Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthornhedge. ’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass ‘Silent Noon’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti FROM the beginning of May, every country road and lane is lined with the familiar froth of cow parsley. Fuelled by inc

I WON my first prize for gardening when I was nine years old at prep school. My grand-mother was delighted—it was she who had sent me the seeds of godetia, eschscholtzia and Virginia stock that secured my victory. Gardening continued to absorb me thr

THERE are beautiful insects and insects handsome to the human eye, but among the least pretty of those six-limbed legions is one directly descended from ancestors that flourished in the Permian period, some 250 million years ago. It is a living fossi

WAR, climate change, political instability, net zero and trade tariffs will all endanger our food supply. ‘No food for three days is worth rioting for, yet we plant trees on Grade-I land.’ Thus ended a recent letter I received from a farmer in Worces

WHEN the invading Roman army arrived in the Cotswolds some 2,000 years ago, they found a region of gentle hills, valleys and streams and a climate of chilly winters and springs. They brought hardy sheep to raise for wool to keep themselves warm and,

KESWICK’S historic place at the heart of global pencil-making began in Borrowdale in the 1500s, when a Cumbrian shepherd discovered clumps of a soft, black substance in the roots of an upturned tree. He began using it to mark his sheep and the practi

SHEILA WILLCOX was not the first female winner—that was Margaret Hough in 1954—but she was ahead of her time in her rigid methodology (which still holds good today) and professional attitude to what was then an amateur sport; she certainly gave no qu

The striking Chloe headboard, from £1,682, is available in the new Fable Woodland fabric featuring pretty floral embroidery, from Andrew Martin (020–3887 6113; www.andrewmartin.co.uk) Inspired by an early-19th-century French design, Salvesen Graham’s

A prize of £25 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened. Solutions must reach Crossword No 4829, Country Life, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR, by Tuesday, May 14. UK entrants only 1 Dark grey animal

MICHAEL SANDLE is a great man and a great artist with a conscience-stricken sense of outrage at the futility of violence, which gives an extra edge to his imaginative genius. The word ‘genius’ does not exactly spring to mind when viewing some of the

THERE are only three native coniferous trees in Britain: Scots pine, yew and juniper (Juniperus communis), the last two being cypresses. Scots pine and juniper share the distinction of being in Britain since the ice last retreated, whereas yew arrive

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Pool End Barn is a delightful Grade II-listed, two-bedroom Cotswold-stone cottage that lies in the heart of the village of Willersey, a few miles north of Broadway. Its position overlooking the village duck pond is particularly picturesque. The house

SOLAR power is a growth industry, critical to the Government’s pursuit of net-zero emissions and mired in controversy. Britain’s largest solar farm, the 220-acre Shotwick Park in Flintshire, is about to be dwarfed by super schemes already in the pipe

Kris Butler (Bodleian, £25) ANYONE tempted to buy this book as a ribald stocking-filler for a boozy uncle, may, on first inspection, find reason to pause. Kris Butler’s text is not po-faced and the book includes, alongside reproductions of the said m

Russell House, Broadway, Worcestershire The home of Andrew Dakin and Malcolm Rogers AS do many Cotswold villages, composed of picturesque stone houses, cottages and inns erected between the 15th and 18th centuries, Broadway owed its wealth to the med

‘This picture provides memories of hunting in days gone by with my father, who was joint-master and hunted the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds two days a week from 1951–74. In my parents’ day, the picture hung in the dining room and I can remember many a S

ONE of the many satisfactions of writing this column comes when it is possible to weave connections between objects in the different sales or exhibitions that I have to discuss. This week, there has been no need for any weaving, as it was unusually e

MANY of Isabella Beeton’s 900-odd recipes were not her own—for which modern-day cookery writers have taken her to task—but she is credited as the first to publish them in the clear format (ingredients followed by method, including cooking time, right

AS you walk into the dimly lit chancel of St Mary’s in Kempley, Gloucestershire, it’s hard to know where to look first. Behind and around the altar of this pretty church, elaborate decoration covers almost every surface, with winged creatures, robed

Visit Tottering-By-Gently on our website: www.countrylife.co.uk/tottering We are committed to only using magazine paper which is derived from responsibly managed, certified forestry and chlorine-free manufacture. The paper in this magazine was source

DO I need to have Amazon Prime for the spectacle of watching a television programme ‘drop’, or does everything drop nowadays? Apparently, new episodes of Clarkson’s Farm start dropping on May 3 (Town & Country, April 24). Please can we stick with the

DRIFT a short way east of the Cotswolds to the cobbles and spires of Oxford and you’ll find the site of England’s first coffeehouse, which opened in the early 1650s. It’s reported to have been a meeting place for enlightened thinkers, although it’s a

THE names of our butterflies are so familiar now that it is easy to miss how strange they are. Some are baldly descriptive: there’s a large white (Pieris brassicae) and a small white (Pieris rapae); a large blue (Phengaris arion) and a small blue (Cu

The gardens at Iford Manor, near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire The home of the Cartwright-Hignett family OH, to have been a fly on the wall in 1898 when Henry Avray Tipping first cycled down the steep hill just outside Bradford-on-Avon and saw below hi