Whitehall and magnificent marble chimneypieces feature prominently throughout. Cockerell sourced most of these from other great houses, including Egremont House in Piccadilly, York House on the Strand and a property called Wricklemarsh in Blackheath. Unfortunately, as the names and functions of rooms have changed, it has become impossible to say with absolute confidence which fireplace came from which house. Cockerell also purchased and re-used doors and doorcases, columns, even second-hand window shutters. Presumably, he was trying to save money in the light of the spiralling costs of the project as a whole.

Such space as was freed up in the Ripley Building by Cockerell’s expansion of Admiralty House was quietly annexed and converted into offices. Of this working part of the building, the Boardroom where the Lords of the Admiralty met was always the standout interior (Fig 5). With its carved decoration and panelling, Corinthian pilasters and portraits, the first impression is of an interior that has served unchanged as the nerve centre of British naval history from the age of Nelson to Churchill and beyond. This is not the case.

The panelling pre-dates the room, having been salvaged from the Wren building on the site that was demolished in 1723. The ceiling, meanwhile, was inserted by Cockerell in 1786 and the same pattern of interlacing circles and rosettes is found next door in the First Lord’s bedroom. Over the fireplace is an anemoscope, or wind-dial, framed by magnificent pearwood festoons attributed to Grinling Gibbons. The incised date of 1695 supports this. These include nautical instruments — ring dials, astrolabes, quadrants and so on — rendered in marvellous detail. Along the top of the chimneypiece is a frothy band of shells, fish, fruit, flowers, bay, oak and palm leaves (Fig 6). In the centre, Fame’s trumpets are combined with a royal crown, sword, sceptre and anchor and the motif of an eye in a sunburst.

The wind-dial, dated between 1707–14, is stylistically linked to another in the King’s Gallery at Kensington Palace, designed by cartographer Robert Morden with mechanism by Thomas Tompion. British seas and adjacent coastlines from Norway to the Pyrenees are mapped out, as ships, whales and allegorical figures shiver among the waves.

Not only, then, are the elements of this splendid room of different dates, but they have been demonstrably reconfigured over time. In the early 19th century, the wind-dial, for example, was located on an end wall (to the north) and built in with bookcases. The carvings, meanwhile, were assembled at the opposite end of the room and a series of pull-down maps installed above the fireplace. The current organisation of the interior broadly dates from 1847, after which two full-length portraits were introduced; Lord Nelson by Guzzardi, acquired by the Admiralty in 1848, and William IV by Beechey, purchased in 1894.

The mighty board table is most likely of 1789 and clearly bespoke. The semi-circular cutaway at one end is made, not for accommodating the corpulence of an undisclosed First Lord as sometimes imagined (and as the arrangement within it of a particularly magnificent chair implies). Rather, it was designed for the hard-working secretaries, to allow better access to the inevitable sea of paperwork that they needed to manage.

Explosions have twice near-destroyed this room; once from a Fenian bomb in 1885 and then again during the Blitz in the 1940s. That the repair has in each instance constituted faithful reinstatement indicates the great historical importance attached to this space.

In 1964, the Labour government merged the Board of Admiralty with the Air Ministry and War Office to create the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which relocated to the present MoD across Whitehall. Thereafter, the buildings have been used by other Government departments and the Boardroom has become a quiet survival. Shown on building tours and occasionally used for meetings, it has, over the decades, taken on the revered air of a museum piece; library-quiet and with the reassuringly warm aroma of dust and beeswax. Having not outwardly changed in nearly 180 years, this is no surprise and makes the evocative interior all the more delightful.

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In 1851, the UK Census showed that 10.1 million people regularly attended church services of some kind — that's 55% of the population. Today, it's around 5% . We live in secular times, and the number of churches with dwindling congregations is a fact of life. The only recent report that claimed otherwise turned out to be based on data that was later debunked.

It's hardly surprising, then, that religious institutions have been selling their buildings off for some decades — a decision which often leads to people wringing their hands, but which is usually unarguable from the point of view of those running the Church of England, Church of Scotland and the other grand old ecclesiastical institutions.

What's more surprising is the prices that some of those buildings are being sold for. Last year eyebrows were raised at the Church of Scotland's 'property for sale' page, which included magnificent buildings such as Culross Abbey on the market for as little as £35,000.

The prices explained by the difficult questions that come with these buildings: what will you do with them? And how will you do it?

Lucy Denton wrote about this exact problem for Country Life last year, and got some fascinating answers. 'Churches have a unique buyer type who see the conversion of a historical building such as this as a project of passion,’ Tom Stewart-Moore of Knight Frank told her. 'Some buyers may be fortunate enough to have deep pockets, but others will very much have a budget to work to.

'It might seem as if the asking prices are low, but, with higher building costs, the heritage and planning implications, and, of course, the general state of repair of the building at the point of purchase, there is a lot for a buyer to think about’.

In some instances, the approaches taken by those brave buyers have led to the creation of truly beautiful homes. Take the case of Greystead Old Church in Northumberland, for example, has been beautifully done and came up for sale earlier this year.

Another example is on the market in Manchester at £325,000, where St George's on Arundel Street has been turned into 25 modern flats.

St Georges makes for an extraordinary apartment block. This 200-year-old church has quite a few original windows, beams and more preserved, particularly in the communal areas.... though as the pictures show, far more has been stripped out and replaced.

That's a solution at one end of the spectrum; many others are at the other end, where the feel is of an almost-untouched church that's simply had pews replaced with sofas and kitchen islands. The best tread the line somewhere in between; here's our pick of some of the finest converted churches on the market today.

Hampshire — £1.25 million


For 93 years, Woodlands Chapel welcomed worshippers, until, in 1982, its doors closed and it was transformed into a comfortable family home with a difference. How many homeowners, for example, can boast of having stained-glass windows that catch the sunlight and cast colour across their rooms? There is even a triptych, which forms part of the show-stopping double-height sitting room/dining room and where the former sanctuary has been turned into a raised seating area.

The nearby kitchen/breakfast room plays host to a Neptune fitted kitchen with granite worktops and whatever is prepared here can easily be carried to the terraced and paved areas outside that are perfect for alfresco dining. One of the four bedrooms is on the ground floor, although it doubles up as a study.

Woodlands Chapel is in the eponymous hamlet close to the market towns of Alresford and Petersfield and within the South Downs National Park, guaranteeing an abundance of natural beauty.

For sale via Carter Jonas — see more details and pictures.

Norfolk — £1.5 million

The Chapel near North Elmham was built with brick and flint elevations in 1883 on the former site of Norfolk County School. Although the school was intended to educate the sons of farmers and artisans, numbers were low and it closed in 1895, only 21 years after opening.

Afterwards, the nearby chapel witnessed the school becoming an orphans’ home and then Watts Naval School, until it shut in 1953. The new owner, therefore, is buying a site with a rich history, as well as a chapel with spectacular proportions that has been tastefully converted and modernised.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance is the first floor’s vaulted 70ft reception room with its stone window that leads out to a balcony where guests and family alike can gaze over the grounds, which run to just over 5¾ acres.

In all, there are four reception rooms and five bedrooms (four of which are on the ground floor). There is also two-bedroom annexe.

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

Cambridgeshire — £775,000

St Mary Magdalene’s Church dates back to the 11th century, so the new owners of what is now a Grade II*-listed conversion will certainly be buying themselves a piece of ancient history, as well as walking in the footsteps of generations of worshippers from the nearby village of Caldecote.

Victoria Short, the agent, says: ‘Church House is far more than a home of exceptional architectural importance; its breathtaking rural position and beautiful grounds create a sense of complete privacy, making it a truly special retreat.’

New arrivals will enjoy seeing the gardens with their lawns and terraces and then, once inside, the principal living areas, including the vaulted sitting and dining rooms and modern, well-appointed kitchen, which are arranged within the nave and historic core of the building.

Three bedrooms and two bathrooms are sited across two floors. Peterborough is about 11 miles away.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Devon — £875,000

As befits a property within the surroundings of a converted Trappist monastery, the lower ground floor of Vespers in Woodleigh near Kingsbridge has been designed as a sanctuary. It contains three bedrooms, each with its own private garden terrace reached via doors that create seamless connections between indoor and outdoor living.

The impressive, light-filled 25½ft by 27½ft sitting room, which is centred around a Portland-stone fireplace, is located on the first floor, as is the open-plan kitchen/dining room, from which elegant arched doors open onto a balcony, offering those sitting there — perhaps enjoying morning coffee or evening supper — idyllic views over some of the 80 acres of landscaped grounds.

The second floor currently contains a study with mezzanine and the third an office. In the restored chapel, the new owners will enjoy exclusive access to a leisure complex that includes an indoor swimming pool, sauna and jacuzzi.

For sale via Marchand Petit — see more details and pictures.

London — £1.65 million

Who wouldn’t love to come home to The Chapel on Munster Road, SW6, after a long day in the office? Where better to perch at this quieter point of the day than in the open-plan kitchen, dining and living space beneath the glorious vaulted ceiling and exposed timber beams, glass of wine or G&T in hand? Whereas some London properties can be gloomy, The Chapel is flooded with natural light — all the better for seeing the building’s period detailing, which marries perfectly with its modern finishes.

The flexible accommodation consists of two or three bedrooms — the third lending itself to use as a study if required. ‘Every detail has been considered to deliver effortless contemporary living, from the bespoke kitchen and premium fittings to the sophisticated bathrooms and high-quality finishes throughout,’ says the agent. As this property forms part of a new development, a separate Land Registry title has yet to be issued.

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

Imagine, for a moment, that you have travelled back in time to an evening in 1923. A man who would not look out of place in one of Sidney Paget’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ illustrations has paused on the landing of his London house and is looking up at the open nursery door. Out in the world he is known for being reserved, even chilly, but, as he watches his young son saying his prayers, a much softer side of his character is clearly visible. There is a chaise in the corner of the nursery and lying on it is a teddy bear — a much-loved birthday present from the Harrods toy department.

Now imagine that, some 40 miles away, in the Surrey village of Shamley Green, another man is walking up the lane to the cottage he shares with his wife and children. He is worn out after a long day in the London office of Punch magazine, but he is whistling something cheerful; he is that sort of person. The lamps have been lit at home and, as he pushes open the gate, he smiles as he spots a small, rotund silhouette on an upstairs windowsill: the toy bear that his 16-year-old son has outgrown, but cannot bring himself to part with.

Alan Milne and Ernest Shepard, as they were then known, had both carved out impressive niches for themselves by the early 1920s. Milne’s effervescent plays were the toast of London and New York; Shepard’s witty cartoons were instrumental to Punch’s popularity. Yet, within a few years, their names would forever be associated with that of a honey-loving little bear: Winnie-the-Pooh. A global superstar — at last count, he has been translated into 72 languages — he is this month celebrating the centenary of his first appearance in a book.

‘The fact that 100 years later we’re still calling people an Eeyore or a Tigger is a testament to Milne’s characterisation and Shepard’s artistry,’ notes James Campbell, author of The Men Who Created Winnie-the-Pooh (Michael O’Mara Books, £25). After marrying into the family — his wife is the artist’s great-granddaughter — he has spent years piecing together the story of an unlikely pair, both greatly affected by the First World War, who together made a new and enduring kind of magic.

Someone intimately familiar with this is Jane Riordan, the writer entrusted with Milne’s legacy and the author of A Little Boy And His Bear, a brand-new collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories (Farshore, £20) with illustrations by Andrew Grey that channel Shepard’s. ‘I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know the books, but every time I re-read them I find something completely new or a joke I missed when I was younger,’ she says.

Unlike his creation, A. A. Milne was a Bear of Very Great Brain. Born in 1882, he was taught by H. G. Wells at the north London prep school his parents ran and, after going up to Cambridge, got to know future Bloomsburyites such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He became the editor of Granta, the university’s literary journal, and then joined the staff of Punch in 1906 (after being turned down by Country Life, to whom, he later remembered, he had emphasised ‘my games record… and my early collections of birds’ eggs and butterflies’).

Not given to what Eeyore would later call ‘gaiety, song-and-dance, here we go round the mulberry bush’, he was married late to Daphne de Sélincourt, the gregarious goddaughter of Punch’s editor. He gained a well-run home, she an escape from the spinsterhood for which so many women of her generation were destined, but it was a pragmatic match that became increasingly distant.

A pacifist (to the dismay of his conservative seniors at Punch), Milne nevertheless was commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment in 1915 and experienced the horrors of the Somme before trench fever sent him home to work in propaganda. He took a small toy-dog mascot out to France with him: Carmen, who has since found her way to the Hundred Acre Wood in Riordan’s work. The post-war years were brightened by the arrival, in 1920, of a longed-for son, Christopher Robin, and making a home on Mallord Street in Chelsea, where Augustus John was a neighbour. Still, he was restless. ‘I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality,’ he later admitted.

Shepard was born in 1879 in St John’s Wood, into an artistic family, but his happy childhood ended abruptly in his 10th year when his mother died. His father fell into a decline, finances became precarious and the young Ernest had to grow up fast (he was especially fond of go-getting Piglet, keeping a set of drawings in his studio for the rest of his life). In 1904, he married a fellow Royal Academy Schools student, Florence Chaplin, and the pair — known as Kipper and Pie — settled down to a modest, but contented existence as working artists in rural Surrey.

His life might have looked bohemian, but Shepard was unambiguously in favour of military action against Germany in 1914 and became an officer in the Royal Artillery, experiencing several very near misses. He continued sketching, sometimes on behalf of military intelligence. ‘His earlier work was very heavily hatched, much more static, but during the war he simply didn’t have the time,’ explains Campbell. ‘He had to go faster, so his style changed — he was using fewer lines, but making them work better.’ It was an evolution born of grim necessity, but it would help him bring the Hundred Acre Wood vividly to life.

The world’s most famous bear made his print debut without a name on February 13, 1924, in an illustration alongside Teddy Bear, a Milne poem printed in Punch before being published by Methuen as part of the collection When We Were Very Young. E. V. Lucas, Methuen’s chairman, matchmade Milne and Shepard for the project: he had a hunch that Shepard’s easygoing demeanour would make him an excellent foil for the introspective, occasionally prickly Milne.

Things got off to a bumpy start. After sending him several poems and approving the sketches Shepard produced, Milne invited him to Chelsea to sketch him reading to Christopher Robin. The door was answered by the parlourmaid who, acting on the instructions of the ever socially conscious Daphne Milne, asked Shepard to use the tradesmen’s entrance. Shepard politely refused, went home and wrote to Milne to explain why he had left. From then on, he always used the front door and their partnership was an equal one. ‘The way they worked was unique at that point in time, as far as we know,’ believes Campbell. ‘Never before had a writer and an illustrator been around the same table saying “a bit more of this, a bit less of that”.’

The poems were well received by Punch readers, but Methuen published them without special fanfare in November 1924. Yet the initial print run sold out on the first day and, by the end of the year, more than 50,000 copies had flown off the shelves in the UK and USA. After a shattering war and the Spanish Flu pandemic, readers were longing for light, joy and freedom — Milne’s words and Shepard’s pictures transported them to the safety of their own recollected childhoods, sunny days spent wandering ‘down to the wood where the blue-bells grow’ and daydreaming by the sea.

The duo, together with the real Christopher Robin, became celebrities and a sequel was inevitable. This time, the setting would be Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, where the Milnes had recently bought a weekend home, Cotchford Farm (later the home of the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones). The focus, too, would shift to the world Milne had been building in bedtime stories for his son, at the heart of which was the Harrods bear formerly known as Edward, but now named Winnie after a real one at London Zoo (the ‘Pooh’ suffix was borrowed from Christopher Robin’s word for swans).

Never a great one for whimsy in his everyday life, Milne revelled in the silliness and jokes. ‘I think for him it was an escape of sorts and it became one for his readers,’ observes Riordan. Guileless and stout-hearted, Pooh is fond of the existential musings that are such a feature of young children’s conversation; today, you can buy a book of his philosophy, The Tao of Pooh.

Up to 150 community libraries housed in former red phone boxes can receive free copies of the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories and the new authorised sequel, A Little Boy and His Bear written by Jane Riordan.

The campaign supports the National Year of Reading and launched on Tuesday (October 6^th) in Canterbury, with Sally Phillips reading to local schoolchildren, alongside author of sequel Jane Riordan and illustrator Andrew Grey.

Anyone who has adapted a phone box can apply to receive copies by clicking here.

Shepard travelled regularly from Surrey with his sketchbook to sit down with Milne, draw Christopher Robin, his collection of soft toys (which by now included a forlorn donkey and a kangaroo) and Ashdown Forest itself. He wandered among its 6,500-acre patchwork of heathery heath, fern-carpeted valleys criss-crossed by streams and ancient deci-duous trees, sketching as he went. Back in his garden studio, he worked in details from photographs of his own son, Graham, as a little boy and Graham’s portly bear Growler, from whom he borrowed Pooh’s ‘tub’.

What emerged was a kind of Eden, which at first glance might seem to have little to do with the Roaring Twenties, but nods to the decade’s Devil-may-care spirit. ‘There are no worries beyond perhaps getting lost in the mist and there’s never a bedtime because it’s always time for elevenses,’ says Riordan. With his scruffy smock and unruly hair, Shepard’s Christopher Robin was refreshingly unlike the cherubic, rather chocolate-boxy children drawn by contemporary artists such as Lilian Hocknell.

His Hundred Acre Wood, meanwhile, was untouched by recent history, like the England Philip Larkin would later conjure in his 1914-set poem MCMXIV, the ‘place-names all hazed over/With flowering grasses’.

Winnie-The-Pooh was published on October 14, 1926, to universal acclaim. Readers of all ages fell in love with Pooh’s gentle humour and, in a world in which moving pictures were scarce, they were entranced by the dynamic imagery. Country Life called the book a ‘lovely portrait’, running Shepard illustrations alongside its review and following it with a tongue-in-cheek piece on Woozle Hunting in its December 4 issue. The book was serialised in the Daily Express and the Evening News and by the end of the year, hundreds of thousands of copies had sold. These were usually read aloud, as they still are today. ‘It’s an integral part of them: because Milne was a playwright, he really understood pacing and how conversation works,’ explains Riordan. ‘It’s something I’m very mindful of writing my new stories — my poor family do have to listen to a lot!’

Now We Are Six, the 1927 return to the Hundred Acre Wood, acknowledged the passage of time by giving Christopher Robin a human friend in the form of Anne, yet ended with his wish to remain ‘six now for ever and ever’. His real-life equivalent would soon be making the uncomfortable transition from child star to public schoolboy: Christopher Milne was mercilessly bullied for the promotional activities in which his mother had involved him, souring his relationship with his parents.

Milne’s wish had come true: by the late 1920s, he was one of the country’s bestselling authors, shoulder to shoulder with the likes of H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie and Noël Coward. Yet, as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he came to resent his creation, seeing Pooh as a distraction from his work for adults. Shepard, meanwhile, was grieving after the sudden death of his wife in 1927. The House at Pooh Corner, which came out in October 1928, was to be their final Winnie-the-Pooh book, they decided. They left readers two further lasting gifts: Tigger, bouncy paw eternally raised, and the game of Pooh Sticks.

Yet their partnership endured, with Shepard even illustrating Milne’s Year In, Year Out (1952), his final book. He wrote prolifically for adults, as well as publishing two autobiographies, although Pooh would always define him, to his chagrin. ‘He never really thought of himself as a children’s author,’ points out Riordan. The inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood continued to call on Shepard’s services as new colour editions were printed, but he never fell out of love with them: a 1970 colour sketch entitled ‘Part of a Pooh Orchestra’ shows Eeyore entangled in a tuba as Piglet saws away enthusiastically at a cello.

Milne died at Cotchford Farm in 1956, leaving part of the rights to his literary estate to the Royal Literary Fund, which continues to support authors through them. He is commemorated alongside Shepard by a plaque at Gill’s Lap (called Galleon’s Lap by Milne), Ashdown Forest’s highest point. This was unveiled in 1979 by Christopher Milne himself, who, later in life, after opening a bookshop and becoming a writer himself, reached an understanding with Pooh. The children who visited then are now bringing their own children to the same place to soak up its magic.

Riordan spends a lot of time in the forest seeking out inspiration, following in Pooh’s paw-prints. ‘You really feel as if you’re stepping into one of the illustrations every time you go there,’ she says. ‘It’s changed, of course, but it’s still so familiar from the books.’ Thanks to A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard, it will forever be an enchanted place where a boy and his bear play.

Winnie-the-Pooh: A Little Boy and His Bear by Jane Riordan and illustrated by Andrew Gray, is out now

The Men Who Created Winnie the Pooh by James Campbell, published by Michael O’Mara Books, is out now

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

‘I was left-handed at birth, and at school in Turkey, when I first started primary school, I was converted to using my right hand. That was the first time I heard the word “exile”,’ Elif Shafak says. ‘The teacher was very adamant that I kept my left hand under the desk all the time, and sent it to exile.’ Soon, it would not just be her left hand that was exiled; as an adult Elif would be leaving her home country for fear of retribution for her writing.

The Turkish-British author has published 21 books including The Forty Rules of Love, There are Rivers in the Sky and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, but it was her 2006 novel The Bastard of Istanbul that got her in trouble with the Turkish authorities.

‘It was a shock, I didn’t expect it at all,’ she says of her prosecution for the crime of ‘insulting Turkishness’, according to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The novel discusses the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government denies. ‘Suddenly I was put on trial in a very unexpected way,’ Elif recalls. ‘There is an article in the Turkish Constitution that protects Turkishness against insults, but nobody knows what that means, to be honest. This had been used against journalists and historians, but never ever before against a fiction writer.

‘The words of fictional characters were taken out and used as evidence in the court room. The prosecutor asked for three years in prison for writing a work of fiction. I was acquitted eventually, but it was a very unsettling period, after which I decided to move out of Turkey.’

Elif came to the UK, which ‘became her home’. Two further works, The Gaze and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World were investigated by the Prosecutors Office for ‘the crime of obscenity’, as Elif explored themes of gendered violence, sexual violence and child brides, ‘which in my opinion means child abuse’. ‘Whatever you write about, from history to sexuality, you can easily offend the authorities and you can get into trouble. As a novelist, that's very very difficult,’ she says.

Despite real threats of retribution, Elif continues to write. Lately she has been working on her new novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, which will be released on October 15. ‘I am only now emerging from that intense work, and these days I’m doing lots of literary festivals… I am an introvert by nature, but I love doing book events,’ she says. She will be speaking twice at Cheltenham Literature Festival this month.

Writing itself, however, is still a challenge. ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s your first book, fifth book or 10th book, you always go through valleys of self-doubt and anxiety. The only thing I’ve learnt is that all of that is part of the writing process.’

Your aesthetic hero

I love James Baldwin. The way he carried himself, the way he spoke, his tone, his whole aura, that is very important to me. In terms of colours and hues, I’m very interested in Francisco Goya, the Spanish painter. In his work, the range is mind blowing, from dark, sometimes gloomy drawings to very colourful, bright, vivid hues. He has such complexity in his body of work. So, I would say James Baldwin and Francisco Goya.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. I had the honour of being one of the three judges in 2025. That was very memorable for me because so many artworks were submitted and displayed, not only paintings but also sculptures, video installations and even tapestries, so it is quite interdisciplinary. Some of the people whose work was being displayed were less well known, some were just members of the public, although there were also very famous painters within the exhibition. That juxtaposition, in the fact that they were all displayed in a very egalitarian way together, is something that really stayed with me.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I mean, I spend a lot of time buying stationery. I just can't stop. If I see a shop full of notebooks I just have to go in there.

The possession you would never sell

I have some first edition books that have been gifted to me. For example, there’s a lovely edition of Madame Bovary on my shelf. I don’t think I would ever sell that, and Madame Bovary also plays a role in my upcoming novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity. But I’d always choose things that have emotional value rather than financial value.

The music that you work to

I have always loved heavy metal since my youth. Now that I am a middle-aged woman people don’t expect me to listen to it, but I still love it. I think many metalheads actually are gentle souls, and I also think that heavy metal is a large vast kingdom. The only thing that’s happened [with age] is that I have moved to subgenres of heavy metal, so now I listen to more industrial metal, metalcore, melodic death metal, sometimes symphonic heavy metal, Viking and Scandinavian bands.

I listen to this kind of music all the time when I’m writing, but I listen to one song on repeat so it becomes like a loop. Seventy, 90 times I can listen to the same song. That’s how I write. It transports me to a different place and I love its high energy. It is very raw. It helps me to write, hopefully, more calmly.

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to podcasts all the time. I was listening to Stephen Fry speak about the Tudors today, although it was an audiobook, so not strictly a podcast. I listened to that as I walked my dog. There’s also a lovely podcast called Hardcore Literature, and I listen to The News Agents and In Our Time, of course. Those are the ones that immediately come to mind.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I have found so many books inspiring for different reasons. Sometimes we are drawn to the story, sometimes to the style, the rhythm. Sometimes it’s the craftsmanship, how the structure has been built. I also like re-reading the books that I love because it’s a very different experience. So honestly, I don’t know how to choose just one book.

Maybe I would say Don Quixote. That has really been life changing for me. I was very young when I first read a children's edition, and I didn't know novels could do that. It just blew me away. This crazy night roaming La Mancha, the Iberian Peninsula — that stayed very vividly with me.

Who would play you in a film of your life

I don’t know how to answer that, honestly. I have a lot of respect for films, but I don’t feel like I have enough say in that kind of matter.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My family and my library.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Every morning is different and we can't expect to be cheerful, smiling, hopeful every day. Sometimes it is difficult to get out of bed. We never talk about these things, but I think we must. At the same time, though, there is so much love, gratitude, humanity, empathy, connectivity. I think the worst thing that we can do to ourselves is to fall into apathy, numbness. So love, you know, gets me out of bed. Gratitude gets me out of bed. Empathy, stories, family, friends, nature, and also humanity. These are the things that I try to focus on.

The items you collect

I don't collect anything. When you live such a nomadic life — and I had to live a very nomadic life for a long time — you cannot keep things. You know, how many things can you put in a suitcase? How much of your home can you carry with you if you are going to another country? I left Istanbul and I haven’t been back for over 11 years now. I always think: Had I known that I would not go back, what would I have taken with me? I would have loved to take a sapling, maybe of a fig tree. So, when you live a peripatetic life, it's difficult to become a collector.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I adore family run hotels, in Spain, Italy, France. Usually the ones that have a loving warm energy, and that are not too corporate and commercial. Places where everything is prepared lovingly, and the breakfast is prepared by, maybe, the mother who is in the kitchen, for example. I like such environments a lot.

Your favourite painting

That’s tricky. I don’t know what my favourite painting is. It’s very difficult to choose just one. I’ve started writing on Substack, and for each essay I write I choose a painting and build a literary essay around it. Paintings have been very important to me, always, ever since I was a child in Madrid. I can never forget the time I visited The Prado Museum, it was just mind-blowing.

I like Goya a lot and Velázquez. There is a painting by Velázquez called Las Meninas, in which the painter is inside the painting. I like things that have, of course, stories. Almost all paintings do, but I like it when there’s a layer within a layer within a layer. I wouldn’t call it my favourite painting, because maybe there isn’t just one painting that I can choose in that sense, but it is one of my favourite paintings by Velázquez.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

Any meal that you share where you break bread with family and friends. It’s not only the food but it’s the feelings, the sharing. Food has always been very important in my writing. I was raised by a grandmother, for whom food was a language. Grandmother, when she didn't know about how to talk about difficult subjects, would instead feed you. Food was how she expressed her love.

In many of my books, there are menus. So, for instance, I dreamed of an imaginary tavern in The Island of Missing Trees called The Happy Fig, and many people told me that they so wanted to be in The Happy Fig, and taste that. So food is really very important in my writing because I think it is a language, it is culture, it is history. Much more than mixing up a few ingredients.

The best present you’ve ever received

We got our little dog — Romeo Cappuccino is his name — when he was just a newborn puppy. That was a big gift, but also every day is a gift, every sunrise, every book we receive and pass on. Any blessing, any beauty, any act of love is a gift.

Elif Shafak will be speaking at Cheltenham Literature Festival this month. In conversation with Simon Armitage and about her new novel, ‘In One Brief Moment All Eternity’. Tickets are still available. ‘In One Brief Moment All Eternity’ will be published on October 15.

Dear like-minded travellers, are you thinking of heading south — of packing up your notebooks and chasing the same coruscating light that has always drawn dreamers to the Côte d’Azur?

Here, it is easy to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald balanced on the rocks in Antibes, Jean Cocteau drafting angels in Menton or James Baldwin writing late at night at home in Saint Paul-de-Vence. Why don’t you follow them there?

For more than a century, the French Riviera has been more of a story than a coastline — written and rewritten by exiles, novelists and poets who came in search of silence, spectacle or to find themselves reflected in its mirrored sea.

It was not all down to the light. We should not deceive ourselves: luxury, peace and pleasure are tempting indulgences. Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Côte d’Azur for this new generation of modern artists was the sheer hedonism suggested by those blue skies and the warm sunshine.

As the 20th century dawned, the Riviera became a refuge for some of the world’s most famous painters. Renoir built himself a villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907 and was still painting fleshy nudes until his death in 1919. Matisse moved permanently to Nice in the early 1920s, when his favourite subject was painting semi-naked odalisques bathed in sunshine. This was also the era when socialites and writers such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Somerset Maugham were drawn to the Côte d’Azur.

After the Second World War, the reputation of the Rivera for hedonism and creativity was secure. The most famous artist in the world, Picasso, moved to the Golfe-Juan in 1946 and Marc Chagall was also a convert. He spent the last four decades of his life in the area, moving first to Vence in 1949 and then to the hilltop village of St-Paul-de-Vence. His subjects were more whimsical, but suffused nevertheless with the light and colour of the south.

The Riviera they knew, however, is not quite the one you will find. The bohemian hotels they once frequented have become five-star palaces and their beaches privatised; the cafés curated for Instagram. Today, you’ll find inspiration in the Riviera’s quieter corners: in small hotels scented with orange blossom, in the back rooms of restaurants where menus are scribbled in chalk and in garden cafés where a glass of rosé is poured without performance.

This is a slow journey along the coast towards places that still reward time and attention.

Who? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso

Where? Antibes

Begin in Antibes, as Fitzgerald did before you. The American author arrived with his wife, Zelda, in 1925, in search of respite from the excesses of New York. They rented Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins, rechristening it Villa America, where Fitzgerald began work on his semi-autobiographical novel Tender is the Night.

The light remains extraordinary. Stand on Cap d’Antibes as dusk falls and you will see what he saw: the sea wrapped around you like swathes of blue silk; the sky bruised pink and cream.

The difference is, of course, that Fitzgerald stayed on the Riviera when it was surprisingly inexpensive and known more as a winter refuge than a summer playground. Today, his villa masquerades as a hotel, the Belle Rives, where even the sun loungers come at a steep price.

Instead, head further round the cap to La Villa Fabulite, a 12-room hideaway shaded by fragrant pine and lemon trees. After a vermouth cassis cocktail, traverse the coastline on foot to the Musée Picasso. Look at them long enough and you’ll start to see the artist’s Cubist faces in the rock formations on Plage de la Garoupe.

Pablo Picasso first came to the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, but it was his return here 1946 that was to prove a turning point in his life. After enduring the Occupation in Paris, he had emerged from the war with renewed energy and a new lover, the young artist Françoise Gilot. That June, the two of them headed south to the Golfe-Juan and then, in September, he was offered an empty room on the second floor of a medieval château in Antibes.

For two months, he worked feverishly. With artists’ materials still scarce after the war, he improvised with boat paint, asbestos-cement panels and decorators’ brushes.

A succession of exuberant still lifes, nudes and humorous sailors poured from his brush. The masterpiece was La Joie de Vivre, a monumental celebration of peace, sunlight and sensuality, with Gilot dancing naked at its centre.

The couple then moved to nearby Vallauris and Picasso began to experiment with ceramics, producing thousands of pieces over the next decade, as well as the great murals War and Peace.

However, he was not an easy man to live with. In 1953, the relationship with Gilot failed and she was replaced in his affections by Jacqueline Roque — a 27-year-old girl who worked in the local pottery shop. They moved to Cannes, then, in 1958, the château at Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, which had a view of his hero, Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire.

After they married in 1961, Picasso spent the rest of his life with Jacqueline and he lies buried in Vauvenargues. Yet, it was the decade in the Golfe-Juan when he was perhaps at his happiest and you can still see the work he made during those golden years in the museums in Antibes and Vallauris.

Who? Alexandre Dumas and the Impressionists

Where? Nice

In 1841, Alexandre Dumas wrote: ‘A beautiful courtesan, softly lying on the edge of her azure mirror, in the shade of her orange trees in bloom, with her long hair abandoned to the sea breezes, and whose waves would come to wet her bare feet, for Nice is the city of sweet laziness and easy pleasures’ — and plus ça change.

If Antibes is the cocktail party, then Nice is the café the morning after: a little battered, but all the more alive because of it. Here, the Belle Époque façades are peeling, charmingly, the Cours Saleya market is a riot of flowers and the smell of socca drifts from wood-fired stoves in Old Town alleys.

In March 1882, Eugène Manet boarded a train from Nice to Paris with a stash of freshly made oil paintings in his baggage. They included a view of the fishing boats in the port at Nice and one especially charming and spontaneous depiction of his daughter Julie playing on the beach. The work of his wife, Berthe Morisot, both pictures were destined for the seventh Impressionist exhibition, which opened the following month on the rue St Honoré.

Morisot, the most prominent female artist of the group, had spent the winter in the Hôtel Richemont with Eugène and Julie. The mild winter climate of the Côte d’Azur had been a boon for an artist who was deeply committed to the new movement, which championed a more spontaneous approach to painting. As did her fellow Impressionists, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, she strove to capture the fleeting effects of light and the atmosphere by working en plein air and immersing herself in her subjects.

Such an approach was fine during the summer in the coastal resorts of Normandy, where Impressionism was born during the 1870s, but it was not so alluring when winter came and the weather turned cold and grey. By heading south, Morisot was part of a new geographical trend — the moment when the light of the south began to filter into French painting. Over the next century, the landscapes of Provence and the sunny skies of the Riviera were to become one of the most important themes in modern art.

Nowadays, writers and artists seek out the Hôtel du Couvent, where a resident herbalist blends together teas and tinctures using herbs growing in the cloister garden, to help sharpen thoughts.

Stop by Les Grandes Caves Caprioglio — a family-run institution since 1910 — for a thoughtfully priced selection of local Bellet and Provence wines. Or Pizza Pili, where the montagnarde — crème fraîche, lardons, potatoes, reblochon — can be carried, hot, to the beach and eaten on the stones as the Mediterranean folds itself against the shore.

Who? W. Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau and Princess Grace of Monaco

Where? Cap d’Ail

There are few train journeys lovelier than the one that connects Nice and Cap d’Ail. The train pauses at Villefranche-sur-Mer—a station set directly above the water—where Cap Ferrat juts into view.

W. Somerset Maugham settled on this peninsula for much of his life, although he also described the south of France as ‘a sunny place for shady people’. His choice of guests — Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf — suggest otherwise.

Cap d’Ail is a pocket of calm at complete odds to Monaco. It was here that Greta Garbo retreated from Hollywood, where Sir Winston Churchill painted and where Gabrielle Réval lived and wrote about the town’s intimate relationship with the sea. She is buried here, overlooking the sea she so often returned to in her work.

From the train station, a staircase winds its way down, through palms and pines, to Plage Mala, a crescent of sand and stone. It feels like a secret. In this cove, it's not about being seen.

Villa les Camélias: Musée à Cap d'Ail is the only Belle Époque villa in Cap d’Ail open to the public and exhibits objects and countless photographs dating from the late 19th century to the 1950s, capturing the daily life of Cap d’Ail’s visitors and residents (Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Princess Grace of Monaco).

The Nietzsche Path, a steep mountain trail that starts here and ends in Èze, takes about 1½ hours to climb. The philosopher from which it takes its name was inspired to complete Thus Spoke Zarathustra when braving it. (‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,’ he once wrote.)

Èze, a medieval village, clings to the mountain like a mirage and is sometimes referred to as ‘the eagle’s nest’. Stay at Les Terrasses d’Èze, a hotel and spa in which you can partake in a form of float therapy. Lying in near silence, weightless, in saltwater, your imagination slowly starts to drift.

Who? James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall

Where? Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Vence

James Baldwin lived in Saint-Paul-de-Vence for 17 years and his house, Chez Baldwin, was a meeting space for intellectuals, artists and exiles. The Provencal landscape, he said, ‘demanded contemplation’. La Colombe d’Or, a historic restaurant with rooms, is Saint Paul’s calling card — its walls hung with Picassos and Braques, left behind in lieu of payment. Alternatively, there is Orion Treehouses, which sits in the middle of a cedarwood forest just around the corner from the Fondation Maeght.

The market town of Vence, Saint Paul’s larger and more authentic sibling, was the first resting place of D.H. Lawrence — before his wife, Frieda, had his remains exhumed and moved, five years after his death.

It was here that Henri Matisse found a second wind: Chapelle du Rosaire was, in his own words, ‘the culmination of a whole life of work and the flowering of a tremendous, sincere, and difficult effort’. Bathed in cobalt blue, lemon yellow and emerald green, the chapel is one of the most spiritual spaces on the Riviera. Pared back and radiant, it is a reminder that simplicity boasts its own kind of grandeur.

If Nietzsche hasn’t made you feel Human, All Too Human, climb to the peak of Baou de Saint-Jeannet, an enormous cliff whose viewpoint attracted Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall. It’s a lesson in perspective: climb higher, see further.

(St Tropez: Best left to the superyachts and paparazzi. A writer will find little here but distraction.)

Who? Blaise Cendrars, Patti Smith and Anthony Bourdain

Where? Marseille

Marseille, France's second-most populous city (above), is all too often dismissed as being rough around the edges, but it’s never felt more vibrant. Novelist Blaise Cendrars described it as ‘a mess after my own heart’; Patti Smith performed at the Gare de Marseille-Saint-Charles; Anthony Bourdain wanted to retire here. ‘Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseille,’ observed Jean-Claude Izzo, the author of the Fabio Montale hard-boiled detective novels. He was right.

The city is raw, restless and constantly being refashioned. There is, right now, a new wave of chefs determined to do more than bouillabaisse and looking to its migrant population, past and present, for inspiration.

At La Friche la Belle de Mai — a multifaceted public space that’s part restaurant, part Arts centre, part market, part skatepark — enjoy a glass of pastis with panisses (chickpea fritters), then slip into Atelier Renata, an exclusive supper club venue without a menu, where dinner is whatever the chef picked up that day. In the morning, browse the sap green Librairie Mazette for something to read before moving east along the coast.

Who? Frédéric Mistral and the Fauvist painters

Where? Cassis

‘He who has seen Paris and not Cassis, has seen nothing’ wrote the poet Frédéric Mistral. The colourful fishing port, with its limestone cliffs, terracotta houses and sheltered, fjord-like inlets known as calanques, once drew in the Fauvist painters — André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck — who captured its magic on canvas, in bold and vivid tones. Linger here.

At Le Petit Oyster Bar, work your way through oysters, razor clams, shrimps, and moules gratinées, washed down with bone-dry Cassis AOC whites. And then onto the Calanques, where the water is so clear that boats look like they’re suspended in mid air. The Calanque d'En-Vau, a narrow limestone cove backed by sheer cliffs, can be reached by boat or a steep, two hour-long trail that’s worth every uphill step.

For writers and artists, this fabled coastline has long offered lessons in how life is best lived. Good writing, like sculpture, removes excess to reveal essence. Inspiration is found not in the opulence of hotel lobbies, but in winding, cliffside paths with the promise of a view at the top. Carry a notebook, and let the landscape do the rest.

Nick Trend’s new book, ‘France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists’, is out now (Thames & Hudson, £50).

‘Painting the French Riviera’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until January 31, 2027.

The spectacular modern garden at Alnwick — 25 years this month — has proved an unqualified success. The scale of its layout is astonishing and its plantings are beautiful. Moreover, thanks to the vision and tenacity of its creator, Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, it has transformed the economy of the North-East and given pleasure to visitors from all over the world.

The Duchess was brought up in a gardening family. Her mother was a keen plantswoman who spent as much time as possible in her garden at Kailzie, near Peebles. The then Jane Richard learnt about plants, especially their names and how to grow them, working alongside her mother. When she married Lord Ralph Percy, the younger son of the 10th Duke of Northumberland, he was 22 and she was 21. They had a relatively impecunious start to married life, so she learnt to do everything for herself.

The skills she acquired were invaluable when her bachelor brother-in-law, the 11th Duke, died unexpectedly and her husband had to take on all the responsibilities that went with being the 12th Duke, including managing Alnwick Castle, its collections and the substantial Percy estates.

Back then, in 1995, Alnwick Castle itself was open to the public, but its grand Italianate garden had long since disappeared. The Percys had ‘dug for Victory’ during the Second World War, but after 1950 all signs of cultivation disappeared and the walled garden was put to growing conifers.

When they took on the estate, the Duke said to his wife, in effect: ‘You know about gardens and gardening… what should we do with the old walled garden?’

The Duchess’s response was that it must be an attraction in its own right — and it must be of benefit not only to visitors, but to the people of Alnwick, too. This is the principle that has guided her at every stage of the garden’s development.

Friends who know the Duchess will tell you that she is, above all, an ‘ideas person’ and very soon she saw the potential of the steep hill that adjoins one side of the kitchen garden. Running water — perhaps some sort of waterfall — might be a feature, she thought, and she began to discuss her ideas with garden architects and designers.

None came up with a scheme that matched her vision for the hillside until a Scottish friend — the owner of a famous historic garden — suggested she should look for a European landscape architect. That explains how, after discussions and meetings with three of Europe’s best-known garden architects, she ended up asking the Belgian Jacques Wirtz to take on the design of the Alnwick Garden.

The most memorable feature of Wirtz’s design is the massive cascade that runs down the hillside opposite the entrance to the garden. Its surreal outline, its 21 steps and its squirting spouts and fountains were something of a puzzle to some observers at first, but water offers innumerable possibilities to gardens and gardeners and Alnwick’s Grand Cascade resonates strongly with visitors. Now, it rates alongside the Angel of the North as one of the region’s proudest modern icons.

The old walled garden, 3¾ acres at the top of the cascade, now the Ornamental Garden, is where the horticultural interest lies.The design is formal and the plantings are opulent. Some of the hedges are composed of unusual plants such as dogwoods and crab apples — Malus ‘Red Sentinel’ takes to hard pruning surprisingly well, whether as a hedge or when pleached. Soft fruit, including raspberries, currants and gooseberries, are interplanted with standard roses. Large pots are filled with spring bulbs or summer-flowering agapanthus. Clematis, roses and honeysuckles clamber up elegant pergolas and trellises. Delphiniums and peonies lead the list of handsome herbaceous plants, all displayed in harmonious colour combinations.

The beautiful Rose Garden was another of the original features when the Alnwick Garden opened in 2001. David Austin planted it and it is regularly replenished with improved varieties. The emphasis is upon roses as good garden plants and includes many of Austin’s own latest introductions. A substantial replanting is planned for this winter.

The Garden was a winner right from the start when the Prince of Wales, now The King, offered to become its patron. What few people realised then was the extent to which it would become a major tourist attraction, the new Versailles of the North. In 2002, Country Life pinpointed Alnwick as the best place to live in Britain, but the Duchess remembers that there was high unemployment and economic depression — and that foot-and-mouth disease had pummelled the local farmers in 2001.

The garden, however, became a force for regeneration. In one year alone, the Duchess remembers, 100 farmers and other locals applied for planning permission to turn their houses and outbuildings into B&Bs. Today, more than 200 people work full time for the garden and almost every business in Alnwick itself has benefited directly or indirectly. Local people support the garden enthusiastically, including some 100 volunteers who consider it their garden.

Shortly after its opening, the Percys realised that the garden must develop as an educational charity for the benefit of visitors. Consequently, the entire garden was transferred to a charitable trust in 2003. This means that not a penny passes to the Percys and the Duchess is free to raise funds for further expansion. Much of her work today focuses on fundraising for social and educational activities.

The Poison Garden was a significant addition early in 2005. More than 100 different poisonous plants are grown and displayed behind black gates adorned with skull and crossbones. A sign by the firmly locked entrance warns visitors that ‘These Plants Can Kill’. They include everything from Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade) and foxgloves to laburnum trees, hemlock and the handsome evergreen tree Strychnos nuxvomica, the attractive orange-like fruits of which are the main source of strychnine. The garden has a licence to grow cannabis, coca and opium poppies. All visits are accompanied and children — who are told about the medical uses of plants and the dangers of misuse — love its allure.

Much more followed: the Treehouse — one of the largest in the world — opened in 2004, supported by a copse of mature lime trees. It is an extraordinary eyrie, with suspended walkways and rope bridges with a restaurant at the centre. The Serpent Garden came the following year — eight fascinating stainless-steel water sculptures by William Pye surround a snaking hedge of holly. These are both beautiful and educational, just as grottos and shell houses were in the 18th century.

The Cherry Orchard, which opened in 2008, is a feature of supreme beauty for two or three fleeting weeks in late spring. It occupies an entire hillside and is planted with only one cultivar — 329 trees of ‘Tai-Haku’, the Great White Cherry. It’s the sort of feature that many gardeners dream of creating, but lack the means or the confidence to do so.

In the Roots-and-Shoots Garden (2011), children are taught to sow seeds, plant vegetables and herbs, nurture their crops and harvest their produce. Elderly people with health worries, often the result of loneliness, maintain parts of the garden and are encouraged to join other activities.

The Alnwick Garden is an extraordinary achievement, but the Duchess is not a person who rests on her laurels. Indeed, she is now looking forward to completing the garden. New plantings, better buildings and improved waterworks are all part of the plan. ‘It’s not who you are that matters,’ she says, ‘but what you do for people.’

Find out more at the Alnwick Garden website.

This feature originally appeared in the September 30, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Fine country houses for sale are as rare as hens’ teeth in Derbyshire and those that come onto the open market — even in tough times — can expect to find buyers beating a path to the front door.

Such a contender is historic, Grade II*-listed Bradbourne Hall, for sale for the first time in 62 years at a guide price of £3 million through the joint agents Derbyshire-based Ed Caudwell and Stuart Flint of Fisher German.

This Elizabethan/Jacobean country house is set in more than 10 acres of beautifully maintained gardens and grounds on the outskirts of the picturesque village of Bradbourne, five miles north of the market town of Ashbourne at the southern edge of the Peak District National Park.

Bradbourne Hall was built on the site of an earlier house by the Buxton family, who lived there until the 1880s. It was then let to a series of tenants before being sold in the early 1960s to a family from Leicestershire who never lived there.

The present owners acquired the hall in 1964, and the place has been much improved by the present owners, who undertook the re-roofing of the entire building some 25 years ago. That said, the decor is showing its age in many of the rooms, so some cosmetic updating will doubtless be on the cards for the new owners. Though if they don't keep the beautiful cream Aga in the kitchen, then the world will be a poorer place.

The house was built, according to its listing, on three storeys of coursed squared limestone with gritstone dressings and quoins under a slate roof.

In all, Bradbourne Hall offers 8,963sq ft of comfortable family living space on three main floors, including five reception rooms, seven bedrooms and four bathrooms. The ground floor houses a panelled reception hall, an elegant dining room, a well-fitted kitchen adjoining a large breakfast room and a charming sitting room with a stone fireplace.

The heart of the house is the magnificent first-floor panelled drawing room, which over-looks the front garden and boasts a wealth of period features. Steps lead down to the Oak Room, a large double bedroom that enjoys views over Bradbourne’s Grade I-listed village church of All Saints.

Also on this floor is the principal bedroom suite, two further double bedrooms and a family bathroom. The exposed beams and stripped floorboards are beautiful, and the effect — especially allied to a four-poster bed — gives the house a fairytale feel in places.

The second floor houses two further double bedrooms and three attic rooms, with a large playroom/family room on the third floor.

A versatile annexe, the former billiard room, serves as a family office with a further double bedroom and bathroom.

Surrounded by mature woodland, which ensures an exceptional degree of privacy, the gardens and grounds have been impeccably maintained over the years by the hall’s devoted full-time gardener.

They include abundant lawned areas, mature shrubs, a large kitchen garden and a heated outdoor pool served by a range of buildings. Outbuildings include garaging, machinery stores and stabling.

Bradbourne Hall is for sale at £3 million through based Caudwell & Co and Fisher German.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

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I saw a coat and I liked it. This, in itself, is not unusual. Some people’s eyes are too big for their stomachs; my coat collection is too big for my wardrobe. And I’m particularly partial to a coat that looks great and can do battle with the British weather. The coat I saw is a Burberry parka with a map of London picked out in raised embroidery so tactile that the city appears to almost lift itself from the fabric.

I found myself wondering why I liked it. Was it the parka? The map? The slightly improbable combination of the two? And, more importantly, when did maps become cool enough for one of Britain’s biggest brands to start decorating entire collections with them?

London has been mapped for more than 2,000 years — though cartographers have not always been very interested in helping us get to where we want to go. Instead, they’ve revealed not only how the city has expanded outwards, but how Londoners understand their own city.

One of the earliest surviving depictions is the Cottonian map, dating from around the 12th or 13th century, when places were mapped according to their religious and political importance. It was followed by: the Tudor-era Agas map, made right before rapid Elizabethan expansion; William’s Morgan’s 1676 London map, produced after the Great Fire and a testament to Sir Christopher Wren’s rebuilding ambitions as well as the reality that emerged; and John Rocque’s monumental 1746 map which covered an area of squares, gardens, villages and newly developing suburbs that would soon be swallowed whole by London.

Then there are the maps that are not really maps at all, including Harry Beck’s 1931 Underground effort, Paula Scher’s riotous, 21-colour silkscreen treasure (above), and Ursula Hitz’s typographic offering. They were made in different centuries using different technologies, but they’re all big and bold and an attempt to make sense of London.

For all their beauty, maps have never quite had the headline-making cachet of other collectibles (think Lalanne sheep, Jean Royère furniture or Lucie Rie ceramics). Until now. Wealthy boomers collected blue-chip paintings. Gen Z — who view paper maps as aesthetic wall art or tools for experiential travel — is opting for collectibles, a $320 billion market. In 2022, Roque’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (c. 1749) sold for more than £58,000 at auction; last year, one of Beck’s annotated proofs fetched £88,900 at auction. Young collectors are striving to create a personal narrative, says Emanuela Tarizzo, director of Frieze Masters. ‘Collectors, whatever their age, are searching for stories that resonate with them, and for a sense of discovery.’ In other words, everyone is tired of homogenous, mass-produced slop.

Burberry's London landmark map design — which appears on fleeces, T-shirts, umbrellas and silk scarves, as well as the parka — turns the familiar business of mapping London into wearable art. The pieces, a part of the Winter 2026 collection, designed by Daniel Lee to celebrate Burberry’s 170th anniversary, are available to purchase at a month-long Harrods pop-up.

The brand opened its first store in the capital at 30, Haymarket in 1891; its trench coats — the garment with which the brand is still most readily associated — are synonymous with our wet, urban landscapes and have London names. Kensington, Chelsea, Waterloo and Camden. The midwinter show, held at Old Billingsgate Market, channeled a London that I, for one, definitely recognise: moody, damp and in a constant state of flux. The space was dimly lit, and decorated with resin puddles and check-patterned scaffolding.

In other words, Burberry has co-opted London as its own. Several of the pieces are embellished with their knight motif, but it is the map of famous landmarks, from Buckingham Palace to Burberry’s headline-making headquarters, that really stands out. Perhaps this is why I keep coming back to the parka. I, too, want to tame London, to understand it — and what better way to try and do that by wearing it. The best bit: it’s made to order, so you won’t find yourself playing spot-the-parka all over London.

Burberry's London map-embroidered cotton sateen parka in navy is POA. The Harrods pop-up is open until October 28.

Arguably the greatest party London has ever seen was the coronation of Henry VIII in 1509. The Tudor King was determined to upstage Edward I, who had ordered 22,460 chickens for his own coronation in 1274, and, aged only 17, was fizzing with the predictable buzz of a teenage boy with a crown on his head.

Henry’s bash, held at Westminster Hall, featured wine-flowing fountains, jousting and (clutch your pearls) a personal detail assigned to their ladyships who had to crawl under the table to rearrange their dresses whenever they needed to urinate. Debauchery? Darling, it barely touches the sides.

The closest we have come to such a bacchanal in recent times — that we know of — was in 2004, when Kate Moss threw her 30th birthday party inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Beautiful And The Damned. As with all the most legendary parties, accounts may vary, but the canonical reading is as follows. Serena Rees, co-founder of luxury lingerie label Agent Provocateur, and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood (later Taylor-Johnson) hosted two adjoining parties for the newly tricenarian model at their north London homes — one was ‘The Beautiful’, the other ‘The Damned’ — before the night progressed to a penthouse at Claridge’s, where Moss danced with Ronnie Wood, Marianne Faithfull and other cultural heavyweights until morning. It is the heady mix of stars, almost symbolic in their potency, for which the party is remembered — more than the alleged extracurriculars.

‘The right mix of people is the most essential party trick,’ says Anna Van Praagh, former deputy editor of ES Magazine and chief content officer of The Standard, who, throughout her career, has been lucky enough to attend some of the best bashes of her generation. ‘It is not so much about the great and the good as it is the great and the bad. You want a few serious people present, but only a few. Important people are often very dull and a host’s job is to make sure no guest is stuck for too long with anyone boring.’

As London heads into silly season, parties are being held every night across the capital. Society doyennes, diary journalists and fixtures of ‘The Scene’ are often contending with five or six different invitations an evening. It’s a nice problem to have for those who have it — but choosing which party to attend can be tricky. What could be the night of your life equally could end up a damp squib.

The greatest parties, often, are those that take you by surprise. ‘The best dos are the most spontaneous,’ says Dean Piper, a former celebrity journalist-turned-VIP strategist. ‘I’ve had more fun at baby showers that went on until the wee hours than at most film-premiere after parties.’ The best bash yours truly has attended this year was no doubt Yotam Ottolenghi’s harvest party, an event that may conjure an image of the labneh class reciting incantations around a giant courgette, but was, in fact, a hoedown of the highest order, attended by such names as Helen Fielding and Nigella Lawson. ‘Bad behaviour is very important,’ believes Van Praagh, ‘and a lot more likely to occur if you have enough young people present who don’t have much to lose.’ Attractive waiters are also a must.

To those hosting the parties, the pressure of competition can be fatal. As anxiety clouds judgement, priorities can be forsaken for nonsense. Ham-fisted attempts at entertainment or organised fun rarely fly. ‘I was always confused by the parties thrown at Sushisamba,’ says Piper, of the restaurant in the Heron Tower, EC2. ‘They’d hire these Brazilian people in carnival costumes — we’re talking full headdresses — that always struck me as bizarre and made the entire event feel claustrophobic.

‘I think any form of entertainment that puts the party on pause is a no-no,’ the former hack continues, ‘except the time that Amy Winehouse got up on stage at the Sanderson Hotel after the Brit Awards in 2004, to serenade us.’ Wine-flowing fountains à la Henry VIII are fine; trapeze artists or ballet solos are not. Only one place, Piper suggests, gets the entertainment right. ‘The Goring nails it. Sure, they have singers and magicians and the whole thing is a bit much — but it feels authentic to the hotel. You can tell that the staff love it, too, which makes a big difference.’

If entertainment is usually best avoided, on what should a host be sure to focus? ‘Music is far and away the most important thing,’ says Serena Connolly, head of under-35s membership at The Birley Clubs, which includes The George, Annabel’s, and Mark’s Club. ‘I could drink not a drop of alcohol and still dance until 5am if the music is good. If the music is bad, I’m out in under an hour.’ Van Praagh agrees, although believes that ‘weapons-grade alcohol’ is important. ‘You want people to get drunk quickly.’

Of course, a party needs more than mere music and drinks to deliver the ‘wow’ factor its punters are chasing. A cursory look at London’s greatest dos suggests that this is a must: the last Frost Fair of 1814 involved an elephant crossing the Thames; the 1994 premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral would not have gone down in history had Elizabeth Hurley not worn that Versace dress; and Sir Elton John’s 50th birthday, held at Hammersmith Palais, is legendary not only because he dressed up as Louis XIV, but because his costume involved a 3ft-tall wig that balanced a miniature Spanish warship and working cannon on its crest.

The most effective way of creating ‘a moment’ without interrupting the flow of the party, Van Praagh says, is via the guest list. ‘You want someone there whom no one is expecting to see,’ she explains. That doesn’t mean someone necessarily more famous or ‘above- grade’, but rather someone incongruous. ‘What made parties in the Noughties so exciting,’ says Van Praagh, ‘was the fact that you could be chatting with Noel Gallagher one minute and with A. C. Grayling the next.’

For Connolly, the best way to produce that memorable moment is through a performance that doesn’t put the evening on pause, but rather weaves into it. Attending The George’s summer party together in July, the downstairs bar filled with people trying to catch a glimpse of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who performed a set of floor-fillers for an hour in between DJ sets (her cover of Like A Prayer has lived in my head rent-free ever since). The right ‘moment’, she suggests, ‘should only bring more people onto the dancefloor’.

If, up until the early days of the Instagram era, a ‘moment’ could easily be created with an outfit going viral online (think of Rihanna’s Guo Pei dress worn at the Met Gala in 2015 that was instantly likened to an omelette), a party is now more likely to become a talking point by foregoing any digital presence; banning phones and cameras and shrouding the event in secrecy. ‘Celebrity parties are all going phone-free,’ Piper says. ‘Take Poppy Delevingne’s 40th birthday this summer. Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and Rita Ora were all there, yet no one was allowed to “pap” them. That made it a lot more enticing to those who weren’t present and ensured that it was talked about for weeks afterwards.

‘There is a movement of people wanting to bring back the “behind-closed-doors” ethos of the parties of yore,’ Piper continues. ‘All the best stuff happens after the Getty photographer has finished his shift.’ A great guest list, once more, does the heavy lifting. ‘Ideally,’ says Van Praagh, ‘you want to have someone there who has been recently cancelled, as everyone wants to speak to them.’

I wanted to put this latest theory to the test and, thinking I knew exactly which party might follow such a rule, emailed the head of events at The Spectator and asked if I could attend their Young Readers’ event as a reporter. Charming as it was, I was disappointed to find not one controversial person there — not even Douglas Murray — and asked attendees, mostly young men in their mid-to-late twenties, whether they agreed the party could have been enlivened by throwing someone controversial into the mix.

‘What do you mean by controversial?’ one quibbled. ‘Do you mean [the chairman] Charles Moore? Because he’s just over there.’ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘I do not mean Charles Moore. I didn’t think he was controversial. I mean someone properly cancelled like Peter Mandelson.’ My audience shrugged. One of our party, two drinks deep, began to round on Rory Stewart, co-host of The Rest Is Politics and scourge of the alt-right. ‘He is so annoying,’ he said irascibly. ‘Thinks he knows everything.’ People around us agreed. I concluded that a feather-ruffler is indeed a good party trick, yet different crowds have different triggers. Putting the cat among the pigeons depends on the cat and the pigeons.

A good venue also goes a long way. The Spectator, still host of one of the most exclusive summer parties around, is blessed with a townhouse that backs onto St James’s Park and a garden that looks bigger than it actually is. At full capacity, one cannot swing a purse without knocking out several politicians and at least one host of The Newsagents podcast.

London’s premiere party destination in recent decades was the Chiltern Firehouse, yet after that shut down due to a fire in 2024, others muscled in to claim the crown. The strongest substitute so far has been The Standard, King’s Cross, a hotel designed by Archer Humphries and Shawn Hausman (the man behind Hollywood Canteen and Bar Marmont in Los Angeles), which hopes to hold onto it when Chiltern reopens in late 2027. Sweeties, the hotel’s penthouse bar, is a pick for today’s album release parties and more intimate soirées are often held in Townhouse Eight, an apartment with its own bar and kitchen. The whole thing is soundproof, as are the suites that tend to host the afterparties.

No phones, no breaks in the set list, soundproof walls and handsome waiters: anything else needed to throw the party of the year? ‘Yes,’ says Van Praagh. ‘Always bring a pack of cigarettes, whether you smoke or not. All the right people smoke and, if you brandish cigarettes obviously enough, they will flock towards you like a moth to a flame.’

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Covid threw many of us into the land of remote work, willingly or unwillingly. Some have since returned to the office, but others certainly haven’t. For a growing number of people, me included, fixed locations are now a distant memory. For the past six years I’ve been roaming around the world, working from my laptop as I go. They call us 'digital nomads'.

The world I’m referring to isn’t one of teenage backpackers in a £3 a night hostel in Laos. An increasing number of working professionals, of all ages, are seeking a different pace and flexibility to life, stepping out of the predictable routines back home and embarking on adventures across the globe.

Some flock to the tried and tested destinations in Western Europe, but increasingly these are expensive and over-saturated with tourists — to the dissatisfaction of locals. Many long-term nomads, such as myself, choose distant terrain to work and enjoy instead. Here are six of my favourite ‘offices’ from around the world.

Tbilisi, Georgia (UK Summer GMT +3, Winter GMT +4)

The Georgian capital is the perfect mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar; it’s where east meets west, ringed by mountains and packed with character and history. It’s described as ‘the Berlin of the East’ with a world-famous arts and electronic music scene and a food-and-drink offer that rivals Western European capitals, but for a fraction of the price.

A few hours’ drive from the city, you have ski resorts, excellent hiking terrain and wine country — presenting a bounty of activities for weekends. Meanwhile, Tbilisi has excellent co-working facilities, city-wide fast internet and a booming nomadic community. You can see and experience more in a week in Tbilisi than you do in a year elsewhere.

Top tip: If you go skiing at the weekend, take your laptop. I once got stuck in a mountain resort for four days after the road back to Tbilisi was hit by an avalanche.

Taghazout/Tamraght, Morocco (Winter same as UK, Summer GMT -1)

A place where winter doesn’t really exist and sunshine is guaranteed most days per year. From October to April it’s a world surfing hub, drawing thousands of ‘digital nomads’ with surfboards in tow. Although only small, the laid-back surf villages contain an array of excellent co-working spaces, speciality coffee shops, tasty eateries and yoga/fitness studios. This is mixed in with an authentic Moroccan fishing community, who are renowned for their hospitality.

When not at the beach, the Atlas Mountains are only a stone’s throw away, offering great weekend escapes to waterfalls and pretty mountain vistas. Food and staples are cheap, the internet is good and it’s hard to feel stressed when the sun and surf vibe keep you in check.

Top tip: Avoid the summer months, it can be oppressively hot. Both this blonde Manxman and his laptop have overheated on a mistimed summer visit.

Santa Catarina Island/Floripa, Brazil (Summer GMT -3, Winter GMT -4)

If your working hours are tied to a British office clock, then you need to enjoy an early start to venture west of the UK. If you do, then the island of Santa Catarina, off the Southern Brazilian coast, doesn’t get much better. It offers miles of pristine beaches, backed by rainforest and lush hills, with numerous lakes in its centre. The beautiful nature is criss-crossed by hiking trails, which lead to small coastal towns, where an ice-cold beer, in an extraordinary setting, awaits you. One side of the island also contains the city of Florianopolis and the region is popular for water sports and marine-life spotting.

It’s also well set-up for remote working, with good Wi-Fi and a culinary offer that punches well above an island of its size. The area has all the beauty and Brazilian flair of Rio, but with a much better security landscape and a more relaxed pace to proceedings.

Top tip: Starting work early, means you finish early. Without caution one can get a little over excited at the beach bars in the afternoon, to the detriment of a 6am Teams call the next day.

Almaty, Kazakhstan (Summer GMT +4, Winter GMT +5)

The coolest city in Central Asia, acting as a major hub for not only businesses and creatives in the region, but also for digital nomads. Sitting on the edge of the Tian Shian Mountains, the leafy city has towering peaks to its south, where ski lifts can be reached in less than 40 minutes & wild nature awaits.

Culturally it’s fascinating: Kazakhstan is at a crossroads of cultures, with Almaty sitting on the edge of Central Asia, but only a few hours from China and in a former Soviet nation, with a large ethnic Russian community and a culture of traditional Kazakh nomadism.

Almaty is awash with excellent cafes, restaurants and bars and has the best music scene in Central Asia. Plus, it has the region’s best-connected airport — offering great short-trip potential across the continent and further afield.

Top tip: If you do decide to stumble into an electronic music event at a nearby ski resort, don’t take the work call (speaking from experience).

Montenegro (GMT +1 year-round)

Montenegro has an idyllic Adriatic coastline, which soon climbs up to the country’s mountains and highlands (which make up 85% of the nation’s territory). Think fresh seafood by the azure sea, with rocky mountains acting as your backdrop. It’s a nature lover's paradise and another top tier spot for hiking, near to ancient coastal towns that never seem to be in a rush.

The country has been flooded with investment in recent years, leading to high-speed internet, improved accommodation and better facilities. Think Croatia, but far cheaper and with more impressive nature.

Top tip: Avoid the height of summer, when the place is swarmed by the uncomfortable presence of cruise ships, decimating the peaceful charm along its coastline.

These are challenging times, especially when it comes to restoring a Grade I-listed building described by the selling agent as being ‘in need of extensive restoration and modernisation’. This is the case with Georgian, Grade I-listed Farfield Hall at Addingham, near Ilkley, West Yorkshire, which comes to the market for the first time in 35 years, at a guide price of £2.85 million through the Harrogate office of Carter Jonas.

Built in the early 18th century in the Yorkshire Baroque style, Farfield Hall stands in 6½ acres of landscaped grounds and woodland looking south over parkland towards Ilkley Moor. With the Dales on your doorstep, the thriving village of Addingham nearby, and local landmarks like Bolton Abbey a short drive, this is a lovely part of Yorkshire to be in.

The setting, the space and the architecture are all in place, then — and despite the agent's warning about the work that must be done, there is no doubt that this is a place full of potential. It's 'an opportunity to acquire a genuine trophy property in a beautiful setting', as the listing puts it.

According to a Country Life article by Architectural Editor Lawrence Weaver (in February 1915, the design of Farfield Hall was planned by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, widely known as the Architect Earl, and built to Burlington’s design for the widow of his friend George Myers, the steward of his Bolton Abbey estate.

Weaver was writing a few years after the house was bought by George Douglas, founder of Bradfield Dyers Association, an international textile conglomerate. ‘The interior has some good features, notably the staircase… it is of interest to note that the staircase ceiling is of carved wood instead of plaster. The back of the house is very plain and includes some older work from the farm that stood originally on the site.'

Much water has gone under the bridge since then but there's no doubt that Weaver, or the house's owner George Douglas, would recognise the place should they happen to walk in today. The staircase that Weaver admired, for example, is just as beautiful now as it was 111 years ago.

'The recent alterations made by Mr Douglas were done in a wise and conservative spirit,' the article goes on, explaining that, the doorway on the south front was originally the main entrance and a drive led to it; but this side has now been terraced, and the subsidiary door on the east side was made the chief entrance — a practical change.'

At that time, 'the main hall became a morning room; the dining room became the drawing room, and vice versa. Otherwise the ground-floor was practically unchanged: and the alterations upstairs were only to provide necessary bathrooms, etc. '. The house's floor space was later extended to 14,215 sq ft with the addition of a huge Art Deco-era music room, big enough to host a grand ball.

'In the gardens great improvements were made by garden designer Thomas Mawson,' Weaver continued.

'A new broad walk was made from the gate-piers westwards and took the place of a drive to the stable… the stable and outbuildings were completely remodelled internally.’ One of those, the Coach House, is listed Grade II in its own right.

Weaver's 1915 article went on to tell of many of the ups and downs of the house. Myers left a son who died young and unmarried and his daughter left no children at her death in 1742.

After passing through several hands, Farfield Hall was bought in 1805 by William, second son of John Cunliffe of Langbar and Addingham, and at the time of writing belonged to his great-nephew, Ellis Cunliffe Lister-Kay of Godmersham Park, Kent, who sold it in 1908 to Douglas.

After the Second World War, Farfield Hall was taken over by the West Riding County Council as a home for the elderly before being sold in 1990 to the current owners, who ran a family business on the ground floor and adapted the upper floors for residential use.

Selling agent Tony Wright of Carter Jonas comments: ‘Farfield Hall offers a series of grand, perfectly proportioned rooms with a wealth of period panelling and plasterwork, with the neighbouring, Grade II-listed coach house an added bonus.’

Farfield Hall is for sale through Carter Jonas at £2.85 million — see more details.

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If a group of ladybirds is a loveliness, then a collection of Ladybird books is lovely. An individual publication charms, but when seen en masse — as is the (book)case with Helen Day’s long-term touring exhibition, now at Mansfield Museum, Nottinghamshire (until November 21) — the subject becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Cataloguing, completing and curating are all essential elements of collecting and, although the process can be a pleasingly solitary endeavour, most collectors, such as Day, aspire to share their efforts.

Sometimes, the thrill of an audience prompts collectors to stray from a beaten path that is signposted by stamps, coins and fridge magnets.

Britain has numerous collecting trailblazers. Consider William Hamilton (1730–1803), who, having acquired a decent array of antiquities, focused his collecting on wax penises associated with the Italian cult of St Cosmo. Or George IV, who became obsessed with Napoleon’s personal artefacts.

Such strange items take on a Frankensteinian power as a collective. As Damien Hirst wrote on the dispersal of Walter Potter’s taxidermied collection: ‘It only makes sense (whatever sense it does make) if it is kept together. Individually, what have you got except for some bad examples of taxidermy?’

As a collection, the weird can become wonderful — and the same can be said of the collectors themselves.

Walter and Charles Rothschild

‘I’ve got a saddle on; doesn’t mean he’ll let you ride him,’ comes the warning in Racing Stripes, the 2005 film about a farming family who train a zebra to compete against Thoroughbreds. It took its lead from Lord Walter Rothschild (1868–1937), who sought to prove the animals could indeed be trained — he famously visited Buckingham Palace in 1898 in a zebra-drawn trap and bred hybrid animals known as zebroids.

In addition to his live menagerie, Rothschild feverishly collected butterflies, eggs, skins and more, amassing what is thought to be the largest-ever private natural-history collection: the museum he founded at Tring, Hertfordshire, holds more than one million avian-related specimens alone.

An entomological fascination bordering on compulsion ran in the family; Walter’s brother Charles Rothschild (1877–1923) also collected butterflies and his pinned examples— o f which he claimed there were no duplicates — were considered the gold standard in contemporary lepidoptery. It was, as Peter Marren writes in Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies, ‘the ultimate frontier of collecting, the polar opposite of a boy's day out with a net and a jam jar’.

Charles’s daughter Miriam (1908–2005) continued his research on fleas, cataloguing her father’s specimens (the 260,000-strong siphonaptera collection at Tring is largely his) and becoming a scientific authority in her own right.

Henry Wellcome

With its inlaid silver pattern, delicate monogrammed carving and surprisingly stiff bristles, Napoleon’s toothbrush is one of the more endearing items in Henry Wellcome’s collection of medical curiosities, together with a gruesome 16th-century amputation saw and a bronze cupping vessel from Pompeii. These are among 125,000 pieces that have been on permanent loan to London’s Science Museum since 1976; many are currently displayed in ‘Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries’.

As a pharmaceutical entrepreneur who founded one of the companies that would eventually merge to become GlaxoSmithKline, Wisconsin-born, British-naturalised Wellcome (1853–1936) had considerable opportunity to enlarge his collection, adding quirky items such as the medicine chest used by Capt Robert Scott in the Antarctic.

He later collected Egyptian and Sudanese antiquities with increasing fervour, culminating in his own large-scale excavations in Jebel Moya at the turn of the 20th century.

Although Wellcome was an occasionally indiscriminate collector — he sometimes acquired bulk lots under a pseudonym — he retained a penchant for medical memorabilia. His first museum in Wigmore Street featured instruments believed to have been used during the mummification process, including the canopic jars that held the internal organs of the deceased.

By the time of Wellcome’s death, his collection (of collections) was reportedly five times larger than those held by the Louvre.

William Buckland

When studying Britain’s most divisive mustelid for his 2013 book Badgerlands, Patrick Barkham was determined to examine all aspects of the animal. In one stomach-churning chapter, he samples stir-fried badger meat, served up by a chef specialising in road-kill cuisine.

It was an astonishing undertaking by a naturalist, but Barkham is not the first to taste his subjects. William Buckland (1784–1856), a paleontologist before the term had been invented, committed to eating every species on earth. His collection of animals at home — bolstered by his academic connections that enabled him to acquire exotic specimens, including a pet hyena called Billy — often ended up on the dinner table as part of his culinary exploration. Hedgehogs, tortoises, rats and frogs were consumed, with mole and bluebottle fly considered the most distasteful.

This was not a private undertaking — John Ruskin was said to have regretted declining an invitation to a meal in which mice were served and Peter Lund Simmonds reports that Buckland offered soup to his guests before claiming that it was made from an alligator that he had dissected earlier that day.

Buckland’s son Francis, following that parental doctrine to clear his plate, was also a keen zoophagist and became a founding member of the British acclimatisation society, an organisation that supported the introduction of non-native plants and animals, primarily as food sources.

Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Maj RT Donald Welsh and Mary Gardiner

Within her respectable collecting interests — including porcelain and fans — Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–95) had an ace up her frilly sleeve. Her collection of card memorabilia was a Victorian full deck, with examples gathered from across the world, including a tarot pack from Bologna and French-Spanish designs destined for South America. The cards, together with advertisements and other games, were bequeathed to the British Museum in 1896.

Among the catalogue is a late-19th-century two-of-spades American ‘squeezer’ playing card, so called because the value is indicated in one or two corners, allowing a player to ascertain their hand while holding closely arranged cards. There also was a complete pack of contemporary Chas Goodall & Son London cards, with the court cards featuring costumes from the Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian periods, and rare Chinese money-suited playing cards from the Qing dynasty.

Schrieber’s once quirky passion was popularised and other British collectors quickly jumped on the cardwagon. Maj R. T. Donald Welsh (1928–2017), co-founder of the English Playing Card Society in 1984, gathered more than 6,000 packs of playing cards and card games, which are currently being catalogued by the Bodleian Libraries.

As with most collecting circles, there’s always someone with a zanier specialism: the card collection of Mary Gardiner (1928–2002) centres on Happy Families, also part of the Bodleian’s ephemera and featured in the 2007 ‘Mr Bun the Baker’ exhibition.

Charles Waterton and Walter Potter

In Capt Edward Jones’s 1825 painting Charles Waterton capturing a cayman, the titular human subject is pictured straddling the crocodilian one as several men attempt to tether the poor beast, under the watchful eyes of armadillos, anteaters and birds of every feather.

The account of the Yorkshire squire’s South American escapades was much discussed — John Timbs’s English Eccentrics and Eccentricities includes Waterton (1782–1865) in the ‘Eccentric Travellers’ section — and might have been disputed, were it not for the deft preservation of the reptile, using the hunter’s own mercuric chloride-based taxidermy technique.

The creature was on show in Waterton’s home at Walton Hall, West Yorkshire, and is now owned by his alma mater Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, where it was recently displayed as part of a Shakespeare exhibition, with the animal a stand-in for the ‘What manner o’ thing is your crocodile’ dialogue in Antony and Cleopatra.

The cayman was the jewel in Waterton’s taxidermy collection, which he proudly declared contained no ‘stuffed’ animals, thanks to his hardening-scooping method. This enabled him to create monstrous creatures, such as a howler monkey's bottom turned into a human face.

The collection included a tableau of reptiles entitled 'The English Reformation Zoologically Demonstrated', foreseeing the Victorian trend for anthropomorphised taxidermy. Walter Potter (1835–1918) took up the pursuit with gusto, amassing some 10,000 specimens, including a kitten wedding, rabbit school and a diorama of ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin’, which contained 98 species of British birds.

Having been on public display for decades, the items were eventually auctioned, with Bonhams revealing Peter Blake and David Bailey among the bidders; the kitten nuptials went for £21,150.

Edward James

Anyone wishing to make an urgent call to the West Dean estate, West Sussex, when it was home to Edward James (1907–84) would meet an unexpected intermediary. James, a passionate collector of Surrealist art, was the dedicatee (and, according to some, collaborator) for several of Dalí’s lobster telephones, having significantly supported the artist throughout the 1930s.

A similarly crustacean-mounted receiver was also installed at James’s Wimpole Street home in London, where René Magritte painted his patron in Not to be Reproduced (1937). In an appropriately Surrealist turn, the line between collecting and living blurred and James’s residence on the West Dean estate, Monkton House, was transformed into a real-life Surrealist world, with Champagne coupes lamps, a Mae West lips sofa and purple stucco.

Later, James went to considerable expense to build his dream Surrealist sculpture garden in the rainforest north of Mexico City, where Escher-like stairways lead to nowhere and Alice-in-Wonderland concrete flora meets rare flowers. The phantasmagorical jungle enclave was declared an ‘Artistic Monument of the Nation in 2012’ and is open to visitors.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Hydrangeas are very useful late-summer shrubs. The typical mopheads, however, are not so easy to grow in the colder parts of our island. That is when and where the white-flowered species Hydrangea paniculata comes into its own.

The wild species comes from Japan and parts of south-eastern China and its flowers are invariably white, but with a tendency to turn pink as they age. They are happy in shady woodland or in open sunny positions, but all hydrangeas give of their best if they are grown in soil that does not dry out. The great value of H. paniculata is that it remains in flower for a very long time, sometimes through to the end of October.

One unusual feature of Hydrangea paniculata is its flower buds, which are completely round, like oversized green drums. The flowers, however, open out as long, conical panicles, which may hang from the branches or grow more upright, according to the strength and thickness of their stems. These panicles have large, sterile florets that attract pollinating insects towards the pollen and nectar of the insignificant fertile flowers.

They are usually scentless, but butterflies, wasps and honey bees nip busily in and out of them. The flower spikes of the wild species are fairly open, but almost all garden varieties are a mass of overlapping sterile florets, presenting a solid cone, slightly reminiscent of a very large lilac, but always white, and opening from green buds.

A stream of new cultivars has been arriving in garden centres on these shores in recent years, from breeders in Japan, France, the Netherlands and the USA. There isn’t a single dud among them — all will grow well in our conditions, flower for many months and give great pleasure.

There are nearly 200 cultivars now in the National Collection of Hydrangea paniculata at Darley Park in Derby. Almost all have massive flower spikes, but some have been developed for their ability to turn unusual shades of pink or crimson with age. Others have been chosen because they remain white right to the end or because the florets are green and slow to turn to white.

Small cultivars are also emerging — Pinky-Winky, now overtaken by newer varieties, is a July-flowering favourite that combines moderate growth with a rich pink colour as it matures. These shorter varieties reach about 3ft in height, whereas some of the larger ones, useful for landscaping, may end up closer to 8ft or 10ft, with vigorous upright and spreading branches if left unpruned.

The RHS four-year trial, organised by Debbie Roe, RHS trials officer, at Bridgewater Garden near Manchester of Hydrangea paniculata cultivars ended last autumn and the great number of Awards of Garden Merit the judges conferred reflects the excitement it generated.

It was an important exercise because it was linked to similar trials in eight European countries, including Belgium, Germany and France, run by the Royal Dutch Horticultural Society under the auspices of the Euro-Trial organisation. Exactly the same 83 cultivars were simultaneously propagated by the Dutch and circulated to all eight nations, so that the trials would have the same starting point and the RHS’s results, together with those from all the other trials, will be published in the Netherlands in a final overall report.

Each of the 83 varieties was represented by three plants: one was hard-pruned to ground level each year in spring, one lightly pruned and one left unpruned. All performed very well.

The results confirmed every gardener’s experience: pruning delays flowering, but the flowers are larger. Unpruned plants bloom sooner and have more flowers, but they are smaller.

The RHS recommends cutting them to the ground every year — some nurserymen do this with a chainsaw — but, whatever régime you adopt, you will not be disappointed: all Hydrangea paniculata varieties are reliable garden plants. The fact that they bloom only on this year’s new growth means that they will flower perfectly even if they are caught by a late frost, too.

The trial judges were told to mark the plants for their vigour and health, the colour of their stems and the size, shape, colour and season of their flowers. They also considered a number of characteristics that many of us would not have considered. For example, the judges looked for plants with strong, sturdy stems, because the large panicles fill up with water in rainy weather and may flop down and be spoiled by contact with the soil.

One very effective way to grow varieties such as Pinky-Winky, the stems of which cannot always bear the weight of its beautiful flowers, is to graft them onto the upright stem of a vigorous variety and grow it as a standard.

With many cultivars of Hydrangea paniculata now available and so many excellent new ones launched every year, it is increasingly difficult to choose between them, but you can be certain that all will be healthy, tough, easy to grow — and beautiful.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.