It is always a pity to sully the pleasures of collecting watches with the taint of filthy lucre, but the soaring value of a certain model of wristwatch can function as a helpful barometer of shifting tastes.

Five years ago, one result in particular sent the mercury shooting up the scale to command the attention of the market. Trophy models by Patek Philippe and Rolex frequently fetch six- and seven-figure sums, but, on November 10, 2021, after fierce bidding, a Cartier Crash watch from 1970 quadrupled its low estimate of 200,000 Swiss francs to sell for 806,500 Swiss francs.

It was an astonishing result, made all the more remarkable because included in the sale was an insurance valuation for the watch from 1997 that valued the watch at £40,000.

The Cartier Crash was invented in the London branch of the famous jeweller in the late 1960s. Until they were reunited in the 1970s, Cartier’s three main boutiques, in Paris, London, and New York, were separately owned by different members of the family and were known for producing their own distinct styles of products.

For instance, for much of the first half of the 20th century, the London branch conducted a brisk, sometimes roaring trade in tiaras, because they were still required for Court occasions, coming-out balls and so on.

But, by the 1960s, London Society had changed: King’s Road fashions rather than Queen Charlotte’s ball dictated tastes and Cartier reflected this shift in the centre of social gravity, offering groovy designs with strange shaped cases and bold dials with large Roman numerals.

Of these far-out creations, none was further out than the Crash. The name referred to the watch’s creation myth that a timepiece damaged by a car crash had been brought in for repair. Everything about the watch was, to use a technical term, wonky: the case asymmetrical, the buckle twisted off centre, even the concealed lugs, invisible when the watch was on the wrist, were at crazy angles. It was so strange that even Cartier was unsure about issuing it, as I was told some years ago by Dennis Gardiner, a veteran designer of Cartier London, who started work in 1947.

‘Mr Emmerson [Mr Gardiner’s colleague and co-designer] was a great designer and I think there was a little bit of the Salvador Dalí in the Crash. Mr Cartier would not make it at first. He said it was too much like Carnaby Street of those days, but the first one sold immediately and they became a cherished item.’

Even so, they were too avant-garde for many traditional Cartier customers. Stewart Granger bought one, but returned after a week to exchange it for something more conventional. Such was their complexity of manufacture that only about a dozen were made in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a couple more on very special order during the 1990s.

London Crashes are true grail watches, but even more common, later examples made in larger numbers by Cartier Paris are increasingly sought after. In the 21st century, the design has been revisited and reinterpreted, including this year, with the release of the Cartier Privé Crash Skeleton in platinum. The collector's item first received a skeletonised dial treatment in 2015, nearly 50 years after the watch's debut, but the 2026 itineration marks the introduction of a new movement, designed to fit and follow the warped case.

However, although it may be the most spectacular of shaped case watches, the Crash is far from being the sole non-round wristwatch to find popularity in recent years. Nor is the shaped case a new thing: indeed, it is as old as the wristwatch.

In 1810, the Queen of Naples commissioned a watch from Breguet that is believed by some to be the first wristwatch. Known as No 2639, it took 2½ years to make. Emmanuel Breguet, the current historian of the Breguet brand, describes it as 'of revolutionary construction and unprecedented sophistication, consisting of a repeating watch with additional refinements, oblong and exceptionally slender with a wristlet made of hair intertwined with gold thread’.

Although this watch is commemorated by the Breguet brand today with a distinctive, egg-like oval watch for women, it would be another century before the wristwatch began to be taken seriously.

As the 19th century drew to a close, the practicality of the wristwatch for active men began to be appreciated: during the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, British soldiers wore pocket watches in cup-like wristbands. Yet even during the early decades of the 20th century the jury was still out as to whether watches should be worn in the waistcoat pocket or on the wrist and many wristlet watches, as they were called, continued to be made from converted pocket watches or ladies pendant watches.

It was in order to stress their modernity that designers of purpose-built, rather than converted, wristwatches chose non-round designs. In this, Louis Cartier was a leader, making the small, square Santos wristwatch for the eponymous Brazilian-born aviator, who was a frequent sight in the skies above Belle Epoque Paris, scooting about in his powered airships.

The Santos set a precedent and, emboldened by its success, even more esoteric models were launched including Tonneau, which found favour with the ultra-modern composer Stravinsky; the tortoise-shaped Tortue; the bell-shaped Cloche; and, of course, the Tank with its numerous derivatives. These watches are spectacular to look at and, after many years in the shadows, Cartier has once again reissued many of its quirkier watches to be worn by both women and — since the trend for oversize watches has receded — men.

Cartier was not alone in adopting non-round shapes to differentiate its early wristwatch production. At roughly the same time, Patek Philippe was supplying the Brazilian jeweller Gondolo with tonneau and rectangular watches shaped to follow the curve of the wrist — so significant were these watches that, even to this day at Patek, a non-round watch is called a Gondolo.

At Vacheron Constantin, between 1919 and 1921, a cushion-cased wristwatch was created for the American market. It was made truly different by the presence of the winding crown at the top right-hand corner of the case, roughly where one would expect to see half-past one. In 2021, the watch was revived, to appeal to 21st-century tastes.

This year is the 95th anniversary of one of the most famous of non-round watches, the Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso, a watch that, as its name suggests, can be turned over on the wrist. This innovation was conceived to protect the watch glass, the most fragile part of the watch at the time. Although synthetic-crystal watch glass has long ago obviated the need for such a protective measure, the flip-over functionality has remained as an opportunity for including either a second face for the watch, with additional functions, or as a canvas for the artists at Jaeger to use to embellish its appearance.

Whether engraved with a coat of arms or decorated with enamel painting (some art-collector clients have even had their paintings reproduced in miniature), the effect can be eye-catching.

Today, the visual effect of the shaped case wristwatch is winning new converts. When Rihanna was photographed announcing her first pregnancy, she wore a pink anorak and ripped jeans, festooned with jewellery. Distended abdomen aside, it was her wrist that attracted attention. She was wearing one of the rarest of Rolexes, the King Midas.

First appearing in the early 1960s, the King Midas used solid gold throughout. ‘Never before — a watch so daringly new, so outrageously different, so harmoniously classical. Named after the legendary king with the golden touch, sculptured from a block of solid 18-carat gold, the King Midas is a watch designed for the most discriminating people in the world’ enthused an early advertisement.

Straight on one side, angled to a point on the other, when laid flat on its edge it evokes the pediment and tympanum of a classical building. ‘We created this as a modern tribute to ancient Greece’ explained one tagline.

Even the box was truly remarkable, taking as its inspiration a masterpiece in the British Museum, the famed Midas stamnos, a lidded pottery vessel combining aspects of vase and amphora that was created in about 440 BC. The black ground is decorated with red figures depicting Silenos led before Midas.

I never saw Rihanna as a student of classical antiquity, but it seems that the strangely shaped Rolex King Midas has finally brought out her inner Mary Beard.

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

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Highclere became world-famous in the 2000s as the impossibly grand Hampshire house used as the location for the filming of Downton Abbey. Yet it was a place celebrated long before ITV's film crews turned up to create the classic period drama, not just for its architecture, but also for the treasures that lie within.

The most famous of these are its Egyptian antiquities, collected by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, excavator of Tutankhamun’s tomb; and its Napoleonic memorabilia, including the Emperor’s chair and desk, personal effects sold from Longwood House on St Helena after his death in 1821.

Today,, though, the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon stand in the Smoking Room at Highclere, an interior redecorated and rehung in the 1990s, in front of a different antique: a table that incorporates decorative panels representing birds and fruits made of ‘hard stone’ or pietra dura.

Making decorative use of stones such as lapis lazuli, onyx, cornelian and sardonyx enjoyed particular popularity in the late 16th century and Ferdinando I de’Medici established a workshop — the Opificio delle Pietre Dure — in Florence in 1588 that became a centre for its subsequent production.

The panels here are thought to date to the 17th century, but were subsequently united in this table, probably in the 19th century. In several cases, the stones actually project from the surface of the panel, giving it real depth.

‘We both love Italy and think the craftsmanship of this table is exceptional,’ says Lord Carnarvon.

‘I love the idea of Nature set into marble, frozen and made eternal. John Keats explores this in his celebrated poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, published in 1819; this table is our urn.’

A version of this feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

For a Victorian hostess, serving ice cream at dinner, turned out from thrilling moulds shaped as beehives, asparagus or swans, was the 19th-century equivalent of showing off on Instagram, ‘afford[ing] the cook the opportunity of making some of the prettiest dishes it is possible to send to the table’.

Leading the charge was the original cookery influencer, Agnes Bertha Marshall (1852–1905), an English culinary entrepreneur who became a leading cookery writer, producing two of the most important books on ice cream — Ices Plain and Fancy: The Book of Ices (1885) and Fancy Ices (1894) — earning herself the title ‘Queen of Ices’.

Born in Haggerston in the East End of London, Marshall was an illegitimate child, raised by her grandmother in Walthamstow. Little is known about her early life — or where exactly she learnt to cook — but it is believed that she trained in Paris, detailing in the preface to her 1887 tome Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book that her recipes are ‘the result of practical training and lessons, through several years, from leading English and Continental authorities, as well as a home experience earlier than I can well recall’.

Her promotional tour for this title saw her cook elaborate luncheons in front of large audiences across the country, securing her reputation as a household name. In 1878, she married Alfred William Marshall, a union that allowed her to take advantage of the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act. In 1883, she bought a plot of land and opened the Marshall School of Cookery at No 67, Mortimer Street, London.

In 1885, Marshall patented a device that could freeze a pint of ice cream. The hand-cranked machine promised ‘smooth and delicious Ice produced in 3 minutes’. She also toyed with using liquefied gas as an ultra-rapid freezing agent — a century before Heston Blumenthal popularised the liquid-nitrogen technique in the pursuit of molecular gastronomy. When he called the ‘Queen of Ices’ one of Britain’s ‘greatest culinary pioneers’, he wasn’t exaggerating

As well as teaching Londoners how to cook, she ran a domestic staff agency business, sold domestic and cooking equipment and campaigned for better standards of food hygiene. Her 1888 recipe for ‘cornets with cream’ would put edible ice-cream cones on the culinary map, using finely chopped almonds, fine flour, caster sugar, one egg, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of orange flower water, mixed to a paste.

Once baked, cornet shapes were quickly cut out of the paste and wrapped around a cornet tin, baked again ‘till quite crisp and dry’ and then filled ‘with any cream or water ice’. This serving suggestion was a novel concept to Victorian Londoners. Cheap ice creams had hitherto been served in small glass containers called ‘penny licks’, which were rarely cleaned between customers. They were eventually made illegal in 1926 for their role in spreading diseases such as tuberculosis.

The High Weald National Landscape is deceptively huge. Stretching from Horsham in the west to Winchelsea in the east, and from the outskirts of Tonbridge to the coast at Hastings, it's almost fifty miles across and 30 miles from north to south, covering 560 square miles of rolling hills and ancient forests, all dotted with charming villages. This, as Octavia Pollock wrote in Country Life in 2020, is 'the archetypal image many of us have of rural England'.

Not far from the dead centre of this stretch of England, between Heathfield and Battle, you'll find one of those aforementioned villages: Dallington. And on the edge of this village, stretching across 337 acres of East Sussex, you'll find the historic Oldcastle Estate, which is now on the market at £7,035,000.

Oldcastle, which has been in the Buckley family for over a century, consists of a hugely impressive principal house, three cottages, one farmhouse and one farmyard, and hundreds of acres of productive farmland. Will Matthews of Knight is handling the sale, either as a whole at the full guide price, or in up to nine lots.

The estate’s focal point is Grade II-listed Oldcastle, the original part of which is a two-storey, timber-frame, late-17th-century building. It was bought in 1910 by Mr Justice Henry Button Buckley, a distinguished barrister and judge, who had the place — then still called Old Castle — restored and enlarged between 1910 and 1912 by Ernest Newton.

It didn't take long for the Justice Buckley to have a fine title to go with his new home: he was created Baron Wrenbury of Old Castle in 1915.

This original part of the house, which boasts some fine 17th-century panelling, forms the central section of the present building, with Newton’s 1910 wings added at either end.

For most of the 20th century Oldcastle remained the country home of the Buckley family, though it housed children refugees during the war, served for a time as a girls’ finishing school, and was even a guest house for a spell, according to the agents, before the 3rd Baron Wrenbury made it the Buckley family home once again in 1961.

The original house, available as Lot 1a at £1.95 million, provides 8,235sq ft of traditional accommodation, set amid 13 acres of delightful gardens and grounds that include easily-seen remnants of those original, 900-year-old castle walls.

The space is set across three floors, and is an object lesson in keeping a period home updated while retaining its character.

There is a fine entrance hall, kitchen, grand dining room, beautiful drawing room, billiard room and more on the ground floor, which has a wine cellar and gun room below.

One side of the house is arranged as a self-contained, three-bedroom annexe, ideal as either staff accommodation or multi-generational living.

The principal bedrooms are all on the first floor, and all with fascinating names which speak of more history to uncover — Chapel Bedroom, Aunt Joyce's Bedroom and so on.

There are also upstairs spaces currently designated as a nursery and a longroom, but depending on the new buyer's needs things could be reconfigured to make this a ten-bedroom home.

The three cottages on the estate — being sold together as Lot 1b — are The Gardener's Cottage and The Engine House, both with two bedrooms, and the three-bed Stables Cottage. The latter is more than just a pretty name: there is indeed a stable included, with three separate bays.

The remaining lots take in the hundreds of acres of farmland — mostly laid to pasture — and woodland, with one of the parcels including a four-bedroom farmhouse.

The Oldcastle Estate is for sale through Knight Frank — see more details.

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

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

There was, in the 1990s, a counter-cyclical knee-jerk among interior designers against fussiness in its forms. The previous decade had been amazing, but quantity had subsumed quality and, suddenly, most inhabitants of fashionable west London postcodes under-took a dramatic decorating detox, painting their floorboards and hanging cream blinds.

The joy was that the look was cheap. A few litres of white paint are so much less expensive than wallpaper, knicker blinds, paint finishes and acres of beige Wilton. The look sparked a new publishing genre: interior books, all with the word ‘simple’ in the title, featuring simple pictures of simple things and text that offered statements of the blindingly obvious. In the USA, the cult of simplicity got its own magazine, Real Simple, which at its peak sold 7.6 million copies a month.

As part of the reinvention of country houses, a new focus on materiality has seen designers and architects paring back houses to their structural framework, revealing stone, brick and beams that a generation ago would have been plastered or carpeted over.

Spaces have been simplified, too, particularly in smaller houses, where removing a wall, pushing into the eaves or opening up staircases can transform the humblest cottage into something quite light and airy. It’s a look that French architects and builders have always understood, especially in the south, where stone farmhouses lend themselves to being unpicked and unpeeled.

It’s an approach to the look that has become a hallmark of estate houses, cottages and pubs, such as The Wild Rabbit at the Daylesford estate in the Cotswolds, where Lady Bamford has been unwavering in carving out her own aesthetic that seamlessly blends texture with modernity.

Never let anyone persuade you that this rural reductivism is simple; reinventing buildings so that they appeal to a modernist sensibility requires clever design, artful construction, ingenious structural engineers and lots of hidden steel beams.

If the technical aspect of the challenge sounds complex, however, it’s not as hard as the spatial planning and sourcing of materials that will add richness and warmth to rooms that could otherwise look austere. Unlike more layered interiors, there’s no hiding behind colour or clutter, nor strategically placed artworks to cover a multitude of sins.

What is refreshing is its honesty; it is blissfully devoid of the pastiche and nostalgia that have been a mark of country houses for far too long.

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

The Experts’ Experts

Country Life asks architects, designers and specialists on its Top 100 list to delve into their little black books to reveal the talented craftspeople and suppliers they turn to for inspira-tion on their own projects  

Why haste creates waste

Hold off on that online-shopping impulse buy — there’s no substitute for carefully crafted quality 

It’s getting hot in here

Ben Lerwill sets his tastebuds a-tingling as he meets the British chilli-sauce makers adding to the spice of life  

Luxury

If you only buy one suitcase, make it a classic GlobeTrotter, suggests Amie Elizabeth White

Winging it

Mark Cocker looks beyond the raven’s grim reputation to seek the truth about our largest corvid

Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s favourite painting

The Speaker of the House of Commons is captivated by the Westminster riverfront in a work with a photographic quality  

On top of the world

Kirsty Fergusson applauds the stamina of the hardy souls who tend the spectacular clifftop gardens at Chygurno, Cornwall 

Country-house treasure

John Goodall stands in the stead of William Tyndale behind a preacher’s pulpit at Bucklebury House in Berkshire  

The legacy

Agnes Stamp salutes Agnes Marshall, the Queen of Ices 

While the cat’s away…

David Glasper lifts the lid on the cat flap, the means by which the regal feline can come and go precisely as it pleases  

An architectural evolution

Jeremy Musson charts the rise of Selwyn College, Cambridge, from its origins as a memorial to a 19th-century missionary  

The raw deal

Tom Parker Bowles savours the lip-smacking summer freshness of that Peruvian classic ceviche 

Travel

Rosie Paterson unpacks the latest in luxury-yacht looks and follows in Frida Kahlo’s footsteps 

Arts & antiques

Beauty and function were fused in the form of the sedan chair, the conveyance of choice for the upper echelons of Georgian society, reveals Carla Passino 

Art to dine for

Intriguing art can be a meal-time conversation starter in country-house dining rooms, as Melanie Cable-Alexander discovers 

Catch of the day

Collector Paul Martin shares his tips on amassing a school of exquisite antiquarian fish prints 

And much more

It can be hard to tell one Volvo from another, but perhaps that is the point.

What do you, dear reader, think about when you read or hear the word Volvo? Do you think of a long line of station wagons at the school gates? A car packed to the rafters with luggage and dogs on its way to the Continent for a family holiday? Safety? Swedishness? Style? Do you think of anything at all, or is the purpose of a Volvo not to be thought about at all — to be locked up and forgotten, an idol of pragmatism on four wheels lost in a Waitrose carpark.

It is one of the many compliments that you can pay to Volvo that it is so many things to so many people. To me, Volvo has been the car of the Fisher family since I took my first steps, starting with the 240 Estate, then the V70, then the XC70 and, most recently the XC60. I have spent a lifetime in Volvos, and they have grown alongside me, a mirror of my own advancing years, but also a constant tether. Safety means many things, especially to the good people of Gothenburg, but to me it is the sight of my mother in her XC60 picking me up from the train station car park at Christmas-time.

It is rare perhaps to consider La Condition Humaine through the lens of a Swedish carmaker, but here we are. Volvos are often considered as cars that do not require thought — Plain Janes that serve a wholly practical purpose of getting kids, dogs and groceries to and from places. But consider this instead: not only are they practical, but they have long had an understated beauty that works in concert with their usefulness. These are cars that are thoughtfully designed by thoughtful people with a penchant for herrings. Practical yes; the three-point seatbelt, designed by Volvo and given to the world, has saved many lives. But also beautiful: the P1800, the best-looking car you’ve never heard of, also holds the world record for most miles driven under a single owner (3.2 million, in case you were wondering). Another good example is the marque’s latest SUV, the EX60.

The EX60 is based on the top-selling XC60 that was introduced in 2008 and has sold more than 2.8 million units. It is a very important car for Volvo on their march towards the electrification of all things — will this be the car that convinces the middle classes to swap petrol for solar power? It is certainly a promising effort.

You would be foolish for thinking that the EX60 is simply an XC60 with a battery where the petrol tank should be. This is essentially a brand-new car from top to bottom, plonked on top of the firm’s new SPA3 platform, which means many things, but principally means that it’s the latest (and by the far the most refined) version of Volvo’s electric offerings.

As well as electric power, the EX60 is also something of a computer on wheels, using various Norse-named computing systems to deliver a seamless driving experience, while the car also benefits from voice-controlled Google Gemini, allowing you to plot driving routes, stops, music, radio and so on. Somewhat alarmingly, it works very well, although having a conversation with yourself while you drive along the motorway might take some getting used to.

Back to La Condition humaine. You may (or may not) spend a lot of time thinking about Volvos, but it pales in comparison to the amount of time that a Volvo is thinking about you. Or, perhaps more accurately, how much thinking about you a Volvo can do at any given time. The EX60, which is perhaps the cleverest Volvo yet, thinks about you 254 trillion times per second, which is an awful lot. If it were a person, you could describe it as clingy. But because it is a Volvo, it is trying to keep you safe and comfortable, which is preferable.

And therein lies the real joy of the Volvo: because it thinks so much, you have to think oh-so little. Very few cars are as relaxing to drive as the EX60, because it plonks you in a well-appointed cabin, nice and high off the road and surrounded by nice things, and it sees the world before you do. Some might consider this level of technology to be a bit incongruous with Volvo, but it’s anything but. Volvo have always been innovators, but like all reasonable people (and unlike many other car makers), they are subtle about it. The EX60 has no interest in telling you about all the many things it can do, or is already doing, to improve your life on the road. It just does them.

It’s an ideology and aesthetic that extends beyond the microchip. The car looks and is sustainable and Scandi, in that the interiors are made from a wealth of recycled and eco-friendly materials, but still feel achingly premium to the touch. The cabin is uncluttered and simple, dominated by a large central screen (where Gemini/HAL9000 lives) and most of the control buttons live on the steering wheel. Any other available space has been given over to storage, underlying the car’s purpose as a family wagon. I liked the cupholders that slide out horizontally from the arm rest, and I really liked the bucket shaped storage space under the dash, which means you can root around for charging cables or whatever without having to take your eyes off the road. It's simple things like this that Volvo is famous for, but probably never gets the appreciation it deserves.

So much new stuff on wheels is overdesigned at the moment, especially in the SUV EV segment, but the EX60 is both contemporary and traditional. The shape is new, but it is also very much Volvo, especially the hipped vertical taillights that are an obvious nod to more vintage versions of the V70 and XC90. The retro renaissance clearly hasn’t passed the good people of Gothenburg by.

To drive, it is as a Volvo should be, which is inoffensive, unobtrusive and comfortable. The steering is light, the ride is soft and the single electric motor in the P6 is smooth and potent. The lineup is fleshed out by the dual-motor AWD P10 and the 671bhp P12, which can hit 0-62mph in 3.9 seconds, should you be really really late in picking up the kids. The advertised range for the P6 is 385 miles, while the P12 is claimed to be able to make over 500 miles on a single full charge, which is very impressive indeed.

Not everything is perfect, but most of it is. Because this is a car company, something that we’ve never had an issue with before has had to be re-designed, which in the EX60’s case are the doorhandles, which are now not handles, but small fins that you rub or gently grab for access. The key is now on your phone or a key tag. It all works very well when it works, but for simple but essential tasks like ‘getting in’ or ‘getting out’, I would always prefer something mechanical over digital. Volvo’s justification for the door fins is better aerodynamics. We will have to take their word on that.

Volvo have long known what they are doing when making big cars, so it stands to reason that the EX60 is spacious and practical, with plenty of room for five full adults and 523 litres of boot space. Overall, despite looking similar to the bridge of a luxury pleasure craft from the future, the interior feels sturdy and well crafted and it should certainly have no issues dealing with the rough and tumble of daily life.

That’s the thing with the EX60 and with Volvo in general. Here is a car that is well made, sustainable, elegant, futuristic and well thought out. It has what it needs, and it does more than you could ever know. So the next time you see a Volvo, whether that’s the EX60 or any other, and think maybe it’s a bit boring or a bit understated, I would urge you to maybe think again.

Some properties sound amazing when you pop a few details down in writing. Just the other week, for example, we looked at Kirtlington Park in Oxfordshire, one of Britain's greatest privately-owned mansions, with 36ft ceilings, 17 bedrooms, 37,000sq ft and gardens landscaped by Capability Brown. That little lot alone took care of the headline.

Today, we have something: 'two-bedroom pilchard cellar for sale' doesn't really sell the place as the stuff of dreams — particularly when you hear that this pilchard cellar has an asking price of £1.295 million, and less than 1,500sq ft of space.

Thankfully, the picture above, of The Cellars and its stunning location, does the heavy lifting, painting its thousand words and then some. Those views, and the access to the deep blue seas off the Lizard Peninsula, make this house a rare catch.

There's more good news: The Cellars might have started life as a 19th century pilchard cellar, but it's long since been converted into a quite wonderful seaside home on the Lizard Peninsula, just along the coast from the southernmost tip of mainland Britain.

The fishy history of this picture-perfect coastal home is goes back to the 19th century, in the days before surfing tourism and Rick Stein restaurants, when fishing was a vital part of life and the economy in Cornwall. Then as now, it seems the annual visitors had seasonal habits: large shoals would gather around this spot in the summer months, allowing the fishermen to catch them and take them to buildings such as this for processing, where they were spread on the floor and salted.

The fishermen who did this are, of course, now long gone and The Cellars is a very different place, having undergone a restoration that has retained its original form and materials, but introduced glazing and a sheltered courtyard spine that imbue the place with a contemporary aesthetic.

The sitting room, at 23½ft by 11ft, offers plenty of space for entertaining or family time. Across the courtyard, the kitchen and dining room are of similar proportions.

The principal bedroom — one of two where new owners and their guests can rest and relax — occupies the entire first floor.

The position of The Cellars, within Church Cove on the Lizard Peninsula, offers sea views from the house and raised gardens, plus easy access to the South West Coast Path — perfect for keen walkers or birdwatchers.

For sale via Rohrs & Rowe and Finest at £1.295 million.

So many of us dream of writing to our idol, but few pluck up the courage to actually do so. If we can muster it, even fewer receive a response. I remember, aged 10, the excitement I felt when my favourite author, Helen Dunmore, wrote back to me. Imagine, then, how Eileen Elgar must have felt when she received a reply from J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973).

Elgar started corresponding with the author in her fifties on the advice of her daughter, who suggested she write to him with some of her questions about his books. Relationship established, Elgar went on to make suggestions on how Tolkien's works could be improved and this eventually led to the writer visiting Elgar at home, and the pair striking up a surprising friendship.

Now, six books, signed by the author, and five correspondents written by him to Elgar, are going up for auction with Sotheby’s.

Tolkien described Elgar, who lived in Bournemouth, as an ‘admirer’ of his in a letter to his grandson in 1963. He added that she was ‘highly intelligent & well read’ and ‘stone deaf’, which necessitated communication ‘by writing pad’.

An autographed note, tucked into a copy of Fellowship of the Ring, is clearly Tolkien's attempt to explain his thought process behind the mythic creations of the race of Dwarves, and includes ‘significant detail regarding Middle Earth Creation lore’. The book and note is part of a single lot of three volumes of The Lord of the Rings from 1961.

In a different title, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a loosely inserted letter references Tolkien's sadness at hearing of the death of C.S. Lewis.

William Passey, of Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts Department says the most surprising thing about these correspondences is ‘how intimate they are, and how much time [Tolkien] was willing to devote to answering Eileen's questions in depth.’

He adds: ‘I suppose the lot that really stands out for me is the set of Lord of the Rings with the note about the creation of the race of the dwarves in it. What’s remarkable about that is the nerdy detail that Tolkien gets into, and obviously the fact that it is not a letter, but something that was written during the course of conversation.’

Elgar, who lived near the Hotel Miramar, where Tolkien and his wife would holiday each year, died in 1980. The letters date from 1961-4 and the works are spread across five lots (lots 83-87). In total, they are estimated to sell for around £39,000-55,000.

Tolkien, born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, was best-known for his fantasy novels. He published The Hobbit in 1937 and the first part of The Lord of the Rings in 1954. He died in 1973 at the age of 81 in Bournemouth.

The demand for his work is still extremely high. In 2023, a second-edition set of Lord of the Rings books that were inscribed by Tolkien in Elvish sold for £95,250 with Sotheby's. The following year, a set of 21 Tolkien letters were sold by the auctioneers for £228,000. The Tolkien Society, founded in 1969, has around 4,000 members in more than 60 different countries and this year, The Lord of the Rings topped The Guardian readers’ top 100 novels of all time list.

Passey of Sotheby’s says: ‘It is worth noting that Tolkien has done exceptionally well at auction in recent years.’ He credits ‘millennial collectors, who are from outside the traditional book collecting world, and have maybe grown up watching the films,’ with this recent boom.

Tolkien expert Pieter Collier told The Observer, of Elgar: ‘I believe she was one of the very few people he could think of as a peer.’ He added that Elgar should ‘get much more credit and respect for her communications with [Tolkien]. He actually listened to what she said.’

‘One cannot help wondering what kind of scholar she might have become had deafness not isolated her from academic life.’

Elgar’s granddaughter, Helen Dutfield, told the BBC that Elgar had ‘a very rich imagination’ and was ‘fascinated by the ancient civilisations’. Of Tolkien, she added: ‘His wife was quite jealous and she was curious about who this woman was that he was going to talk to.

‘We laugh about that because my grandmother was old before her time, she was terribly intense — not the sort of person you could imagine he would have fancied.’

For more information about the sale, visit Sotheby’s website

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

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

Sarah Corbett-Winder (below) is a fashion consultant, sometimes referred to as ‘The Wardrobe Whisperer’, and founder of Kipper clothing.

She recently moved from London to a historic farmhouse in the Welsh countryside, where she lives with her husband, three children and two miniature sausage dogs.

Gucci mega cuff coat

Obviously a piece from my wardrobe had to feature. It has been very hard to pick (I wanted to say the whole lot), but it would have to be this.

She is a recent friend I picked up from Sign of the Times — so good for vintage finds.

I had no intention of buying, but she fit me like a glove and made me smile so much that she had to come home with me.

I like to wear her in expected and unexpected situations, such as the Monday-morning school drop off or in the supermarket.

Not only does she bring me joy, but also others, and I hope to pass her onto my girls.

Engraved necklace

The day before our wedding day, my husband gave me a necklace. A penny-sized, very classic gold disc on a thin gold chain with ‘N&S 14.12.13’ — our initials and wedding date — engraved on it. I haven’t taken it off since that day.

I cherish it with all my heart and hold it when I need that extra boost or support in my life. A piece that is totally and truly tailored to my husband and I.

Portrait of a Lady EDP by Frédéric Malle

It has become a bit of an inside joke that you can usually smell me before you see me.

I have been wearing this for about seven years now and I am still in love with it. It’s such an unusual, slightly masculine, yet very feminine smell.

I am yet to smell another perfume that gets me like this one. It’s a mixture of rose, patchouli and sandalwood — a real piece of art.

It also comes as a body lotion, which might be my next luxury…

Margaret and Marigold

My two wonderful pooches. Margaret is four years old, my short-haired dappled friend, and Marigold is nine months old, my long-haired dappled friend.

They bring me so much joy and insist on being next to me or with me at all times, like my own private security. There is sometimes a competition to see who can be closer to me… Margaret always wins.

They make me feel so loved and special. A lot of my day is spent admiring my pooches, particularly when they are wearing one of their silk neck scarves (nearly always — they have a rather extensive collection!).

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

Strawberry Hill remains the undisputed icon of the Gothic Revival movement. Built by Horace Walpole from 1749 (making it, technically, a precursor to the current which it helped to create), the jet-white edifice conceals a dark and moody interior that was designed to accommodate Walpole’s collection of antiquaries. He referred to this particular decorative style as ‘gloomth’ — warmth and gloom coming together in harmony.

These days, house buyers prefer to err on the side of light rather than dark — but occasionally we come across the home that manages to do a little of both. That is emphatically the case with a house just down the river from Walpole's home, in the beautifully-named Strawberry Vale. Here, a double-fronted Victorian home is up for sale at £4.75 million with Dexters and Inigo. This six-bedroom villa is flooded with light, but its bold colour scheme brings the gloomth to striking effect.

The house, with its long garden that trails right down to the Thames, forms part of a conservation area comprising nine other houses. and spread across four floors, with a beautifully preserved porte-cochère leading to the raised ground floor.

A glass-covered awning connects the street to the building, where each storey, save for the attic floor, is blessed with at least four or five street-facing windows — and there are even more at the back.

The proportions are vast, with the first floor dedicated to the master suite (complete with a walk-in wardrobe and a balcony) and a guest room.

The ground floor has a gym, plant room, cinema room and a store leading to the garden. Three bedrooms, with a lateral balcony, occupy the second (and top) floor.

These are, as industry parlance goes, very good bones indeed. The current interiors, the world of interior designer Claire Botha, are bold, flamboyant, and a decidedly 21st century take on Walpole’s vision of handsome riverside villas with cosy, moody interiors.

Some elements are timeless and classic: the front door, decked out in stained-glass windows; the exposed brick wall in the kitchen; the elegantly-tiled master bathroom with panelling and a mantlepiece. But safe to say that the look won't be for everyone.

Proximity to Teddington and glorious Richmond Park should typically lure buyers with an appreciation for period finishings.

The riverside garden, 150-ft long, comes with private mooring and a boathouse — both real rarities this close to central London. Parties here will be a thing of beauty. It is perfect for a large family, with one or two dogs.

For sale at £4.75 million through Dexters and Inigo.

Unlike its namesake, Papillon Hall managed to live a lot longer than a brief spell. But, still, it perished far too quickly.

On May 4, 1912, Country Life published a supplement focused on the latest works of Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944). One of the prolific architect’s works under the microscope was his modernisation of Papillon Hall in Lubenham, just outside Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

In the opening years of the 20th century, Lutyens had been called in by Captain Frank Ashton Bellville, heir to the Robinson’s Barley Water and Keen’s mustard fortunes, to greatly extend his octagonal, 17th century, semi-fortified home.

The heart of Bellville’s home, built — and lived in, for some time — by the French architect David Papillon, came with one small, but seemingly potent problem.

According to local legend, Papillon, the person, not the house, had a Spanish mistress who he kept prisoner in the attic after she fell from his favour. The poor woman died in mysterious circumstances sometime around 1715. When Bellville acquired the house, he also took possession of her 'cursed' brocade shoes. Locked behind a grille, legend (and legal documents) had it that if the shoes ever left the house, misfortune would befall its owner.

The original hall was retained at the centre of Lutyens' designs, and an extra storey added to it. There were four new wings, built in the shape of a butterfly, which contained a dining room, billiard room, kitchen and servants' hall. To the south was a sunken pond, dotted with water lilies; to the east, the flower gardens were replanted inside the wings, in the cottage garden style of Lutyen’s great friend, Gertrude Jekyll.

For the duration of the works, the brocade shoes were kept at Bellville’s solicitor's offices.

Reports show that work progressed slowly; contractors pulled out at the last minute and there were numerous accidents and one death. The skeleton of a long-dead woman, presumably Papillon’s mistress, was discovered in a bricked up cavity in the roof. Then, in August 1905, Captain Bellville was badly injured when he was thrown from his jaunting car (a small horse buggy). Against all the odds, he recovered.

However, the shoes were on the move again — this time, to a museum. Soon after, George Rathbone, an electrical engineer, died in a car car crash. He was in Bellville’s car being driven by Bellville’s chauffeur. Sarah Clark, a servant, was accused by later acquitted of infanticide after a dead baby was found in her room. Lastly, Bellville was flung from his polo pony. (Amazingly, he recovered, again, which somewhat disproves the lucky shoes theory.)

Bellville died in 1937, at the age of 68, and Papillon Hall passed to his son, Rupert.

Rupert was described in contemporary news reports as a sportsman, airman and one-time amateur bull fighter. He also fought alongside General Francisco Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, at the moment his father died, he was in Spanish prison.

Rupert reportedly fell into the enemy's hands because he presumed Santander had been taken by the Spanish nationalists, so flew himself and the head of González Byass to the latter's headquarters, to pick up a few cases of celebratory sherry. Upon landing, he discovered a) his error and b) the opposition.

The sherry-seeking Franco fighter was released following a series of heated negotiations and, when he arrived home, set about painting every gate on the estate in the dictator's colours. Then, in 1938, he put it all up for sale. However, it failed to actually sell.

During the Second World War, Papillon Hall hosted the 319th Glider Battalion and the 82nd Airborne Division of the American Army, who, naturally, were not overly worried about building and garden conservation and Lutyens' unique creation fell into a state of seemingly-terminal disrepair.

After the War, the decision was taken to demolish it, but not before Rupert’s wife 'saved' the remaining slipper (Rupert had taken one with him to Spain which explains quite a lot). Today, only small parts of the garden remain; the shoes are on display at the Harborough Museum.

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Pity the man who never got to fly on Concorde. Your correspondent was but four when the aircraft was discontinued and, akin to many, has been awaiting the return of supersonic flight with glee. Let us rejoice, for a successor has finally landed: the European Space Agency is currently developing a jet called Invictus that aims to travel at five times the speed of sound. This, we are told, will deliver passengers from London to Sydney in only three hours.

Against these soaring ambitions stand our airports: once-proud institutions that have, in recent years, become pandemonium. Practically no one enjoys them anymore. Two-thirds of the British public believe they are overcrowded and, according to Sail Croatia, three of our main hubs — Stansted, Gatwick and Heathrow — rank among the five most stressful airports on Earth.

The EU’s new Entry-Exit-System, reliant on biometric data, has been blamed for a recent hike in delays and missed flights. During the US government shutdown at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta earlier this year, paid entertainers were hired to alleviate tensions among those facing superqueues — a strategy akin to putting out a fire with a comedy skit.

If aerospace engineers are capable of building a jet that reaches Mach 5, you’d think that those in charge of our airports would manage to improve things here and there. As David Mitchell says: It's not rocket science. Yet the decline appears terminal. There is perhaps no better metonym for it than the screens that appear after security with four smiley faces, ranging from happy (green) to irate (red): a lazy substitute for adequate staff training. Indeed, a 2025 report from the device’s parent company showed that, even on the best of days, more than one in ten travellers said they’d had a bad time.

With a fall in service comes a fall in glamour — not for lack of trying from some. Designer Anya Hindmarch now has a shop, Air Anya, selling luggage tags and passport holders reminiscent of the 1970s. If only the people at the airport check-in counter were even half as fun. Instead, I have been forced to watch as British Airways asks Gold members to check in hand-luggage small enough to serve as Playmobil.

Isolated attempts at progress are often futile. Where London has done away with the 100ml limit on carry-on liquids, others have not: a fact worth remembering as people plan to bring home large bottles of Factor-50 for the next heatwave. These will be confiscated, unless one remembers to put this in the suitcase that BA has made them surrender as cargo. A more capacious overhaul is needed. I’d put the engineers in charge.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

You join me on a shore of Lake Como for a scene from a James Bond film. We are at the palatial Villa d’Este, the famed grande dame hotel that’s hosted the Who’s Who of Hollywood, from Chaplin to Clooney and Garbo to Gaga. A hundred impeccably-dressed and well-heeled guests, drawn from around the world, sip Telmont Champagne on the gravelled terrace. Others totter into Riva tenders to get a closer look at the action. On the water, almost silent, is the stealthy spectacle they’ve come to witness: A bunch of 'Star Wars'-inspired hydrofoil speed boats duking it out around a rippling race track marked by buoys.

This is Spanish entrepreneur Alejandro Agag’s latest production. Having created the first electric car racing championship, Formula E, more than a decade ago, and done the same with off-road rallying in the form of Extreme E, he has now taken to the seas. Formula E was about making electric motorsport credible, and giving car manufacturers a global platform to develop and show off their EV tech. Extreme E was about taking cameras to places where the environment is under threat and funding climate initiatives. E1 Series, this all-electric regatta, intends to make battery-based mobility glamorous.

There are 10 teams fielding two drivers each: a man and a woman. In addition to the drivers and technicians, the bijou paddock that’s been formed alongside the Villa d’Este’s floating swimming pool is populated by investors, socialites and influencers. Forget grandstands full of punters like you’d find at Silverstone, or Wimbledon or Wembley for that matter. This is essentially a garden party. I daren’t imagine what the cost of this event is divided by the number of spectators in situ. Tickets can be bought for €1,500 a pop, which includes lunch and an open bar. Yet E1’s proposition is that motorsport is no longer merely competition, it’s content. E1 Series is custom made for watching on TikTok. It’s got crashes, speedy technology and sexy locations. It’s highly ‘clippable’, it’s aspirational, and it boasts personalities that social media goes crazy for.

Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Jaguar; many well-known automotive brands invested in Formula E. They all have a fan following. Now I’m sure boatbuilders have their own loyal base, but Sunseeker, Benetti and Princess don’t have the same cut-through. The pilots don’t have the same name recognition either: Sir Lewis Hamilton isn’t battling Sir Ben Ainslie out there, alas. So Agag had a brainwave. Celebrities can bring their own brands. They can invest in teams and be the face of the series.

E1’s team owners include movie star Will Smith, DJ Steve Aoki, basketball legend LeBron James, NFL GOAT Tom Brady, footballer Didier Drogba, cricketer Virat Kohli, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, pop star Marc Anthony, and tennis sensation Rafael Nadal. They post about E1 to their millions of Instagram followers. Some, apparently, get quite hands on with the teams themselves. I’m told Brady is almost unbearably competitive, and Nadal is much the same. Jamie Copas is E1’s CEO. He explains the model of team ownership: ‘The celebrities are investing their time, their brand and their social media profile. It’s about their engagement.’

I asked Thibaut Courtois, who plays for Real Madrid, why he signed up. ‘I love the water, boats. My wife, she loves it, she has her skipper licence. And obviously the electrical thing, it’s not polluting the nature. Electric propulsion, I think it’s the way forward.’ Would he like to drive one of these E1 boats himself? ‘I’m 6ft 7in. Unfortunately I can’t fit.’

Aside from the very expensive hotels and indulgent spreads, the logistics and operational costs, much of the budget goes towards the boats, christened RaceBirds. These stock racing machines, which cost about €1 million, are fascinating pieces of engineering, with advanced propulsion and hydrofoils that can lift them clear of the water. Carbon-fibre foils reduce drag and the RaceBird makes significantly less wake than a conventional powerboat. The result is a cross between a fighter jet, a Formula E car and that thing Pierce Brosnan rode up the Thames in The World is Not Enough.

Don’t imagine it’ll go as fast as an F1H20 world championship powerboat, though, because it doesn’t. An F1H20 boat has a 400bhp internal combustion engine and a top speed of 140mph. E1’s RaceBird’s electric motor produces 200bhp and can only muster 58mph. Despite that, when the racing is close and they start banging into each other, it’s exciting.

‘I wish they were faster, but we do still go airborne a lot,’ says Sara Price, 33, who is the first American woman to win a stage of the Dakar rally, and who races in E1 for Will Smith’s team. ‘We haven’t flipped yet, but we’ve been close. But it’s pretty safe. Off-road is way harder on your body.’

The 20 drivers — or pilots — are drawn from different disciplines, which is also compelling. Ten come from four-wheeled motorsport, six from powerboating, two from sailing, and there’s one jet ski champion and one kitesurfer.

Oban Duncan, 19, is a ten-time British powerboat champion. She’s also a health-and-safety consultant in Glasgow. This endeavour doesn’t seem very health-and-safety-ish, I proffer. ‘No, it isn’t, but it’s my passion. I’d be very bored sitting at home if I wasn’t here.’ She undertook testing duties when the RaceBird was still in its development. Having grown up on the water, does this give her an advantage over those that only raced on land before? ‘The RaceBirds are so different to any other powerboat,’ she says, ‘because of the hydrofoils. It’s a lot harder, it’s about balancing the boat.’

Before getting into motorsport, Jamaica’s Sara Misir, 28, was an equestrian. ‘It’s the pilots who make a difference. Everyone gets the same thing; same weight, same engine, so it’s about strategy, team communication, and adapting to your surroundings. It’s not like on a race track where the surface and the braking points stay the same. On water, every single lap is completely different; the water’s getting rougher, the wind, the turbulence, the current; there’s a lot going on. Also the locations we visit are very different. Lake Como is fresh water and deep. Jeddah is open water, saltwater, with very different waves and grip levels.’

I would have thought those with powerboat racing experience would have a marked advantage, but apparently not. Catie Munnings, 28, who also works as a TV presenter, says she’s had no difficulty adapting despite coming from rallying. ‘I was matching the lap-times of the powerboaters straight away. The throttle, the steering wheel, the racing instincts; it’s all the same. I love it. Where the main difference, though, is that with cars the more you push, the more aggressive you are, the more you’re rewarded. Here you don’t, you just fall off the foil. You need to have a real feel for it to be competitive. One advantage I think we have over the powerboaters is that the way you trim, which is controlling the angle of the engine, is the complete opposite of how you would drive a boat without foils. In a way, we car racers don’t bring any bad habits.’

Munnings and many of the other pilots didn’t even have their powerboat licence before getting called up. ‘I got it in November and the first race was in January. It was very last minute. Imagine racing in the World Rally Championship three months after driving a car for the first time. The thing is, the boats aren’t that hard to drive, they’re just hard to get the maximum from. You basically stay on full-throttle the whole time, even around hairpins. When you start to turn, the drag from the foil pitches you into the corner and it’s like applying the handbrake. You’re concentrating on the trim levels, moving the engine at 0.1 of a degree at a time to power out of corners, and that’s the tricky bit.’

The series is now in its third season, and has already visited Jeddah, Venice, Puerto Banus, Monaco, Doha, Dubrovnik, Lake Maggiore, Lagos and Miami. Luanda, in Angola, and the Bahamas appear on the calendar for the first time this year.

‘The future is in the USA,’ Agag tells Country Life. ‘We need to expand a lot there. We have great potential, given the team owners we have: Tom Brady, LeBron, Marc Anthony, Will Smith. We have Miami. We need to have New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC. We need to make it bigger, consolidate it, make a fanbase.’ There are eight races scheduled in 2026. I’d like 12 races a year, with six of them in the USA. And we have room for another couple of teams.’

Who is paying for all this? Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) own 50% of E1. The main commercial partners are Hublot and Bombay Sapphire. Angola and Nigeria are putting money in to sponsor Smith’s Westbrook Racing team and Drogba’s Global Africa team and will host the rounds in Luanda and Lagos in September and October respectively. In addition to its social media reach, the series is broadcast in more than 140 territories. In the UK, you can watch it live on ITV4, ITVX and YouTube.

Powerboating was big in the 1980s, but it got overtaken by Formula One and MotoGP. E1 hopes that its many overlaps — motorsport, celebrity culture, telegenic locations, innovation, sustainability and environmental storytelling — can draw Gen Z to the water’s edge. The plan is to grow its young, tech-savvy, glamour-hungry audience and attract bigger blue chip sponsors. But PIF announced in April that it’s to stop funding LIV Golf, citing mounting losses. War in the Middle East is causing the money taps to be turned off. That’s got to make Agag nervous.

E1 is exclusive and excessive. It feels rather like pre-war motorsport or F1 in the 1960s and ‘70s, when there were no sponsors. A lot of money was spent on having a good time and they’d worry about how they’d settle the bill on Monday. Once upon a time we’d have referred to it as a playboy’s sport — but of course half the heroes here are women, and cheers to that.

Whether E1 proves a commercial success remains to be seen, but in the meantime, it sure is a lot of fun.

Round 4 of the 2026 UIM E1 World Championship will take place in Monaco on July 17-18. Will Smith’s team Angola Westbrook Racing, with pilots Sara Price and Lucas Ordonez, are currently in the lead.

The Sealyham terrier has the sort of face that suggests it has seen a great deal of life and approved of only some of it. Small, white and faintly dishevelled, with dark intelligent eyes peering out beneath extravagant eyebrows, it resembles nothing so much as a retired colonel who has wandered out of a country house in search of a whisky and an argument.

Few dogs combine such comic dignity with such complete certainty in their own judgement, which may explain why Sealyham people become so devoted to them.

The breed began life, improbably enough, as a serious working dog. In the 1850s, Captain John Edwardes of Sealyham House in Pembrokeshire, required a small terrier game enough to go to earth after badger, otter and fox, while keeping pace with his pack of otterhounds. He insisted the dog be white, so that, underground or in the thick of a hunt, it could never be mistaken for its quarry. Edwardes kept no records, so the exact recipe is lost, but the now-extinct English white terrier, the Welsh corgi, the Dandie Dinmont and a little bull terrier are all thought to have had a hand in it. The result had to be fearless enough to face a badger underground, yet civilised enough to behave respectably indoors afterwards — a curious marriage of ferocity and good manners that has charmed owners ever since.

After the First World War, the Sealyham became the dog to be seen with. It swept the show ring, taking Best in Show at Westminster four times between the wars; Alfred Hitchcock adored them and famously appeared alongside two of his own, Geoffrey and Stanley, in the opening moments of The Birds. Princess Margaret reportedly insisted hers, Johnnie and Pippin, be brought to her room with her breakfast tray each morning; Cary Grant was so fond of the breed that he gave one his original name, Archie Leach. Agatha Christie kept them too, which seems entirely fitting because I imagine they would have made excellent witnesses.

The Sealyham is lazy compared to its terrier compatriates and very happy to while away several hours on the sofa. They like their own people best and are in no hurry to be charmed by anyone else.

The Kennel Club registered more than 1,000 Sealyhams in 1938; by 2008, the figure had collapsed to 43 puppies, placing the breed among the most endangered native dogs in Britain. Even now only about 100 or so are registered in a typical year. Country Life itself sounded the alarm, devoting a 2011 cover to the cause: ‘SOS: Save Our Sealyhams’.

Salvation, such as it is, has come from a devoted few who speak of them with unguarded affection. The interior designer Bee Osborne, who keeps the breed, calls them simply the perfect small dog: loyal, but not needy, sturdy and brave, friendly and kind-spirited. The only real drawback, she admits, is practical rather than temperamental — for a dog this low to the ground and this emphatically white requires bathing rather more often than one might like. Her devotion runs further than most: she has named a whole range of paints after her Sealyhams.

And there are flickers of a revival. A younger generation is beginning to rediscover the breed. In an age of dogs bred to be relentlessly agreeable, there is something appealing about one that reserves the right not to be. Watching a Sealyham trot across a lawn, whiskered face set in faint but unwavering self-belief, one feels it belongs to a Britain quietly disappearing. The Sealyham, characteristically, seems unconcerned. It has always expected the world to come back round to its way of thinking — eventually.

Herefordshire — £9 million

Huge excitement for this launch: Dinmore, ome of the most incredible properties in Herefordshire, has come on to the market. The ivy-clad cloisters with a tower at one end are breathtaking.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Oxfordshire — £6.5 million

CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien used to meet regularly at Studley Priory, an outstanding 11-bedroom house that was, back in the day, a country hotel. Now, this venerable old building is a home once more — and what a home it is.

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

Norfolk — £4.5 million

An unbearably handsome Queen Anne house — plus four cottages — on this 47-acre estate in Great Hockham. This is a proper, rural playground, with superb grounds, swimming pool, tennis court and more.

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

Monmouthshire — £1.895 million

Penyclawdd Court is a remarkable, Grade I-listed country house in a wonderful rural spot near Abergavenny. Full of character, six bedrooms, and no chain to worry about.

For sale via Powells — see more details and pictures.

Kent — £2 million

In a rural setting between Canterbury and the coast, this early 20th century home is peaceful and calming. A separate coach house is run as a successful holiday let.

For sale via Hobbs Parker — see more details and pictures.

It's not only beauty that is in the eye of the beholder. It is, we are assured, also the answer to that perennial query: ‘What’s the difference ’twixt a wildflower and a weed?’ The Oxford English Dictionary is definitive, defining a weed as a ‘wild plant growing where it is not wanted and is in competition with cultivated plants’.

The common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), with its lovely golden head, will serve as an example. On the verge, we see it positively as prettifying, but growing on the grassy village cricket pitch, in front of the stumps, it is an obstruction that requires ‘weeding’. That’s that, then. The answer to ‘weed or wildflower?’ done and dusted.

Whether a wild plant is a weed or wildflower is a matter of its location — plus human perception. The moseying dog-walker admires the dandelion on the lane, the groundsman mowing the cricket pitch’s infield regards it as a problem. Ah, the dear old dandelion, put on Earth to rebut the wisdom of lexicographers and to weed out ontological glibness.

To itself, of course, Taraxacum officinale’s status as ‘wildflower’ or ‘weed’ is immaterial. It exists unto itself, what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant — who rather early got the hang of this being and perception stuff in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) — posited as the state of ‘noumena’. Humans can only know things as they appear to us or as ‘phenomena’.

Neither do the 50 or so insects the dandelion supports care a fig about its classification, Kantian or otherwise. The bees of early spring are glad to visit it wherever it appears. They need the dandelion’s sweet pollen, which is as energy-giving as the primaveral sun.

In France, the dandelion, far from being in competition with cultivated plants, is a cultivated plant, a salad. Take note, too, of dandelion’s Latin tag, the officinale meaning that herbalists of the past granted it purpose as a medicinal herb — not a weed, or a wildflower mind you — and would have picked it wherever it popped up. Dandelion, among its medicinal attributes, is a powerful diuretic, hence its French name of pissenlit. Edible plants are plants. The end. Dig into history and the people of the past were clearly crop/weed/wildflower fluid.

Tollund Man, the bog-preserved corpse from the Danish Iron Age, consumed porridge containing cultivated barley and fat-hen (Chenopodium album) for his breakfast before being hanged. If the barley of his last meal was cultivated, the fat-hen may equally have been farmed or foraged.

Highly nutritious, the Iron Agers grew it or allowed it to grow — an eminently sensible approach to food provision: let the edible plant that flourishes flourish, whether wild and sown by breeze or planted by a horny-handed human with a digging stick. Fat-hen was sold by hawkers as a leafy vegetable in Britain as recently as the 18th century, yet today? It is a bane ‘weed’ of agriculture.

What did the Romans ever do for us? We may gawp in awe at Hadrian’s Wall and Bath’s baths, but the empire’s legacy also includes ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria), which was introduced to the isles as a pot herb. The perennial jumped the villa wall to take root elsewhere. As John Gerard noted of ground elder in his Herball (1597), ‘where it hath once taken roote, it will hardly be gotten out again’. Centuries of gardeners wail their woeful accord.

Those gardeners, together with small children, will doubtless be bemused to find that the plants once cultivated but now damned as weeds include the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica). Fairservice, the gardener in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), raised it under glass as an early spring green. Oh, the irony. What we regard as the ‘weeds’ of farm and garden were made more prolific by… farming and gardening.

The turning of soil favoured poppies and the midden — the farm muck heap — was a source of nitrogen beloved by the nettle. There was, however, in the past many a virtuous link between ‘weeds’ and farming, as recorded by the plants’ common names, which are often floral memorials of their ancient utility. Galium aparine, that sticky climber of the hedge, was known as ‘goose-grass’, as it was fed to goslings and Heracleum sphondylium, the airy white umbels of which liven the lane in June, was ‘common hogweed’, as it was free fodder for porcines.

Time has hardened the distinction between wildflower and weed. As agriculture rose and rose, the plants that competed with crops took on the negative nomenclature of ‘weed’, the word itself entering the English language in the 9th century. The division was more than botanical, agricultural, it was political.

Cultivated crops, especially cereals, became regarded as signs of orthodoxy and order, whereas weeds became symbols of anarchy and wildness. It’s there in Shakespeare, always the mirror to the age, when Cordelia says of her father in King Lear, Act IV, Scene 4: 'He was met even now/ As mad as the vex’d sea — singing aloud;/ Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,/ With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo- flowers,/ Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.' Or put plainly, Lear is an insane regent wearing a parodic crown composed of the parasitic weeds choking the grain that feeds his subjects.

By the opposite token, when Gerard Manley Hopkins railed against the Victorian taming of the countryside, his chosen emblem of poetic protest was weed, not ‘wildflower’: 'What would the world be, once bereft/ Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,/ O let them be left, wildness and wet;/ Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.'

When Hopkins wrote Inversnaid (1881), the industrialisation of agriculture was in full march and the weed became more than an issue, it became an enemy. The widespread use of chemical herbicides post-1950 allowed a Final Fix to the problem of ‘weeds’. One contemporary agrichemical company boasts its herbicides ‘fight weeds with a vengeance’. You and I might ponder whether or not flora is wildflower or weed, but ‘weedkillers’ rarely make such distinction.

Weed and wildflower alike are to be suppressed. Hence all those monotone cereal fields across the land. The poppy (Papaver rhoeas) is the blood-red wildflower of Remembrance, yet for the maker of broad-leaved herbicide it is merely a menace to the sustaining corn. Thus is the cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), which is the blue of sky, condemned; so, too, the little scarlet pimpernel (Lysimachia arvensis), whose name is its description, pink and shyly peeking, and corn chamomile (Anthemis arvensis), elegantly limbed and sweetly daisy-headed.

Weeds gave colour to the countryside, as well as food and habitat for our native creatures. When the weeds went, so did the wildlife. The grey partridge (Perdix perdix) declined by 92% between 1970 and 2013. The bird’s chicks are crucially dependent on insects whose hosts are arable ‘weeds’.

I am a serial re-creator of early Victorian wheatfields with their riotous wildflower/weed chromatics. I admit, my cereal yield has been a smidgeon less than conventional agriculture, but my arable wild plants have succoured the buzzing, flitting pollinators on which farming depends. The cattle have loved and thrived on the wild flora baled in the straw. I have gained, not lost. It helps to be pretty. Is that not part of the wildflower versus weed division?

I’ve deliberately sown corn chamomile, yet I have never sown broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius), a plant so plain Jane that Mrs Bennet would struggle to find it a suitor. My mistake. Although classified as ‘injurious’ in the 1959 Weeds Act, meaning that the government may enforce its removal due to toxicity/destructiveness, recent research from the Biological Husbandry Unit in New Zealand suggests that small populations of docks in pasture help prevent bloat in livestock, as well as providing mineral-rich nutrition.

The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was more right than he knew when he defined a weed as ‘a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered’ — or have been forgotten.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

On June 24, 1348, in the course of a tournament at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, Edward III famously instituted a fellowship of 25 knights under his personal leadership. The Order of the Garter, as it was known, was established at a moment of martial triumph in England. One of the founder members of this new order was Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who personified the confidence and belligerence of the moment. ‘The Devil Warwick’, as his enemies called him, had fought side by side with Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and otherwise enjoyed a formidable reputation as a soldier. He was also a great builder and, as the modern visitor encounters it outwardly, Warwick Castle is substantially his creation.

William the Conqueror first founded the castle in 1068 within the defences of a fortified settlement or burgh. The burgh, created in 914 by Æthelflæd of Mercia, occupied a hill top that had been naturally cut back as a cliff on one side by the River Avon. William constructed the castle along the cliff top (Fig 1), from where it commanded a river crossing. According to the Domesday survey of 1086, four houses were demolished to make space for it. William’s castle seems to have taken the conventional form of an artificial mound — termed a motte — and an associated enclosure or bailey. The motte, albeit heavily reworked since the 11th century, still survives and it’s assumed that the bailey followed roughly the line of the later walls. These earthworks were presumably fortified in timber.

Warwick Castle was subsequently granted to a Norman, Henry de Beaumont. The exact date of this grant is uncertain, but it was through Henry’s close connection with the Conqueror’s son and heir, William Rufus, that he was able to constitute a vast patchwork of estates extending across the Midlands, South Wales and Normandy. It helped, too, that, in 1088, he became Earl of Warwick, with exceptional powers within his titular county. The Earl seems to have played a crucial role in securing the succession of Henry I to the throne in 1100 and, in 1118, towards the end of his life, became a monk. At that time he seems to have divided his estates, passing those in England to his eldest son, Roger.

By contemporary assessment, Earl Roger was a failure. Henry I almost immediately compelled him to yield up a very considerable portion of his Warwickshire estates to a royal favourite, Geoffrey de Clinton, who established a rival castle about five miles away at Kenilworth in the same county. The stories of these two great castles remained inextricably linked until the latter was demolished in 1649. During the Civil Wars fought after Henry I’s death in 1135, the Earl was forced to hand over Warwick to a royal garrison. He is described as dying of shock in 1153 after hearing the news that his wife, Gundreda, had tricked Warwick’s garrison into surrendering the castle to the supporters of the future Henry II.

Through the 12th and 13th centuries, the architectural development of Warwick Castle is a near blank. For a building of such importance, this is surprising. Documentary sources reveal the existence of a chapel and, in 1191, a certain Ralph the Mason inspected minor repairs, implying the existence of stone buildings or fortifications. These presumably replaced the original timber structures of the 11th century. It is also asserted by the 15th-century historian of Warwick, John Rous, that, when supporters of Simon de Montfort sallied out of Kenilworth and captured the castle in 1264, they had ‘beaten down the walls from tower to tower’ to render the fortifications useless to Henry III. He goes on to say that the walls of Warwick Castle were substituted by hedges.

In 1268, soon after this event, the Earldom of Warwick was inherited by William Beauchamp. Neither William nor his son, Guy, who succeeded as 10th Earl in 1298, are known to have improved Warwick Castle, although the latter did use it for the brief imprisonment of Edward II’s notorious royal favourite, Piers Gaveston, in 1312. Gaveston, who dubbed the Earl ‘the black dog of Arden’, was famously led from the castle to nearby Blacklow Hill — significantly the property of another inveterate enemy, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster — and executed. Guy died in 1315 and the castle passed to his son, another Thomas. Perhaps the state of the building — hedged and without new buildings — inspired him to transform it so completely.

Thomas was just over a year old when he inherited his father’s estates and was a minor throughout the turbulent events and military humiliations of Edward II’s reign. He secured his estates in 1329, shortly before Edward III — his near contemporary — dramatically seized control of the realm from his mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, in 1330. His building work at Warwick is not documented, which makes it complicated to date, but its character cannot be properly understood without reference to the King’s enthusiasms and concurrent activities at Windsor.

The Order of the Garter was directly inspired by the example of the Knights of the Round Table, whose fabled exploits enjoyed European popularity in the late Middle Ages. Edward III had previously built a ‘Round Table’ in the Upper Ward at Windsor in 1344 and attended tournaments splendidly dressed in Arthurian persona. Rooting reality in legend was intoxicating and, in Warwick, Thomas had his own chivalric hero to promote. The legend of Guy of Warwick, notionally set in the period of the Danish invasions, became popular in the early 13th century and exists in multiple versions.

According to it, Guy won the hand of Felice, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, by performing daring feats of arms across Europe. Following his marriage and the conception of a child, Reinbrun, however — and, according to some versions, when staring into the heavens from the top of the tallest castle tower — he suddenly realised the vanity of fighting for a woman; he ought to have been fighting for Christ. Leaving the tearful Felice, he set off once again on his adventures until miraculously summoned back to England to vanquish the Danish champion Colbrond. After this duel, he became a hermit outside Warwick and, on his deathbed, sent for the faithful Felice, who immediately followed him to the grave.

Thomas Beauchamp’s enthusiasm for this legend first found expression in the 1330s. Not only did he name two of his sons Guy and Reinbrun, but he was almost certainly the creator of an 8ft-high sculpture of the dead hero carved in the living rock at so-called Guy’s Cliffe (Fig 6), the supposed site of his hermitage close to Blacklow Hill (Country Life, July 21, 2010). Beauchamp’s will in 1369 also makes mention of ‘the coat of mail sometime belonging to that famous Guy of Warwick’, which was bequeathed to his son and namesake. Guy’s legend was assuming reality.

At Warwick Castle, meanwhile, Beauchamp built an entire suite of domestic chambers, with a hall, services and withdrawing chambers in stone along the cliff top (Fig 5). He also constructed the main entrance façade (Fig 2). This comprises a central gatehouse with an outer fortification or barbican (Fig 4) flanked by towers at each outward corner of the castle. The pairing of the towers masks their colossal scale. Both are prodigy buildings, taller than anything comparable of the period in England. Each principal floor within them is vaulted, an astonishing expense, and seems to have served as a self-contained lodging.

The towers have been known since at least 1644 as Caesar’s Tower and Guy’s Tower, names suggestive of deep history. If the names are medieval, the latter could be an architectural evocation of the tower on which the legendary Guy of Warwick experienced his conversion to Christ’s service. Whatever the case, this building has long enjoyed admiration and, as early as the 15th century, inspired copies at Cardiff (another Beauchamp possession) and Raglan Castles. Curiously, the Earl did not build on the motte, the natural focus of the castle. He did, however, create a gateway on an octagonal plan immediately beside it (Fig 3). This highly unusual form suggests a connection with royal building projects in Wales.

Beauchamp might have begun redeveloping Warwick Castle at any time from 1329, but it’s likely that he only acquired the necessary resources a decade or more later. His additions to the castle could also have grown in scale as time went on. Might his appointment as Marshal of England in 1344; or the first formal gathering of the Knights of the Garter on St George’s Day, 1349; or the victory at Poitiers in 1356, at which the Earl fought, have prompted fresh building initiatives? Certainly, despite the striking overall uniformity of the buildings attributed to him, close analysis of the fabric shows that there are minor changes in such details as the moulding of vault ribs. This could suggest a prolonged period of construction and the involvement of different masons.

What can be said with confidence is that a starting date in the mid 1340s would agree with the dating of one building that bears close technical comparison with what seem to be the very earliest additions to Warwick. This is the castle built at nearby Maxstoke by William Clinton, a close companion of Edward III (and a descendant of the builder of Kenilworth), which was licensed by the King in 1345. The designer of Maxstoke clearly knew the character of Warwick well and even created elaborate chimneypots that evoke in miniature its main 14th-century towers.

Both in scale and form, however, the most obvious parallel for Beauchamp’s domestic apartments at Warwick is the outstanding royal building project of the late 14th century. This was the palace begun in the upper ward of Windsor Castle by Edward III in 1359, which was paid for by the proceeds of Poitiers. It incorporated a single coherent frontage comprising a hall, chapel and chamber, raised on a huge vaulted undercroft. Ideas from Windsor also informed rebuilding work at Kenilworth by the King’s brother, John of Gaunt, in the 1370s and, in a neat symmetry, these also relate back to Warwick. In particular, they evoke Beauchamp’s last major architectural project, the construction from 1367 of a suitably magnificent collegiate church at Warwick, now the parish church of St Mary (Country Life, April 16, 2025).

When Beauchamp died in 1369, he was succeeded by his son and namesake. Thomas, 11th Earl of Warwick, certainly finished his father’s work to the collegiate church and he may also have had to complete the castle buildings, because the usually reliable 17th-century antiquarian, William Dugdale, cites a payment of £395 towards Guy’s Tower in a medieval account of 1393/94, now frustratingly lost. The Earl also entered further into his father’s enthusiasm for Guy of Warwick. A sculpture of the hero was carved for the choir of the collegiate church and a suit of tapestries ‘wrought with the arms and story of Guy of Warwick’ hung in the castle in 1399. Guy’s armour, sword and harness are also mentioned in his will. These, and such other imagined relics as Guy’s poringer, can still be seen in the castle today.

The castle continued to evolve through the 15th century. In the 1420s, Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick, another flower of English chivalry, created a huge stable complex outside the walls of the castle strikingly decorated in plaster of Paris. This was later demolished, but something of its scale is apparent in the surviving 16th-century stable at Kenilworth, which seems to be a copy of that at Warwick. The Spy Tower was probably added to the withdrawing apartments in the 1470s by George, Duke of Clarence, who married Isabel Neville, the co-heiress of the Warwick estates (Fig 7). With large windows and access to the roof leads, it offered spectacular views over the neighbouring park.

Warwick subsequently passed to the Duke’s brother, the future Richard III, and thus into royal ownership. Richard entertained ambitious plans for the castle and began a massive artillery tower to reinforce its defences, but construction was cut short by his fall from power in 1485. What remains of this building now forms part of the line of the castle walls (Fig 8). Henry VIII repaired the castle, but it was in the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I that it acquired renewed significance, as we will explore next week.

See more details about visiting the castle at the Warwick Castle website.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 10, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The scenic Roseland peninsula, bounded by the Fal estuary to the west and the open waters of Gerrans Bay to the east, lies within the Cornwall National Landscape and is one of south Cornwall’s most beautiful and heavily protected regions.

Rosteague, one of the most private coastal estates there, is tucked away at the southern end of the peninsula, two miles from the village of Portscatho. It is for sale for the first time in 25 years, at a guide price of £12.5 million through Truro-based Lillicrap Chilcott.

Its appearance on the market is certain to cause a stir. Prior to the sale in 2003, the house hadn't been sold since 1945 — and back then, the clamour was so great that buyers are said to have raced down from London in their Rolls-Royces in order to secure a deal.

The estate comprises a Grade II*-listed manor house and stable block, a lodge, cottage and equestrian facilities set in 183 acres of historic gardens, woodland, arable and pasture, with more than a mile of direct frontage to Gerrans Bay.

This is a wonderful wide horseshoe sweep of water, with the towering cliffs of Nare Head at one end and the ancient fishing village of Portscatho at the other. A notorious haunt of smugglers in the 18th and 19th centuries, the deeply indented coastline is today an area of gently rolling farmland, hidden coves and glorious unspoilt beaches, much of it accessible only on foot or by water.

Rosteague Manor dates from 1363, when Ralph de Restak was its first recorded resident. In 1401, John Petit and his wife, Mary, had a licence to celebrate divine service at their chapel at Resteak.

During the 16th century, the estate was held by the influential Mohun family, one of whom was Reginald Mohun, one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s captains; the impressive Elizabethan façade of the present house dates from this period.

In about 1620, Rosteague was acquired by Nicholas Kempe (about 1593–1646), whose grandson, also Nicholas (1643–1710), married the heiress Mary Spry of Place House, St Anthony in Roseland, which is now owned by the National Trust.

The younger Kempe, who inherited the estate in 1669, established its formal walled French knot garden, and, in about 1700, remodelled the 15th/16th-century manor house.

It was later extended in about 1820 for Henry Harris, whose father bought Rosteague from the Kempes in 1780. The Grade II*-listed Victorian stable block dates from the mid 19th century.

The estate was occupied by the Land Army during the Second World War and, in 1945, was acquired by the McKenna family, who converted the old Cider House into an impressive music room. The McKennas remained at Rosteague until 2003, when it was bought by its current owners, who have extensively renovated and enhanced the property.

Rosteague Manor, its medieval, Elizabethan and Georgian evolution reflected in a wealth of historic detail, sits within a sheltered fold of the landscape, hidden from view, yet commanding an immense outlook across Gerrans Bay and the open waters of the English Channel.

It provides 6,384sq ft of well-ordered accommodation on two main floors, including four grand reception rooms, a large modern kitchen, a breakfast room and study. There's also a dedicated flower room, which was once a medieval chapel.

Above, there is a vast principal bedroom suite, five double bedrooms and three further bathrooms. The look and feel of the decor is truly something: this is a home of exotic wallpaper, four-poster beds and polished copper baths.

Further accommodation is provided in the pretty, Grade II-listed, three-bedroom Lodge designed in the Arts-and-Crafts style by Charles Harrison Townsend, plus a three-bedroom farm cottage and a one-bedroom groom’s flat.

The six acres of gardens, which enclose the manor house on three sides, are a delight. Stone steps beside the house lead through a wrought-iron gate to the celebrated French Garden, of which Prof Timothy Mowl wrote in his 2005 book Historic Gardens of Cornwall: ‘Rosteague, sheltered behind a slate-roofed wall of granite and cob, has preserved that holiest of horticultural relics, one possibly unique in England, its original box parterre.’

More than 20 acres of amenity woodland provide enchanting walks. The remaining 110 acres of land include 31½ acres of well-drained, mostly post-and-railed paddocks; for keen equestrians, the house also has an all-weather manege.

For selling agent Ian Lillicrap, however, the defining attribute is the extent of the shoreline, which includes ownership to mean low water, ‘a rare and precious asset in a county where coastal property is revered and private ownership on this scale is truly extraordinary’.

Yet, despite its sense of seclusion, Rosteague remains accessible, with the cathedral city of Truro 17 miles to the north-west and Newquay airport some 19 miles away.

The Rosteague Estate is on the market with Lillicrap Chilcott — see more details.

A company’ muses Gilbert Huph, the vertically challenged insurance manager in Pixar’s The Incredibles, ‘is like an enormous clock. It only works if all the little cogs mesh together.’ His is a statement intended to satirise a culture of corporate naivety. He wants employees to turn a blind eye and bury their heads in the sand so long as they make a profit. Think too hard and they might not.

The same statement, however, can be made of the world’s greatest sports ground without a trace of irony. To see Wimbledon in action is to realise that a company — or, in this case, the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC) — is a thing of beauty precisely because it is run like clockwork. What in The Incredibles’ fictional location of Metroville, California, sounds like an indictment of late-stage capitalism rings, in this patch of south-west London, as an ode to collective success. When one thinks of Wimbledon’s shining stars — the people who keep the cogs ticking besides the players themselves — one thinks of the umpires; the ball girls and ball boys; the camera operators; perhaps the wait staff. The ticketing officer may sometimes get a nod, as might the stewards shepherding punters from Southfields station to the grounds.

Behind such public faces, however, is an ecosystem without which the perfection attained by the tournament’s front-of-house staff for close to 150 years could never be reached.

Wimbledon is often lauded for embodying the best of Britain. It is a bucolic marvel, with 50,000 plants spread across 42 acres. It rewards sportsmanship and casts such a spell over the crowd that punters behave almost as gracefully as the players themselves. It is a paean to our past (the UK, after all, invented lawn tennis — and still today all participants must wear white) as well as our future, consecrating our nation as a breeding ground for talent. It is at Wimbledon, where grass courts mean the neon balls travel faster than on any other surface, that people come to watch the greatest games in the world. Matches here are more often discussed in dramaturgical terms than in the traditional language of sport.

Centre Court, the jewel in AELTC’s crown, was said by John McPhee to resemble ‘an Elizabethan theatre’ in a 1968 New Yorker article on ‘The Lawns of Wimbledon’. The tournament’s most renowned finals — between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in 2008, and Federer and Novak Djokovic in 2019 — were more adrenaline-inducing than top action films of the 1990s. This is the stage that gave rise to Björn Borg and Pete Sampras, as well as today’s equally captivating rivalry between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz.

Yet, as all good directors know, a film or play is only ever as good as the sum of its parts. The minutiae, in other words, are as important as the big picture. Without the crew, no one can bring the cast to life; and this crew (its youngest member new to Wimbledon, its eldest a veteran of the grounds) embodies the very qualities — devotion, dignity and perfectionism — that punters come here to celebrate.

The timekeeper — Dan Bloxham

When a player emerges from the locker room and walks onto Centre Court, he is accompanied by a man wearing beige trousers and a white shirt with a tie and AELTC’s signature navy blazer. On his feet are white tennis shoes: the same as those once worn by line judges. Known familiarly as the player escort — and officially as the master of ceremonies — Dan Bloxham has been here for more than 25 years.

His role, on the face of it, looks easy. Yet anyone who’s ever been a personal assistant to the great and good will know that getting them where they need to be on time is no mean feat.

‘Thirty years ago, players weren’t too worried about getting ready,’ Dan says. Today, it’s a different game. ‘Everyone’s in the gym, throwing balls, running, doing exercises right up until it’s time to get onto the court. I have to kick the players out of the warm-up areas, one from one side and one from the other, and there’s always the risk that, when you’re accompanying one player, by the time you return, the other’s not there.’

This comedy of (unforced) errors speaks volumes of the ever-growing quality of tennis at Wimbledon. ‘Nowadays, the quality at the end of a five-hour match is just as good as it is at the beginning,’ Dan notes. This is because players will only compete if they are at their fittest. To many a fan’s chagrin, Alcaraz has pulled out of this year’s tournament due to tenosynovitis. ‘You can’t have so much as a chink in your armour anymore,’ the master of ceremonies states.

Dan assumed his current position about a decade into his Wimbledon years, in 2008. He remembers his first day, accompanying an already seasoned Federer onto the court. It was a stressful first assignment, he says, although he now seems to do this with eyes closed. His predecessor, Steve Adams, had given him only one tip: to ‘take control’. ‘My job is to try to make the players feel special,’ Dan explains, ‘and realise that they’re playing on the greatest court in the world.

‘They are part of a club here,’ he continues, ‘not only a facility. I might introduce them to members and key staff on the morning of their match as they walk down to see the court. It’s an entirely different way of getting there than it is at any other event.’ He is also the club’s head coach (‘when I’m not in my uniform, I’ll make sure I wear my sports kit, so the players know I have a clue’) and jokes about being able to tell a competitor’s nationality by their choice of warm-up (‘Italians tend to run at each other’). Federer, he says, would make his rivals nervous by doing the opposite. ‘He didn’t run around — not at first, although he eventually started doing yoga, throwing the balls around, even some football drills.’

Learning to navigate these differences and approach players when in the throes of preparing for a life-changing match is, Dan says, the most difficult part of his job. Yet it’s one to which he’s risen with aplomb. As well as being a timekeeper, he is also Wimbledon’s chief diplomat. ‘There have been moments where a player’s kit looked great, but they put a tracksuit top on right before walking out onto the court — and it’s not white,’ he laughs. ‘You’ve got their agent saying it’s white… but you know it’s not.’

One aspect of the job he no longer has to worry about is bringing the trophy onto the court. ‘I had to do that for the 2008 final,’ he tells me. ‘First of all, it’s an incredibly heavy trophy — you’re constantly thinking: don’t drop it — and you always end up holding it for a lot longer than you think because the players take five minutes to go into the crowd and come back around.’ As in the parts of his job for which he’s still in charge, patience is key.

The guardian — Christopher Boucher

It’s not only players who need minding — or their time managed. SW19’s more than half a million attendees also need directions, so they know where to be and when. The order of play is sacred and cannot be interrupted: fans are only allowed out of their seats, for instance, during a change of ends or set break.

Enter the stewards, whose military uniforms — often handsomely gilded — dot the grounds with flashes of black, red and gold. It is they who ensure the athletes are fully immersed in a game by keeping crowd disturbance to a minimum. They also look after the crowd itself: the tournament being held in July means it can sometimes get very hot and people can be taken ill. It reached 35.7˚C last summer, Christopher Boucher, the head steward, informs me. ‘It’s our job to attend to them and call first aid if anyone passes out.’

The stewards serve as human compasses for the punters, steering them in the right direction, whether they need food, water, medical assistance, a loo break, directions to their seats or help with spillage. With their uniforms, however, are they not the ones most at risk of overheating? ‘We wear only a short-sleeved white shirt and black trousers inside Centre Court,’ Lt Cdr Boucher reveals, ‘which keeps things a little cooler.’

The stewards — about 25% of whom are now women — number 500 in total. This year, there were 1,400 applicants. They hail from military backgrounds — Lt Cdr Boucher, a serving member of the Royal Navy, shows me the medals with which he has been presented for service in the Gulf and Bosnian wars, together with his Jubilee, Coronation and Long Service and Good Conduct Medals — meaning that some are forced to drop out of Wimbledon at the last minute because they’ve been deployed somewhere on duty. A reserve list makes up the shortfall.

Their job begins on the Sunday before the Championships, with a safety briefing and assignment to a specific team. After that, they get quizzed every day so that they remain up to scratch (‘by day four or five, they’re all over it’) and all take two weeks of annual leave in order to volunteer. A team of 50 mans the Royal Box, greeting each visitor and circulating throughout the day with water.

The year 2021 was particularly challenging because covid was lurking and any steward testing positive meant their gangway of four volunteers had to be replaced with those in the wings. The extra logistical planning, Lt Cdr Boucher notes, was immense. ‘We had about 100 people on standby at once — and can you imagine having to wear a mask in this heat?’

The chronicler — Emma Traherne

No.1 Court was never meant to be made of grass. The 1922 architectural plans conceived it as a hard court before the idea was scrapped. When the new No.1 opened in 1997, it did so as a sunken court for which soil had to be removed and harvested, eventually giving rise to what we now know as Henman Hill.

We know this because Emma Traherne and her team of 12 keep the architectural plans intact — together with the rest of the archive. Emma has been the curator of the Wimbledon Museum for seven years, having previously looked after the historic furniture and decorative arts in the Houses of Parliament. ‘We have more than one million historic assets in SW19,’ she reveals, ‘many of them photographs, as well as 60,000 physical objects, such as clothing, rackets and paintings.’

Among the artefacts in the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum archive, there are some that date back to the sport’s earlier iterations (even before the invention of lawn tennis). On display is a first edition of the first book to mention ‘tennis’, written by Antonio Sciano in 1555, in which the game being discussed is an ancestor of real tennis.

The museum has about 1,000 materials on show at any one time, as well as a dedicated exhibition space that changes every 12 months. Currently on display is ‘A Slice of History: Food & Drink at Wimbledon’, which explores the role of food at the tournament for both players and fans. Alongside strawberries and cream, an entire segment is dedicated to the evolution of player nutrition. Pickle juice, Emma explains, is the modern player’s drink of choice during matches, as it allows salts to return to the body at speed — a far cry from Suzanne Lenglen’s penchant for sipping brandy between games in the 1920s.

Roughly 120,000 people a year visit the museum, which documents the tournament’s evolution, as well as its relentless pursuit of excellence. Some 30% visit in the first two weeks of July; yet Emma observes her job is a marathon, not a sprint. ‘We do a huge amount of work in the four weeks before the Championship and install about 35 displays across the site,’ she explains, ‘which we take down once they wrap mid July. It’s not before early August that we are able to take a break.’

Perhaps the most important part of Emma’s role is the annual trophy engraving. No fewer than 84 trophies and salvers are worked on by five engravers over finals weekend. Emma says the spell-check process is ‘extremely thorough’. Have there ever been mistakes? ‘Not in my time.’

In the event of something going wrong, the situation is salvageable. The magic of Wimbledon, Emma says, is its efficiency. ‘It’s a very short turnaround,’ she explains. ‘As the victors are handed the full-size trophy by The Princess of Wales on Centre Court, the engravers are hard at work behind the scenes, engraving names onto the three-quarter-size replica of the trophy which the winners get to take home.’ Even one mistake, she says, could add half an hour to what should be a 20-minute job. The full-size trophy — the one viewers can see — is returned to the Club post-presentation and is on permanent display at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.

If AELTC has anything resembling the Firm’s Operation London Bridge — a contingency plan in case, despite rigorous spellchecks, an error is made during the engraving — all decline to say what this is; although one imagines that Wimbledon’s quest for perfectionism would naturally involve some Plan Bs.

The wingmen — Donna Davis and Rufus

More than any other tournament, Wimbledon strives for perfection. Part of its appeal is how spotless the place is: there is no litter or gum on the floor and, perhaps more importantly, there are no rats or pigeons. This is all thanks to Rufus, the 18-year-old hawk who has been guarding the grounds at SW19 since 2008 — far outclassing his predecessor Hamish’s nine-year tenure.

His handler, Donna Davis, tells me he learnt to fly here at 16 weeks old. ‘We were very lucky,’ Donna says. ‘Hawks can exhibit very different personality traits from one bird to another and Rufus was always great around people.’ His day will begin with a quick turn around the court on Donna’s arm, to do a recce and check what birds are around. Some species, she tells me, should not be disrupted. The grounds are home to little pied wagtails, ‘who are naturally curious and chatter away, yelling at Rufus on the roof’. He has been taught largely to ignore them. When they get truly pesky, he flares his wings at them and they instantly dissipate.

Rufus, who travels from Northamptonshire for the Championships, is only freed from Donna’s jesses when too many birds congregate in one spot (typically, a roof or a balcony). When it’s time for him to come back, she tempts him home using lightly cooked strips of his favourite food: quail. ‘If he doesn’t get it from me,’ Donna reveals, ‘he’s off to the Debenture lounge.’ As Rufus is a Harris hawk, his form and plumage are adaptable to the sometimes harsh conditions of his native America. A bit of rain, therefore, is not a problem, although he is a ‘sun worshipper,’ Donna admits. As for the wind, he can use it to his advantage. Heavy downpours, however, are a problem. ‘He doesn’t like that.’

Rufus hasn’t yet fraternised that much with players. ‘We need to start making some moves in that direction,’ Donna says. ‘I know that Serena Williams doesn’t like him…’ How does one build up trust with a hawk? ‘It comes with time and spending every day together,’ Donna explains. ‘Historically, you had priests train hawks for kings and bishops and get them used to human voices by reading them scriptures. Rufus is used to the sound of my voice, which I don’t think is quite so soothing, but really, it’s about food motivation. He knows he doesn’t need to exert himself too much to have his favourite meal if he’s near me.’

The botanist — Robin Murphy

There are more plants and flowers across AELTC — currently expanding to include a fourth site at Wimbledon Park — than there are in Regent’s Park’s Queen Mary’s Gardens. ‘Our main ethos,’ explains lead gardener Robin Murphy, ‘is to create tennis in an English garden.’ It is a huge part of what makes the Championships so special and lends Wimbledon the heritage quality sought after by punters.

‘Everything we plant is a nod to the English-garden style,’ Robin says. ‘Of course, we have to evolve and change things every year — we follow the principle of “always the same, like never before” — so we replicate a feeling, rather than an actual design.’

There are more than 2,200 trees across the grounds and an additional 1,000 trees and shrubs in stock to be reused in July. To these are added 32,000 perennial summer flowers — ‘to create the tournament overlay,’ Robin explains — and 15,000 petunias that hang on the buildings’ façades. Recent years have favoured pollinator-friendly planting. ‘Nurturing biodiversity is a big part of what we do,’ the lead gardener says. ‘We aren’t afraid to trial new plant species and to roll their number up if they prove successful.’ Still, they try to keep things native wherever possible. Foxgloves, for example, are conspicuously popular.

There are 13 full-time gardeners on the main site, Robin tells me, although they are supplemented in the weeks leading up to (and during) the Championships by seasonal gardeners, as well as more on the parkland across the road and at the satellite location in nearby Raynes Park, SW20. Many of them return each year and have become ‘as integral as the full-time staff,’ he notes.

Robin has been involved in the Championships since 2004, but became employed directly by AELTC in 2014. In 2016, he interviewed for his current position. ‘I stumbled into horticulture, really,’ he says. ‘I trained as a carpenter when I left school, but needed some summer work. My dad, who was a gardener, had a company that had a small contract on site and I came to help out that year. There used to be a lot more contractors dealing with different parts of the site, but it’s been streamlined since then.’ One can ‘absolutely tell the difference,’ he says, since the work was taken in house. There is a sense of cohesion unmatched anywhere else.

‘The weather always presents its challenges,’ Robin notes. ‘Too much heat requires more water, whereas too little sun might slow down flowering. I think the biggest difficulty is the fact that there are so many groups working on top of one another’ — competing cogs, as it were — ‘which makes scheduling work quite an ordeal when you experience delays caused in other areas.’ Much as the stewards attend to guests on court, the gardeners must often help those on Henman Hill.

‘Our most common call-out is when people have dropped their phone or sunglasses in the water feature we’ve installed at the top of the hill,’ he laughs, ‘so they can be fished out.’ Not all heroes wear Nike.

The bouncers — Ben Edwards and Boris, Faye Benson and Moo

It wouldn’t be Wimbledon without dogs. Keeping their noses out and alert to the slightest fracas, SW19’s anointed sniffers travel from far and wide to ensure that everything runs smoothly. That way, spectators and players alike can keep their heads down and enjoy the tennis. Boris, a Russian terrier, has been serving as a general-purpose patrol dog for five years.

‘We walk around the grounds and keep an eye out for anyone trying to gain access or exhibiting anti-social behaviour,’ his handler, Ben Edwards, explains. ‘It rarely, if ever, happens. Boris is big enough to act as a deterrent. We prevent these things from happening before they do, which makes our life easier.’ Boris and Ben travel to the site from their farm in Kent. ‘He’s got quite a deep voice,’ his handler smiles. ‘It’s amazing: any problem and he tends to nip it in the bud.’

For Moo, a 2½-year-old black labrador, Wimbledon is a brave new world. This is hers and handler Faye Benson’s first time at the Championships (the two previously worked at Royal Ascot). ‘She’s quite lively when she’s working,’ Faye tells me, ‘and quite calm when she’s not working. Perfect.’ Unlike Boris, Moo is more highly specialised and looks out for explosives. ‘We are lucky enough never to have found any in real life — only during training,’ Faye says.

Once a month, Moo goes through a refresher course to make sure she is up to speed. ‘We’re also undergoing some extra training here right before the Championships start,’ her handler mentions.

The juggler — Andrew Chevalier

The ball girls and boys are among the Championships’ most recognisable figures. The balls they run to fetch, however, are not distributed at random. There are three kinds of balls pre-sent in any one game,’ says Andrew Chevalier, ball-distribution manager: threes, fives and sevens. These figures are based on the number of games in which each ball has been used.

Andrew is in charge of a team of eight whose job it is to get each ball where it needs to be — both during practice and the Championships themselves. ‘There isn’t enough space to store all the balls used in a match on the court,’ he explains, ‘so these are constantly being replenished.’ Each match begins with 21 cans on the court. Ball girls and ball boys will always have two cans on the go, which translates to six balls. Every nine games, these are replaced as the umpire asks for new balls. A men’s game typically uses 16 cans (or 48 balls) and a women’s game 10 (or 30).

‘Many people don’t realise what happens when a ball accidentally lands among the crowd,’ he says, citing this as one of his principal challenges. ‘We leave a secret tin under the chair of each umpire — one which, according to tracking, has been used for three, five or seven games.’ This is because the quality of the ball needs to match that which has been shot into the crowd. The umpire then drops the relevant ball into the game.

In the background, Andrew grades the balls he collects after the umpire requests a change. At this stage, he assesses how many games they can still be used in; or whether they should be tossed, by looking at the Slazenger logo on the ball and seeing how battered it looks. ‘Rain delays, during which the umpire will sometimes suspend play, pose a particular challenge,’ Andrew notes. When play eventually resumes and players are asked to warm up again, the rule dictates that they must do so using ‘fives’ (they cannot use new balls, which are saved for when the actual match recommences — and the majority of balls collected during suspension have been used up to nine times already, making the more desirable fives hard to find).

‘We need to sift through thousands of previous days’ balls to find these fives,’ Andrew explains. If all 18 courts at AELTC are affected by a suspension (and six ‘fives’ are needed on each one for the reprisal), that means finding 108 such balls. Sometimes, the same court will face multiple suspensions of play within a single day.

Still, Andrew maintains the kind of stoicism that appears synonymous with Wimbledon. ‘If I’m doing my job correctly, no one should notice I am doing it at all.’ He has worked here since 2018 and as ball-distribution manager from 2021. ‘I step into the Wimbledon world for a month every year,’ he says, ‘and forget that anything else exists.’ In his day-to-day life, he freelances as an actor and writer.

As McPhee did in The New Yorker in 1968, he draws an analogy between Wimbledon and the theatre. ‘It’s a load of departments coming together to put on a world-class production,’ he explains. His job is to keep plates spinning ‘and keep my team happily engaged in what they are doing. It’s important for everyone to appreciate how special it is to work here.

‘What I’ve learnt over the past eight years of working here is that the managers of all the different departments are some of the most dedicated people in the country,’ Andrew beams. ‘It’s 14 days of work, non-stop. Every single office and every single member of staff is exhausted by the end of it, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It must be hard to craft a beautiful poem with ‘a million kids running around’ you, but such is the challenge faced by George Mpanga, better known as George the Poet. The 35-year-old father of two is multi-talented. The spoken-word artist, poet (obviously), author and host of Have You Heard George’s Podcast? began his career as a rapper, signing a music deal with Island Records aged 22.

He turned to poetry and podcasting after taking a step back from music. He is currently doing a PhD at UCL about the economic and cultural potential of black music and has just written an exclusive short story for Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, a Belmond Train, as part of Writers on the Rails. Last year he published a book, Track Record: Me, Music and the War on Blackness. He’s done a lot so far, but he started very young.

Born in 1991 in north London to Ugandan parents, his creative ambitions formed at around 11 years old. ‘I remember writing down: “I would like to be an entertainer with influential ideas” — something like that. I thought I was going to be a singer or rapper, and perhaps also a public speaker — poetry wasn't on my radar,’ he says.

It was through rap music that George’s interest in poetry awakened. ‘More specifically UK grime music,’ George explains. ‘From the age of 15 I was a grime rapper… and I just felt like there were layers that I could peel back when it came to the performance. I felt like I didn’t really need the music.’ He adds: ‘Being a rapper is a little bit like being a professional wrestler, there's a lot of bombast involved, and that’s not really me. The more I started to pull away from those elements, the more I was left with what I could only describe as poetry.’

It was while studying politics, psychology and sociology at King’s College, Cambridge, that George’s career really started to take off. ‘I ended up spending more time off campus because there was a growing demand. One moment I’ll never forget was in my final year. I was supposed to be in the exam hall, and I was filming a poetry special for Formula 1 at the Monaco Grand Prix. I had to write it, memorise it, deliver it to camera, fly back to uni and sit the exam in about 36 hours. At that point I realised that this was probably going to be my career,’ he recalls.

George’s EP, The Chicken and the Egg, was released in 2014 to critical acclaim. His first book of poetry, Search Party, was published in 2015 and, in 2018, he was elected as a member of the national council of Arts Council England. He opened the BBC coverage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding with a love poem and was offered an MBE in 2019 that he declined because of the British Empire’s treatment of Uganda, which he termed ‘evil’.

Perhaps his success is in part due to his wife. He has two children with Sandra Mpanga, who is also his manager and events producer. ‘She’s the best person I’ve ever worked with,’ George gushes. ‘The most successful events that I’ve done have been produced by her.’ The pair have known each other since their school days.

Recently they’ve been enjoying seeing the world together. ‘My wife and I got married not long ago, in 2021, and we started travelling quite a bit. It really did ignite this new passion in me, because obviously it’s a mind-expanding experience. You meet new people, you see different things.’ On his work with Belmond, he adds: ‘There's something about the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express journey passing through all of these different landscapes, from the rural to the urban, that I'd actually never really seen before or taken the time to appreciate. It was such a rich opportunity to write for travel.’

Your aesthetic hero

This is a little bit of a wild card that I don’t think people will expect from me, but probably the pop star The Weeknd. He's a master of aesthetics, in my opinion. When he first came out he had a very unique sound, but he also had a mystique around him, and there was this big question in the early years, as he became a superstar, of how he would navigate that — not being mysterious anymore. However, with every album cycle he reinvents his aesthetic. He's got a concept: sometimes he's looking like a mad scientist, other times he's looking like a parody of a Hollywood has-been. He treats his physical appearance like a canvas as much as his music.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

There’s an artist called Phoebe Boswell. I went to an exhibition of hers some time ago. It was just beautiful art and it really played with the idea of the female body a lot. There's a lot of art that is capturing my attention from Uganda as well. I have an artist that I'm obsessed with called Hatimax, and I also did some very, very, very interesting work with a digital art gallery last year called Frameless.

They're based in London, and they create immersive installations out of classical art pieces. That also left a big impact on me. I wrote a piece to a painting by the Victorian-era artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. It was beautiful, I got lost in that.

The last thing that you bought for yourself

I bought myself a watch. For day-to-day, nothing extravagant.

Your favourite painting

To be honest with you, my favourite painting is not known. It's a piece that I had made about my family. It hangs in our living room and I adore it. The artist I mentioned earlier, Hatimax, made it. I gave it to my wife for Valentine’s Day.

A possession you’d never sell

Apart from that painting I just mentioned, I’ve won a fair few trophies — they would never be sold.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I always come back to Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers. It was a very interesting take. The whole thesis of the book is that there are factors that go into success that sometimes are staring you in the face, but they are not necessarily highlighted when you talk about the great successes, like in the computing or sporting industries. There are things that matter — the way you treat people, the way you pour into your children, the way you pay attention to what's going on around you. I've always found that to be a powerful message.

The music that you work to

The last genre of music that I really used to lose myself to was lo-fi hip hop. It is the most relaxing. Literally, I think scientifically, the frequencies that it hits are the frequencies of relaxation, comfort, nostalgia and warmth. So, I recommend it to anyone out there looking to have something on in the background that they can unplug but still feel free and creative to.

The last podcast you listened to

A podcast that keeps me up to date with Uganda, it’s called ON Uganda.

Who would play you in a film of your life

I feel like it has to be Daniel Kaluuya or Damson Idris, if we’re gonna lean into the ‘heart throbby’ vibe of George the Poet.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I would need music, so some kind of speaker, and I’d love to take electricity. Also some seeded bread, because I’m fancy, and peanut butter, because I’m really fancy — and a notepad. My middle-class desert island experience would be complete.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The fact that my kids are screaming. They are one and three. That’s me being a bit tongue in cheek, but literally the knowledge that there is all this life to live with them, and they’re up in the morning and raring to go so, emotionally and practically, that will get you out of bed.

The items you collect

Maybe Air Jordans, but I don’t think of it like collecting. I don’t have a ridiculous number of pairs, but it's definitely more than five.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Waldorf Astoria, it’s just a classic. If you ever get the chance, go to the one in Amsterdam. It’s a work of art, man.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I’ll never forget eating snails in France when I was 10, so that was memorable. I didn’t say good, but literally — I will never forget. I think I just prefer them alive. I see a snail, and I feel no animosity towards it. I'm perfectly happy for it to continue being a snail without being on my plate. I don't think I should have that snail. And they leave a trail of slime behind them.

The best present you’ve ever received

It will definitely be from my wife. She kills it with the presents. One time she literally surprised me with a trip and it was amazing. The details are between us, but yeah, she’s the best.

‘Writers on the Rails’ is a new literary collection of exclusive short stories featuring George the Poet. It was launched as part of Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, a Belmond train. Journeys will be departing from now until October 2026.

'It is definitely the only garden I have ever designed where old-fashioned roses have been the big thing,’ is how Tom Stuart-Smith summarised his garden at Lasborough Park in Gloucestershire, designed for Julia and Sir Hans Rausing. For the man whose creations with perennials have passed into horticultural folklore, the project was definitely a one-off, yet one that he will always recall with great affection.

Whatever style of garden a designer might be asked to produce, few could fail to be entranced by the setting at Lasborough. Here, in the south-western reaches of the Cotswolds, where the limestone uplands fold gently down towards the Severn estuary, is some of the most undisturbed and beautiful countryside in south-west England.

It includes a series of secluded valleys, wrapped around by wooded hillsides so as to appear little worlds of their own. This is certainly the case as you approach Lasborough and take the narrow lane that drops down from the A46 west of Tetbury and eventually brings you to the cluster of houses close to the church before crossing the River Wells and rising gently on the far side to Lasborough Park.

Lasborough’s long history stretching back over centuries has witnessed a succession of owners. It has also benefited from some garden and landscape highlights, evidence of which survives today. The present house was originally built in the late 18th century, designed by James Wyatt, and William Emes planned the surrounding landscape.

The impressive walled garden with its long, curving south-facing wall originally dated from the early 19th century and, in the mid 19th century, Lasborough was acquired by the famous Victorian tree planter Robert Stayner Holford of nearby Westonbirt.

Characteristically, one of his additions was Lodge Avenue, a double avenue stretching the five miles from Westonbirt to Lasborough, much of which remains today. Holford lived at Lasborough for a period and he also made extensive alterations to the outbuildings and added the original freestanding glasshouse to the walled garden. During the 1920s, the little known, but distinguished garden designer George Dillistone was commissioned by the then owners, Galbraith and Eleanor Cole, to plan an ambitious reworking of the garden, but Galbraith died in 1929 and Lasborough was sold before Dillistone’s work could begin.

There were to be five more sales of the house before, in 2014, it was purchased by the Rausings, who almost immediately commissioned Mr Stuart-Smith to carry out extensive work in the gardens, the major element of which was to be the re-creation of the early-19th-century walled garden. Perhaps the most significant factor for Mr Stuart-Smith was the degree to which the work on the garden would be a partnership with Julia. She had already been diagnosed with cancer and the creation of the Lasborough garden was an absorbing project that gave her great pleasure in the final years before her death in 2024.

When Mr Stuart-Smith started work, the walled garden had effectively ceased to exist. Holford’s impressive glasshouse had disappeared by the 1920s and the designer recalls that ‘all there was in the walled garden was an oil tank, an Astroturf putting green and some Christmas trees’. Repairing — in many areas completely rebuilding — the walls took a year, after which a new glasshouse was built on the footprint of the original. The new garden that emerged is something of a celebration of the great British tradition of walled kitchen gardens — on a spectacular scale, as it extends to more than an acre.

A symmetrical pattern of beds is arranged around a grid of paths, with those extending across the garden from one side to the other giving views that demonstrate the overall scale. The central area is set out with beds in front of the new glasshouse, to one side there is a concentration of vegetables, to the other the flower garden. The beds now overflow with a combination of plants that, if there is an unfamiliar emphasis on roses in many areas, bears all the hallmarks of Mr Stuart-Smith’s skill with a complex plant palette. In some places, there are mixtures; elsewhere, a single plant is massed for effect, for instance, a block of pinky/mauve-flowered echinacea.

There is the rich mixture of flowers, fruit and vegetables essential to a traditional walled garden, growing in such quantities that there is a constantly changing kaleidoscope from month to month. In the depth of winter, tall drums of clipped beech retain their golden leaves and provide structure, as do the arches and other metalwork over which a range of apple and pear trees is immaculately trained.

More fruit is trained against the walls, especially on the long curve of the south-facing one where a medley of gages, figs, apricots, plums and pears alternates with a similarly mouthwatering range of wall shrubs and climbers, such as different Clematis viticella, white and mauve solanum and abutilons. Mingling with them all are, of course, roses, including The Generous Gardener, ‘François Juranville’ and ‘Albertine’ to name only three reliable pink-flowered old favourites. Around the garden, some choice larger wall shrubs include Magnolia delavayi, Maytenus boaria, Hoheria sexstylosa ‘Stardust’, Viburnum cinnamomifolium and Clerodendrum trichotomum var. fargesii.

Through the weeks of summer, as the beds devoted to vegetables fill out with their burgeoning crops and beans and sweet peas smother hazel wigwams, the range of plants and plant combinations creates an atmosphere of richness that on a sunny day is sheer intoxication. In May and early June, a wonderful collection of Benton irises come into flower in beds in front of the glasshouse beneath espalier pears. In some beds, shrub roses predominate, underplanted with geraniums, erigeron and other appropriate low perennials.

The David Austin-bred Scepter’d Isle and Susan Williams-Ellis; old-fashioned shrubs ‘Tuscany Superb’, ‘Charles de Mills’ and ‘Fantin-Latour’; and hybrid musk ‘Penelope’ and ‘Felicia’, form a selection of roses picked out by Mr Stuart-Smith. Elsewhere, there is a variety of shrub and perennial combinations that would keep you absorbed for hours and, in the glasshouse, in traditional kitchen-garden style, there’s a collection of pelargoniums in clay pots, including a delicious pale-pink-flowered climbing variety trained against one wall.

The walled garden is definitely the centrepiece of the new garden at Lasborough and is best viewed from the Gothic folly built by Ptolemy Dean perched on the slope above. Yet Mr Stuart-Smith’s work attended to all the areas that make up the 12 acres — as well as extending out into the park to the south and west, which gives both garden and house such an idyllic setting. When he began work, the area immediately to the west of the house had been made into an enclosed courtyard with no proper links to the pool garden nearby and the areas beyond, such as the walled garden. Since then, the pool garden has been replanted and the courtyard opened up, so it now leads to the walk that extends parallel to the walled garden. Here, long borders either side of the path are at their best in May, with repeat cornus and other shrubs mixing with a palette of spring perennials.

A little over 10 years has witnessed a transformation in the garden at Lasborough, taking it to heights not achieved at any time in its past when, all too often, a change in ownership brought a period of stability to an end. In the creation and development through its formative years, the garden gave enormous and recuperative pleasure to Julia Rausing. Today, it gives the house a setting of horticultural excellence that is a fitting complement to the centuries-old landscape that surrounds it.

George Plumptre is the former chief executive of the National Garden Scheme, for which the garden of Lasborough Park, Gloucestershire, opens.

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The clue’s in the name: Palm Beach. There are palm trees and a long strip of beach. There’s also bright-pink bougainvillea on every house, jasmine in the air, singing mockingbirds competing with the gentle purr of the odd Rolls-Royce and roads with names such as Hibiscus Avenue and Coral Lane (Gulfstream Road, too, which is appropriately Palm Beach because almost everyone here owns one). Right at the centre of it all is the new, gleaming, bright-white hotel on the block, The Vineta.

It’s boom time in Palm Beach, but not necessarily for the reason you think. Sure, Donald Trump is often in town and holds court at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and country club (the joining fee, cannily hiked shortly before his second presidential term began, is now $1 million).

However, the frenetic activity and influx into this surprisingly small, moneyed patch of America — which boasts the highest density of billionaires in the country, I’m told on my second night there — isn’t all due to him.

Think of it like the gold-rush to the Cotswolds. It’s a slightly glib comparison, but not entirely dissimilar. Californians and New Yorkers have flocked south to Palm Beach for more space, sunnier climes (at least, the ones from New York) and, crucially, more favourable taxes. This means that what has long been a wealthy area is now even more so.

It’s not possible, alas, to do a bus tour of the stars’ homes as you can in Hollywood, but take a walk up the lake trail and you’ll pass $50-million-plus house after $50-million-plus house. Drive around Palm Beach with a local and they’ll point out the Lauder house or Tom Ford’s house or the Peltz house, setting for the, ahem, controversial Brooklyn-Peltz wedding in 2022. Every other car is a Cullinan; a jar of jam in the new Bilboquet deli, a casual offshoot of the famous restaurant, will set you back $19.

This sunny spot has long been well served by swanky restaurants and members’ clubs that cost a cool half million or so to join. The likes of The Everglades Club, and Palm Beach Bath and Tennis have been here since Palm Beach started attracting the rich towards the beginning of the 20th century (on which more in a moment).

The famous pink Colony Hotel flung open its doors in 1947. However, other splashy openings are racing to keep up with demand. Polo kingpin Nacho Figueras opened The Polo Room restaurant last year. Über-exclusive members’ club the Carriage House, which opened in 2022 and is supposedly heavily influenced by 5 Hertford Street in London, has more recently jacked its joining fee to $400,000. Robin Birley has reportedly signed paperwork for a new club near Worth Avenue, which will be to Palm Beach what Maxime’s has become to Manhattan.

Then there’s the new jewel, The Vineta, a hotel bought by the Reuben brothers, David and Simon, in 2022 and managed by the Oetker Collection, the group’s first foray into the USA. Not bad for an island that is pretty small: just under four square miles or, if you prefer, the size of Richmond Park.

However, it’s technically incorrect to call The Vineta new. The building has almost always been a hotel (save for a brief transformation into a condominium block), ever since it opened to tourists in 1926. It was briefly called The Vineta back in the day, then it moved through various hands until it became The Chesterfield in 1989 and attracted Margaret Thatcher, Catherine Deneuve and Sir Rod Stewart.

After a three-year building project, the aesthetic now is classic Palm Beach: creams and blues, the odd splash of pink, with rattan detailing, shell sconces on the walls, orchids and ferns beside thick Assouline coffee-table books and wall-to-wall marble bathrooms (I should note here that the presidential suite is the only room with a bathtub; Florida is shower territory).

The interiors were handed over to the Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi, who has looked after other hotels in the group, including the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France, and Eden Rock St Barths in the Caribbean. I have never before stayed in such a serene hotel room — more creams, more blues, rattan lampshades, fluted bedside tables — or a hotel room that has a menu that includes a page of injectables, should I need some. How about Nefertiti Neck, to smooth out those pesky lines? Or Trapezius Tox to relax my shoulders after the long flight?

The swimming pool is sensational — destined to launch a million Instagram posts. Tino spent some time in Palm Beach doing his homework and it shows. The spiral pool handrails, for instance, are designed to match the swirl on the town’s famous Clock Tower, overlooking the beach. Coco’s, the hotel’s restaurant, features old-timers steak Diane and crêpes Suzette, which regulars from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc may recognise. It all adds up to create a serene sense of continuity; the hotel may only just have opened, but it feels like a grande dame.

There’s also an in-room pet menu — including a ‘buddy burger’ beef patty with broccoli and rice for $18 or an ‘amuse pooch’ oatmeal cookie for $9. Every room (there are 41) is dog friendly. Palm Beach itself is extremely dog friendly. One morning, strolling the lake trail, I passed a chap in his eighties walking a Yorkshire terrier in a red MAGA cap. Moments later, I passed another with his poodle, in a navy MANA cap, worn by the other side; it apparently means ‘make America normal again’.

Walking is a good way to take in this place, because it’s small enough to explore on foot. Take a stroll down Worth Avenue and you’ll pass Chanel, Ferragamo and Palm Beach favourites Stubbs & Wootton (for slippers) and Lily Pulitzer (for tropical clothing). You’ll see plenty of Tesla Cybertrucks and perhaps even Mona Lisa. Not, I hasten to add, the painting, but a pig. One of the financiers has a pet pig, called Mona Lisa, whose walker takes her up and down the main drag every morning.

After that, I’d continue strolling to the Flagler Museum to brush up on Palm Beach history. Henry Flagler was the oil magnate and generous being who built the grand house that’s now a museum between 1900–02 for his third wife. He has been dubbed the ‘inventor’ of modern Florida for also constructing the railway that stretched the length of the state and allowed 19th-century travellers to discover this balmy patch of the USA. This was the Gilded Age, when it became fashionable for those who summered in Newport to winter down here.

Flagler constructed Palm Beach’s earliest glitzy hotels — the Royal Poinciana, The Breakers — and guests soon flocked. The architect Addison Mizner then rolled up his sleeves and started designing buildings in the style he’d become famous for, still evident across Palm Beach today: ‘Bastard-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Bull-Market-Damn-The-Expense’, someone subsequently dubbed it. Houses and clubs that wouldn’t look out of place in Madrid, in other words, albeit with more tropical gardens. Palm trees, naturally, but also hibiscus, gardenias and plumbago. Colour is everywhere. Nothing is terribly subtle here.

‘The Palm Beach season, then as now, was a time of parties, concerts and entertainment as visitors arrived for a respite from the cold winter weather in Northern states,’ notes a plaque in the museum, beneath a grainy photograph of the Flaglers hosting a tea party on their lawn, alongside their friends visiting from Britain, the Duke and Duchess of Manchester.

That was as correct then as it is now, as the season still exists in these parts and runs roughly from Thanksgiving, when everyone descends from the north, until Easter, when they return to the east coast. ‘It basically empties, it’s a ghost town,’ says a friend, of the summer months, when it’s too hot and humid to do much outside.

However, during the season, oof, remember your vitamins — because it is busy. Supper after supper, charity event after charity event. Are we talking endless charity parties for blind and impoverished dolphins, I ask my friend, assuming there are a good number of rich people here looking for a cause — any cause — to distract them from pilates ($68 a class) and all that golf? ‘Not all,’ she says, contemplatively, ‘although we did go to a charity event for dolphins the other day.’

I stop by one drinks party at a private home (with the usual army of uniformed staff) with martinis the size of fish bowls and a woman tells me she’s drinking as many as she can before speaking to her lawyer about her divorce that evening. That party was to raise money for local beaches. The next night, at another charity do, in aid of the mangroves, former model and heiress Amanda Hearst makes a speech about the importance of the ocean and I talk to a Norwegian who only mentions half an hour into our conversation that he’s a director. Quite a major director. He’s Amanda's husband, Joachim Rønning, and he’s directed a ‘Tron’ film as well as the last in the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ series.

Then it’s off to dinner at the Everglades; the next night, a supper at another private home by the pool. At least American dinner parties finish early, all wrapped up by 11pm. I developed a chest infection after several days here, despite the tropical warmth. London socialising is nowhere near as frenetic as Palm Beach in season.

In 1995, when property tycoon Frank Lahainer died in Palm Beach, the story goes, his widow Gianna had his body embalmed and kept at a funeral home for more than a month, so she didn’t have to skip any parties. ‘Why would I wait?’ Gianna reportedly said, ‘I would miss the season.’ Quite right.

This is a party town — and the fun must go on.

Rooms at The Vineta start from £735 per night on a B&B basis, excluding taxes. Click here for more information and to book.

New York — $3,100,000

This dairy farm in upstate New York dates back to 1759, sits in 12 acres of gorgeous woodland — which is as old, or older than the building — and has been beautifully updated throughout.

It's close to the Appalachian Trail, has a gorgeous DeVol kitchen, and is just 90 minutes from Manhattan on the train.

For sale @buyingupstate and The Lillie K Team at Four Seasons Sotheby's International Realty.

South Carolina — $4,295,000

In the magical old city of Charleston, this 1743-built home pre-dates the Boston Tea Party by thirty years.

It's an architectural gem on South Lamboll Street, one of the prettiest in the city, and as well as its charming original features it also has double piazzas and verandas to provide the quintessential Charleston outdoor living lifestyle.

For sale via Daniel Ravenel Sotheby’s International Realty — see more details and pictures.

Pennsylvania — $999,000

Looking for all the world like the sort of cottage you'd find in Cumbria, this glorious little stone-built home dates back to 1753.

It's been updated sensitively, though, with a fine kitchen, a swimming pool and grounds of just over half an acre.

For sale via Kurfiss Sotheby's International Realty — see more details and pictures.

Massachusetts — $1,489,000

You'll find eight fireplaces, original wide-plank wood floors, and preserved period detail throughout a house that was originally the Cushing Tavern, built in 1746 in the town of Hingham, where you'll find some of the oldest homes in America.

It's had modern updates — heating system, roof, and central air conditioning — but is in many ways a blank canvas looking for an owner to bring their own personality to this 18th century home.

For sale via William Raveis — see more details and pictures.

Connecticut — $7,250,000

As rude as it might be to play favourites, we've left the best til last: this utterly magical house is described by the agents as having 'one of the most breathtaking private settings on the Connecticut River' — and it's not hard to believe.

Built in 1750, with almost 4,500sq ft of space and just under 10 acres, it's an irresistibly pretty house that has been remarkably well cared for — and the cool, wooded grounds and pool are sumptuous.

For sale via William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty — see more details and pictures.

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

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Daniel Brush, who died in 2022, was a one-off, a phenomenon, a sort of genius without portfolio, a maker of marvellous objects. His output was tiny and he usually hung on to what he produced for decades before parting with it, if he parted with it at all. He never accepted a commission, seldom exhibited, didn’t have a dealer and sold only when and to whom he pleased. For these reasons, hardly anyone got to see, let alone own, the things he made.

Despite or perhaps because of his Sasquatch-like elusiveness, a retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Art and Design in 2012 was the best attended show in the museum’s history.

Now another opportunity to see a significant cross-section of his work has arisen. ‘Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light’, at Van Cleef & Arpels’ L’Ecole in Paris until October 2, 2026, comprises 75 pieces spanning most though not quite all of his career. There are some exquisite drawings, jagged, fraught and intense. There are sculptural, totemic objects of profound mystery in steel and gold. There are brooches and cuffs, some whimsical, some transcendent, in precious gemstones, Bakelite and ultralight NASA metal alloys — wearable sculptures that, for better or worse, earned Daniel a reputation as a jeweller (the finest since Benvenuto Cellini, in the opinion of no less an authority than Christie’s chairman and jewellery supremo, François Curiel).

I got to know Daniel and his wife Olivia in the mid-2000s and visited them whenever I was in New York. Their apartment on West 24th Street was itself a kind of installation, a 5,000-square-foot, open-plan living-working space and a mirror of their shared life and enthusiasms. Olivia is an artist who works primarily in textiles; Daniel’s Loose Threads — my favourite of his works, magnificently displayed in its entirety in Paris — is a moving tribute to her tendency to end each day covered in squiggly bits of yarn.

There’s such diversity among Daniel’s works that it’s difficult to believe they sprang from the same consciousness or were wrought by the same pair of hands. His conversation was no less eclectic. Looking at the transcript of our last meeting, I see that he spoke, for the best part of six hours, about cowboy boots, German bisque dolls, Bugatti engines, endangered species, the Noh concept of yugen, macaroons, calligraphy, snaphaunces, Hedy Lamarr, Vladimir Horowitz, Modern Farmer magazine, machine guns, mimesis, fishmongers, ballet, Scotch whisky, Polaroid film, ‘classic seven’ Upper East Side apartments, punctuation marks and Casio G-Shock digital watches. Among other things.

What’s the line through, the loose thread of connection? People ooh and ah endlessly about Daniel’s almost superhuman manipulation of materials, particularly metals. But curiosity, not virtuosity, is, I think, the key. He loathed the ‘v’ word. Virtuosity for its own sake meant nothing to him. Technique interested him greatly, but only as a means, not an end, a way to get things done. He was fascinated by the way well-made objects can serve as a direct and intimate link between artist and audience.

Every one of the pieces on display in Paris might be considered in terms of line and light. Some of them fit the bill to perfection: the astonishing Remembrance of Things Present sequence of ink drawings, for instance, which are all about line, and the mesmeric engraved steel sculptures, Thinking About Monet, which are all about colour.

And yet, while taking in the show, I was also reminded of something that usually happened when I went to see Daniel and Olivia at the studio — not every time, but more often than not. Shortly after I arrived Daniel would say: ‘Shut your eyes and open your hand. Here. Now close your hand and hold on to this.’ It would be something he’d made — maybe something he’d finished that morning, or 30 years ago. For as long as the object remained invisible in my closed hand, considerations of line and light were, of course, irrelevant. Daniel was inviting an act of imaginative engagement based solely on touch, a response to what I could feel but not see. I recall his fondness for Native American dreamcatchers — objects intended both to bring on dreams and to banish them while under the influence of hallucinogens in order to commune directly with the spirit world. ‘Can a jewel do that?’ he asked. ‘Can a jewel take your breath away, in and of itself, so that it doesn’t even have to be worn? Can it be held in your hand so you dream? Can it become an intimate sculpture without a utilitarian function?’

The questions were rhetorical. His belief that a jewel could do those things was absolute and unwavering.

‘So, you know,’ he went on, ‘I got this wonderful note the other day, from this sensational guy. I love it. He said he has one of my things in a fitted box in his study, where he reads about art. And every once in a while he opens the box with his eyes closed and touches it, because he wants to experience it as if he were blind. God, I love that. I absolutely love that. I keep thinking and hoping, the more I engage with people, that it’s not just the tactile nature of it, it’s that private, quiet, removed, you know, secret kind of thing… You’re engaging with another person you don’t know but you’ve become intimate with. It’s such an odd transference.’

The chance to see so much of Daniel’s work, so elegantly displayed under one roof, is unlikely to be repeated any time soon. Make your way to Paris and let the transference begin.

‘Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light’ is at L’Ecole School of Jewellery Arts, supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau, Paris, until October 4, 2026. Admission is free upon reservation. Click here for more information.

When Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne became the first duo to row from Peru to Australia in 2025, they were also the first to use a floating farm to sustain themselves at sea.

Growing their own salad over an 8,000-mile journey was made possible by one of their sponsors, Home Harvest, a tech firm whose flagship product allows consumers to grow herbs and leaves directly from seed mats. The company, which uses hydroponic technology to produce fresh leafy greens in days, adapted its product to be solar-powered and directly attached to the racing shell, to great effect: together, Jess and Miriam raised more than £120,000 for educational charity Outward Bound Trust.

Home Harvest’s flagship product is different. A three-tier box, powered by LEDs, it has a filtration system that disperses water to professional-grade seed mats; one prototype features a different salad crop growing on each level. The boxes connect to an app, which offers recipes and nutritional advice tailored to individual goals (such as to lose weight or increase vitamin C intake), as well as more generalist advice rooted in Home Harvest’s core belief: that our current agricultural system is as bad for us as for the planet.

A camera is built into each box to monitor the growth of the crops, accessible via the app. ‘We offer a direct-to-consumer business,’ explains Hedley Aylott, the firm’s co-founder and marketing director, ‘one that bypasses the need for a middleman and reduces the carbon footprint of imports.’

Hedley is keen to stress the anti-pesticide virtues of indoor hydroponic growing and invites me to sample the radish, rocket and pea shoots that have been grown by a Home Harvest box. ‘The technology works by using higher seed density in the paper seed mats to achieve faster growth,’ co-founder Andrew Johnson, nicknamed ‘The Salad King’, told Country Life last year.

‘The system creates the perfect growing environment with controlled temperature and light. You simply add water and can get fresh, leafy greens in a matter of days, rather than months.’

The market for such a product, according to both founders, is huge. ‘With the weather becoming more volatile and hard to predict,’ Andrew says, ‘it is becoming harder for consumers to rely on crops that are grown outdoors.’ As such, the firm subscribes to the same beliefs as were touted by Michael Gove when he was Defra Secretary: that vertical farming, ‘with vegetables grown in temperature, moisture and nutrition-controlled environments’, can ‘guarantee improvements in yield’ and reduce the risk posed to crop production by freak weather incidents.

‘Vertical farms not only minimise land use,’ Michael told the Oxford Farming Conference in 2019, ‘but can, of course, be located close to the urban population centres they serve.’ Home Harvest, then, stands at the frontier of what the minister teased as the fourth agricultural revolution. Founded in 2021, the company is on the verge of stateside expansion. ‘We launch in America this month,’ Andrew beams.

The US market, roughly five times the size of the UK’s and facing similar issues, could be poised for British invasion. There are, however, important differences to account for. Britain is far more reliant on agricultural imports for fresh fruit and vegetables, taking in about 65% of the latter and 83% of the former. The US, by contrast, is more independent: 59% of its fruit and only 35% of its vegetables hail from international markets.

It would be a great English success story if Home Harvest were to take off across the pond. The more immediate question, however, is whether the British smallholder could suffer from such innovation. If, indeed, the consumer becomes his or her own grower, does this render the work of our own farmers obsolete? Moreover, if this becomes society’s chief way of feeding itself, is it utopian to assume that an endless supply of professional-grade seed mats would become available? The market is likely to do as it always does: split into categories that distinguish between higher-quality, more expensive items and lower-quality, more accessible products.

The root of Home Harvest’s success so far — with £1.2 million secured in pre-seed funding — is the quality seed mats sold with the subscriptions, which are sourced from CN Seeds near Ely, Cambridgeshire. For those banking on this being the future of agriculture, exploring possibilities in the seed space could be a cunning move. The three-tier box costs £399, then £15 per month for seed mats; the one-tier box is £300 and £10 a month.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The one where you can smell the burning rubber — Silverstone, from £850,000

For diehard F1 fans, it doesn’t get much better than this: a property literally trackside at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix. Picture it: from the comfort of your home, you can watch (as well as hear, feel, and even smell) the action unfold on Maggotts and Becketts — among the most famous corners in motorsport.

The Escapade Silverstone development comprises 60 sleek properties and a clubhouse with top-notch facilities, including a ‘driver-focused gym’. There’s a myriad of other perks for homeowners too,, making the starting prices of around £850,000 easier to bear.

Think free access to major race events at Silverstone, with discounts available for friends and family. This is sure to appeal to anyone who takes their racing seriously (and more importantly, has the budget to match).

You may need to get used to sharing your trophy asset, though. According to By Design, which is marketing this four-bedroom house, Silverstone will rent out your home when you’re not there ‘to ensure each owner is making an income from their empty property’.

For sale via agents including Savills and United Kingdom Sotheby's International Realty.

The one with an underground 'Batcave' garage — Derbyshire, £6,000,000

Set on the edge of the Peak District National Park, this striking contemporary home comes with a twist: an incredible 4,000 sq ft underground haven that will have car collectors drooling.

On the lower ground floor, there’s a six-car garage with three — yes, three — automated roller doors, electric charging points and storage. And in the basement, there’s a separate garage space with enough room for a car collection, alongside a fully-equipped workshop and a maintenance lift. There is even a car wash and valeting bay to ensure cars leave looking track-ready.

And how do you reach this underground gem? Via a concealed hydraulic car lift from the driveway, of course.

The living space at this sprawling five-bedroom house is no less impressive, featuring everything from an eight-seat cinema to an altitude training room. You see, this really is an all-singing, all-dancing affair.

For sale via Fisher German — see more details and pictures.

The one with an underground garage in the middle of London — Hampstead, £16,950,000

It is not every day that you come across a London home with a private underground garage large enough for six cars. But then again, there is very little about this property that could be described as ‘ordinary’.

For starters, this glitzy penthouse is located on The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, dubbed ‘Billionaires’ Row’. It also happens to have been rented by Ariana Grande while she was filming Wicked.

The enormous garage is only part of the appeal. The five-bedroom apartment — part of the swish Buxmead development — is packed with A-list-style amenities, including a cinema and games room, gym, and two kitchens.

If you are in the market for this type of home, privacy and security are likely to be top-of-mind. Fortunately, this home delivers on both fronts. The garage is accessed via a lift, while a uniformed — naturally — security team watches over the development. This is the sort of setup that will allow you to sleep soundly, no matter what's parked downstairs.

For sale via United Kingdom Sotheby’s International Realty and Alexander Main.

The countryside home with space to work on your Lamborghini — West Sussex, £1,800,000

At first glance, Duncans Granary looks every inch the idyllic countryside retreat. But hidden inside one of the outbuildings is a space that is likely to set car enthusiasts’ pulses racing: an ‘extensive man cave garaging and workshop’, according to selling agent Strutt & Parker.

Totalling almost 2,500 sq ft, it comprises two garage areas, a workshop and even a bar. In other words, it is a place designed as much for admiring cars as working on them. And judging by the photos, the current owners have set the bar high, housing what appear to be some pretty special engines.

The four-bedroom house and outbuildings sit within 3.2 acres of grounds, including a pond with a bridge and a decked seating area.

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

The one with its own rally stage to race on — Ceredigion, £3,500,000

Most farms come with barns. This one also comes with its own two-mile tarmac track that features loops and split roads.

Known as the Bont Dolebolion Rally Stage, the track winds through the rolling Welsh countryside. What is more, it offers the potential to generate income: a variety of motorsport events, including rally testing days, take place here. Yes, it's a rally stage rather than an F1 circuit — but it's surely the sort of thing petrolheads dream of.

Away from the motorsports action, the 395-acre beef and sheep farm includes a traditional four-bedroom farmhouse and numerous outbuildings. Some are in better condition than others...

This is a little more rough and ready than a track-side home at Escapade Silverstone — but therein lies its charm. Just try not to confuse the livestock count with your split times.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

The one that caters to every kind of horsepower — Berkshire, £2,950,000

With extensive garaging that’s in very good nick, this property has ‘car collector’ written all over it.

The stables at Willow Farm have been converted into an enormous garage and showroom, complete with an office, meeting room, kitchen, gardener’s room and games room. A separate garage and a car port sit just behind it. All-in-all, ample space for everything from cherished classics to the latest supercars.

The block is currently used as a smart showroom, but it given that it's entirely secure and has capacity for up to 20 cars, you could probably use it as a motoring museum.

And while it's one for serious car collectors, this is still a beautiful family home that's ideal for those who prefer a different kind of horsepower: the house is set in 12 acres, has a paddock, direct access to the bridleway, and the grounds are so flat, and in such good shape, that it's apparently ideal for creating a polo field.

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

The one where you can live in the home of a legend — Kensington, £2,625,000 

What this charming mews house in south west London lacks in high octane motorsports facilities, it more than makes up for in history.

This was once the home of James Hunt, the charismatic 1976 F1 world champion, who was loved by a generation of fans first as a driver, and then as the most hilariously honest commentator in motorsport. Younger readers will more likely remember him from the film, Rush — one of the best motorsport films ever made.

Unlike many F1 stars who quit racing and go to live in country homes, Hunt loved his famous playboy lifestyle in London, and moved to this home in 1980 after swapping his steering wheel for a BBC microphone — a decision he made, as he admitted, ‘for reasons of self-preservation’.

Originally two separate houses, the property has been transformed into a light and airy four-bedroom home. Unusually, all the living space is arranged on the first floor, where an open-plan kitchen, dining and reception room opens out onto a terrace.

The property comes with two private parking spaces — a feature that, according to current owner Dave Allan, drew Hunt to the house in the first place.

‘It’s been lovely owning a piece of history and hearing all the stories relating to the house,’ says Allan. ‘Apparently, during James Hunt’s time there, it was well known for hosting some rather lively parties.’

For sale via Hamptons — see more details and pictures.

If the Unloved Birds’ Club has an apex predator in its midst, then it is surely this giant of a beast. The white-tailed eagle is our largest raptor and among the biggest of all British birds. Everything about it is impressive: the huge talons, the deep hook-tipped beak, the loud, almost goose-like hacking call, but, above all, the square-ended 8ft wingspan.

Equally noteworthy in a separate sphere is its glorious flexibility as a predator. It will catch and devour animals ranging in size from lemmings or small chicks to large wildfowl. It will rob other raptors of their kills. It will — we should note — tackle the seven biggest species on the unloved bird-list, including herring and great black-backed gull, cormorant and greylag goose. For this predation alone we should perhaps learn to love it.

Yet, white-tailed eagles are not too regal to enjoy carrion, from whales and reindeer to strandline fish. Ironically, it is those clean-up operations of dead animals that have caused the species more trouble than any other part of its lifestyle. The birds were once found from the English South Coast to the outer Scottish isles, but were driven inexorably to the margins of Britain by an unofficial coalition of shepherds, landowners and keepers. The issue propelling that long history of persecution was an old charge against the eagle as a killer of livestock.

By 1918, the last ever individual was eliminated and eagles were absent as breeding birds until a reintroduction campaign was initiated on the inner Hebridean island of Rum in 1975. The organisers could never perhaps have imagined how successful their eagle project would become. Today, the breeding total is put at about 150 pairs, most of them concentrated in the Western Isles, with strongholds on Lewis, Skye and Mull, but a new initiative launched on the Isle of Wight in 2019 has restored the species to the South Coast.

These patient works may have brought back a magnificent eagle, but they have also resurrected the accusations against them as killers of sheep. Several members of Parliament have called for an eagle cull. A bird released on the Isle of Wight was poisoned by rodenticides at a Dorset site in 2019 and last summer saw a highly publicised charge by a Hebridean farmer that eagles may have taken five foals from his herd of Shetland ponies.

Few would deny that a predator so flexible in matters of diet will readily take a free meal. It is when its status as a consumer of dead animals crosses a line to make it a killer of live, healthy stock that the problems arise. However, let’s first consider the case of the mysteriously disappearing Shetland foals.

Environmentalists argued that it is nigh-on impossible for an eagle to perform such a feat: the ponies weigh two to five times as much as the bird. No matter how broad those barn-door wings, an eagle could never fly off with prey weighing up to 37lb.

Searches around nests of the nearest breeding eagles corroborated this first-principle physics: no pony remains were ever found. Yet the story garnered widespread media coverage founded purely on supposition. Like almost all of the Unloved Birds’ Club controversies, it is not a bird problem: it is a human problem. Entrenched positions on both sides make it so difficult to achieve any kind of compromise.

Let’s try a little thought experiment. A solution could be found if eagles were allowed to reach their full carrying capacity in the British Isles. Then, if a ‘rogue’ bird were proven to take livestock (such as lambs and piglets), we could act, if necessary, even eliminating that individual. The eagle population would be secure and the farmer could sleep at night.

Environmentalists would probably be horrified by such proposals, but no more than their opponents by a vision of eagle numbers climbing to their full breeding extent in Britain. At present, we should note that our 150 pairs represent only a fraction more than 1% of the European total. Thus both parties continue arguing, entrenched and siloed, with no agreement in sight. Given the slow, steady rise in eagle numbers in Britain, the disagreements over them will continue. Perhaps all we can say is, watch this space.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Do you have a huge pile of unread books next to your bed? You almost certainly do, because as a visitor to the Country Life website, you're fairly likely to love reading. And everyone — everyone — who loves reading also loves acquiring new books to read at slightly faster rate than they finish the ones they already have.

As a kid, this means a book or two hanging around. As an adult, your backlog will reach double figures, then multliple dozens, and — if left unchecked — can head into the hundreds, and beyond. At one point the pile of books on my bedside table grew so tall that it began to lean towards the sun, like a particularly large skyscraper. When it became an undeniable health hazard, some went to the charity shop (heartbreaking), some went into the back of a wardrobe (almost as bad). Not the bookshelves, of course, because they were already full-to-bursting.

The only real answer, I used to think, would be a stint in a high-security prison where there was no work, no recreation, nothing at all to do except to read. Six months would probably do the trick, but probably best to pencil in a year, and I reckon I could get through the lot before starting a new life unencumbered by everything I hadn't yet got round to.

Now, though, I've changed my mind. I don't need a stint in prison; all I need is £3 million to buy Thorne Island, in the waters off the beautiful Pembrokeshire coast.

Thorne Island isn't a prison, and never has been, even though it looks like the British equivalent to Alcatraz — but the reason they look so similar is that both were military forts built in the 1850s.

It was only in 1933 that Alcatraz was bought by the United States Department of Justice for use as a Federal penitentiary. A year earlier, in 1932, Thorne Island had been bought at auction for just £90, as reported by Country Life, by Miss A.W.M. Pearson, who turned it into a hotel.

The Thorne Island Hotel was successful enough to keep it running for half a century, but the Pearsons sold it in 1989 and things started to go wrong. By 2000 it had began to fall into disrepair.

The place changed hands once or twice before eventually being bought by IT entrepreneur Mike Conners in 2017. Conners has ploughed a huge amount of time and money into the place: £2 million, according to the agents Fine & Country, to make it a place where you can truly get away from it all.

This 2½-acre private haven has five sea moorings, a jetty and a helipad — the latter coming in useful during the refurbishment work, with some 350 back-and-forth trips apparently needed to bring in the new materials and fittings for the island.

While the island isn't far off the mainland, it's far enough off to be entirely off the grid — but Conners and his son Ben have made the place completely self-sufficient for power and water with a series of renewable-energy facilities that make it feel very 21st century.

There are solar panels, air source heat pumps, sewage treatment facility, a rainwater collection with a 250,000-litre capacity (that's probably about three day's worth in south Wales) and a reverse-osmosis system to ensure a supply of clean, drinkable water.

The accommodation within this Grade II*-listed coastal fort includes a modern, open-plan kitchen/family area, dining room and sitting room, five bedrooms and five bathrooms.

The sleeping areas can be reconfigured, according to the agents, to make this 8,000sq ft house able to cater for 20 overnight guests.

Traditional exposed red brickwork gives the rooms a warm, characterful feel.

There's also a rooftop bar area, with a games room — and a space that was once the fort’s lookout on the western edge of the island has been turned into an office. There's even a garden of sorts, with the outdoor courtyard laid to lawn.

All that remains is to decide what to use the place for. A boutique hotel? The ultimate Air BNB? A miniature prison? Or just a picture-perfect spot where you can finally catch up on all that reading...

Thorne Island is for sale through Strutt & Parker — see more details.

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

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The War of Independence that unfolded between 1775 and 1783 may have been American, but it rippled across the Atlantic Ocean onto European shores. With France weighing in on the side of the nascent US — and seizing the opportunity to try and reconquer territories that it had previously lost to Britain in India — a few naval battles took place off the Brittany coast.

In April 1782, in particular, two Royal Navy ships engaged with French vessels off Ushant, a French island at the mouth of the Channel, and HMS Foudroyant, under the command of captain John Jervis, captured the 74-gun Pégase. Shortly afterwards, the victorious British man o’ war escorted her prize into Portsmouth harbour, where hundreds of people awaited their arrival.

Among the crowd was probably Dominic Serres, one of the greatest marine painters of the late 18th century, whose son Dominique Michael served aboard Foudroyant. The artist captured the scene in a painting somewhat reminiscent of Canaletto’s style.

Foudroyant, herself originally a French ship, sails ahead in all her glory, Pégase jury-rigged behind her — beaten, the flag flying under the Royal Navy jack at the stem as white as her winged figurehead — against the backdrop of Portsmouth harbour seen from Gosport.

Serres made not one, but two versions of the painting. The first is at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Jervis, who was made a Knight of Bath for the victory and would later become 1st Earl of St Vincent after defeating a Spanish fleet off the cape of the same name in 1797, probably commissioned from the painter a larger version. This was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1793, but later passed down the generations and forgotten by the public.

‘It never left the family until last year and, in fact, had been hidden in a loft,’ says art dealer James Mitchell. It re-emerged in April 2025, when it was sold at Bonhams, and, now restored, is on offer with John Mitchell Fine Paintings.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

We have been mired in the building of a glasshouse from gymnasium windows and a random door, thinking it would be cheaper than a greenhouse. True, but for a while we referred to it as ‘the Shell garage’, owing to its resemblance to a petrol station thrown up in the 1930s when motoring was a thrill. Now, it’s the Café de Pellée, a winter palace for our pelargoniums.

We hope conditions are right for the clientele — a white ceiling with roof lights and vents, glazed on three sides, because pelargoniums, as does anything under glass, need copious ventilation. If you start to find whitefly, open windows and doors and spread the pots out or get them outside. Space and shade are paramount. Ed Boers and Laura Whiley, the new proprietors of Fibrex Nurseries in Worcestershire, advocate 40% shade as optimum: this is surprising, but perhaps not when you think of them in the back porch or a Chinese takeaway. Although they seem to thrive on nonchalance, pelargoniums must be kept frost free, and dry in winter. Mr B sometimes simply de-pots and throws them in a heap under the bench until spring.

Yet come spring, pelargoniums are conversely responsive to restless grooming: manicuring of spent flowers and leaves. Luckily, keeping them kempt is both meditative and aromatherapeutic. Mr B loves to tend to the needs of a Jilly Cooper-esque cultivar such as P. ‘Clorinda’, louche and puce, yet abhors my grandmother’s zonal pelargoniums, calling them the ‘Clarice Cliff’ of the greenhouse.

My grandmother’s geraniums were guardsman-scarlet and had leaves that smelled of hot Draylon. They were planted out each summer in a military row, but were, correctly speaking, pelargoniums. Cranesbills and stork’s bills; that is the old confusion.

The geranium or cranesbill is a low northern, hardy, herbaceous perennial: the ubiquitous G. ‘Rozanne’. The pelargonium is different, being tender, generally from South Africa and known as stork’s bills owing to the fruit’s resemblance to a bird’s beak, which is part of their charm. Pelargonium species come, like liquorice, in all sorts, including zonal, ivy and, best of all, scented-leaved species and varieties.

Not being a botanist, the definition of ‘species’ has long perplexed me, but, put simply, species are the original wild forms and generally more robust, particularly when indigenous. Cultivars have been selected (and often transported across oceans) by generations of humanity, and hybrids are the result of both naturally occurring and deliberate crossbreeding.

Pelargoniums are not indigenous, but they offer extended flowering and scent from their numerous cultivars. Yet species pelargoniums are where it all began, combining subtle beauty with leaves and sometimes flowers that smell of the veldt. ‘Bonjour!’ to Pelargonium triste, the first species to reach Europe from the Cape; part of the plant library of John Tradescant by 1632.

The specific epithet derived from the Latin for sad or gloomy. It is pale, shy, scented, dormant in summer, but, on February evenings, Pelargonium triste unfolds five petals of tallow dashed with darkest plum; uncooked spiced pastries in look and smell. These damson splashes are more intense on her near cousin P. lobatum, whose evening perfume is sherbet fountains. P. lobatum’s offspring (after a coupling with P. fulgidum, which has lipstick scarlet flowers) is P. ‘Ardens’, my favourite winter flower fairy. She wears a Fortuny hat of velutinous madder smudged darkest crimson, but she has no scent.

All the above are tuberous — known colloquially as ‘gouty’ — pelargoniums, on account of their swollen basal nodes, and are difficult to propagate. This makes them all the more desirable. The garden designer Helen Dillon suggests cutting up the tuber with a bit of stem and burying the whole thing completely in light compost, praying for a plant in three months: ‘At no stage disturb the pots to see what’s happening.’

However, regular pelargoniums strike from the smallest cutting, providing presents for friends. You might like to give them P. sidoides, whose beaky purple flowers emerge from grey cashmere stems, felty, but sticky with a gum that smells sour from April until December.

They all deplore the stagnant and the damp, but P. sidoides likes Martini-dry conditions. P. odoratissimum, on the other hand, a prostrate shrublet whose candied apple scent emanates from small white flowers, revels in shaded places in the Cape woodland.

My great love of the moment — but this will change — likes just such an umbrageous corner. P. tomentosum, meaning downy, not tormented, has mossy peppermint-coloured and peppermint-scented leaves, as soft as mouse fur; tactile heaven for small children and obsessive adults. These species are worth all the attention they seek.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In Dorset, the pristine, 127-acre Ashmore Manor estate at Ashmore, 6½ miles south-east of Shaftesbury, revels in a panoramic vista over its own land and the surrounding Cranborne Chase National Landscape. Now, following a meticulous refurbishment and renovation programme, the estate is for sale through James Toogood of Savills country department at a guide price of £12 million.

Situated at 700ft above sea level, Ashmore is the county’s highest village, and it's as ancient a place as you'll find. Forget mentions in the Domesday Book, or Roman remains: Ashmore is one of a tiny number of villages in England that's been continuously inhabited since Celtic times.

The focal point of the estate, which was bought by the current owners in 2008, is imposing Ashmore Manor, the core of which was designed by London architect William Curtis Green.

It has been altered and extended by Dorset-based Adrian Morris Architecture, with the addition of a new farmhouse, new farm buildings and a link to an existing oak-frame annexe next to the indoor pool.

The main house provides 16,673sq ft of elegant accommodation on three floors, including an entrance hall, five reception rooms, a snug, kitchen/breakfast room, six bedrooms and four bathrooms.

The gardens have been thoughtfully designed and lovingly nurtured, each distinct area carefully positioned to capture the best of the surrounding landscape.

The estate land is farmed, but not intensively, but carefully planted to enhance the bio-diversity of both flora and fauna. This is a superb house in a setting that is simply magical, with lakes, meadows, woodland, walled gardens, a bluebell wood and more. No wonder it has the agent waxing lyrical: Savills describe it as 'one of the finest manor houses to come to the market in recent years.'

The Ashmore Estate is for sale through Savills at £12 million — see more details.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States on July 4 (see below), it has to be said that the country’s ‘special relationship’ with Britain is arguably not what it was. Aggressive pronouncements on social media and potentially wounding trade tariffs by the 45th and 47th President, not to mention rising oil prices and the war with Iran, have strained friendship.

This is a pity. The USA — ‘land of the free’ — has long been a byword for aspirational, joyous adventures in big cars in big spaces, rock music, the rollicking Wild West films that inspired childhood games and, as Britain emerged from the privations of war, the glamour of the Kennedys and Hollywood.

We have enjoyed and benefited from American culture, from the 16th-century idea of eating turkey for Christmas — surely better than peacocks? — to the stylish cut of Levi jeans and we finally grasp the obsession with ice and air-conditioning. We have revered Marilyn Monroe as the ultimate symbol of glamour and mysterious tragedy and Snoopy as the wisest, cutest cartoon beagle.

There is the wit of Dorothy Parker and Mark Twain, the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and the novels of Harper Lee, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Melville, whose 175-year-old Moby-Dick entered Cockney rhyming slang — plus their successors on the book charts Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett and the Booker-winning George Saunders.

That’s before we mention the uplifting music of Gershwin and Bernstein, Cash and Chuck Berry, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the velvet tones of Elvis Presley. America has given us the monumental flower paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the contrasting art of Warhol and Singer Sargent, the defiant courage of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, played by handsome actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the polo logo of Ralph Lauren, chocolate-chip cookies, pecan pie, cowboy boots, Tom Collins cocktails, the bucking-bronco party challenge and line dancing.

We have embraced the tasteful influence of imported figures such as Nancy Lancaster and Jennie Churchill; we still turn to the wisdom of environmentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Rachel Carson; we’re relying on the intelligent commentary at Wimbledon of Billie Jean King and John McEnroe on the BBC; and we still re-create the cool New England aesthetic of Shaker-style kitchens and the wholesome preppy look taken up by Boden and Seasalt.

Above all, perhaps, America has given us that optimistic holiday feeling — think Grease and Summer Lovin’, Carousel and June is bustin’ out all over. Therefore, on this auspicious anniversary, let us give thanks for an open-hearted culture that will endure long after the politics have faded.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I live under a number of illusions, but I’ve never thought I’d make a great watchmaker. For starters, my hands are enormous (not a humblebrag, but I can see why some might think otherwise), and I have no patience for minutiae. Honestly, all those tiny components. So fiddly. I have great admiration for watchmakers, but by the end of week one I’d be flush with rage. Or bored.

This is why I almost always resist invitations to have a go at watchmaking. But then when Richard Benc, the elven founder of British watch brand Studio Underd0g, messaged me to say he was opening a new facility just outside London with a space set aside for punters to have a go at watch assembly, and would I like to give it a try, I said yes. Why? Partly home soil, but mostly because Richard is British watchmaking’s Willy Wonka. He even looks a bit like Gene Wilder.

Benc — rhymes with sense — founded his brand during lockdown and has made a name for it with Instagram-friendly watch drops, few more fêted than those with watermelon or pizza-themed dials. It seems to have gone well. In not much more than five years, Richard has sold more than 30,000 watches. He now drives a Porsche.

For his next trick, he’s taken a ‘seven-figure’ plunge and opened up a facility where he can build watches, doubling down on the ‘Assembled in Great Britain’ tag he adds to his watch dials. It’s in Maidenhead and called the The Dogh0use, a name stencilled on the glass over the plum-coloured front door in the gently ironic sans serif typeface Richard uses to express the brand’s kooky spirit (some of his campaign artwork is very Wes Anderson). He reckons he can assemble between 1,200 and 1,500 watches a month here, an uptick of around 25% on last year.

And it’s to The Dogh0use I’ve been invited. Richard’s team have just finished phase one of the fit-out, and the smell of fresh paint lingers. Catherine Godon of the London-based Letter Studio interiors has taken the Wonka-Anderson brief to heart, creating a speakeasy of sorts where customer presentations will take place. The rich plum tree paint shade continues, and there are wicker John Cullen accent lights on the walls and a deep-pile pink and burnt orange Nordic Knot rug on the floor. The centrepiece is a rather charming bespoke two-seater crush velvet armchair that transforms into an upscale platform for a game of Connect4, played using tokens fashioned from Studio Underd0g watch dials. Despite the autumnal tones, the space is warm and welcoming.

Along the corridor, our little group of four is shown into a small workshop where we’ll assemble the 01Series Guava, a limited-edition 39.5mm version of Studio Underd0g’s signature chronograph with a pink and lime green dial that will only be available at The Dogh0use. It costs £575, but for the more dexterous with an extra £125 to spend, you can go behind the curtain and build it yourself.

Now, someone good at watch assembly will assemble 20 pieces in a day, roughly one every 25 minutes. But Richard’s head of assembly training, former Rolex employee Joshua Sable, has set aside four hours for our quartet to do just one.

At the bench — as watchmaker’s desks are called — we’re presented with a tray of components and lots of Lilliputian tools. Some are obviously screwdrivers or tweezers; others look completely alien. The mechanical movement that will sit at the heart of the watch arrives from China in one piece, and so thank goodness, we won’t be playing with tiny wheels, pinions and hairsprings. The job in hand is to attach the movement to the dial, add the five hands and the crown and its winding stem, and then case it up.

It sounds simple enough. But it’s not. The screw heads are tiny and only visible through a loupe. Some of the hands are barely thicker than an ant’s leg, and slotting them on top of an even smaller pivot is immensely difficult. More than once, my hay-baler hands gripped the tweezers too hard and sent a screw or a hand flying I don’t know where: they’re so small that once they’re gone, there’s no finding them. It’s embarrassing, but also somehow quite funny. Joshua was clearly expecting the maladroitness of his charges, and has pots of spare components ready to gloss over our mistakes.

Four hours later, though, an enormous feeling of satisfaction. In front of me is a working mechanical wristwatch. Even that skinny chronograph central seconds hand is beautifully aligned with the zero marker. A labour of love, that one. Joshua seems pleased. He tests it for accuracy and water-resistance, and signs it off. I made a watch. With these hands. Sort of. Just don’t ask me to do it again.

To book an appointment or an assembly experience at The Dogh0use, visit the Studio's website.

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Loch Fyne is Scotland’s longest sea loch, reaching 40 miles inland from the Sound of Bute. Kabn, a pair of private, off-grid cabins, is close to its head. From Glasgow, it only takes an hour to reach them, driving along Loch Lomond and down a bumpy track that cuts through the Ardkinglas Estate.

Our cabin — sleek and black, all charred timber topped with solar panels, and floor-to-ceiling windows — stands sentry between a woodland stream and the shoreline. Inside, there’s a cloud-like bed, a hot rain shower, a well-equipped kitchen (with 15 herbs and spices) and a wood-burning stove. Everything is considered and sustainably sourced, including the recycled plastic duvet.

For now, though, our focus is on the outside: swimming in the icy water; barbecuing on the Big Green Egg; sitting by the fire pit; watching the light on the loch. We’re absorbed by the flicker of flames, thinking about everything and nothing. And then a seal pops its whiskery head out of the water and looks at us, and we could hardly be happier.

Cabins are having a moment. Not all of them are strictly off-grid (meaning that they function independently of public utility networks), however, they are often remote enough to feel like it. The majority featured below are only connected to the mains for water.

Of the luxury 'glamping' accommodation represented by Canopy & Stars, cabins account for 352 of 855 places and 50% of bookings. They mostly appeal to urban couples, aged 25-44, according to the specialist, especially 25-34 year olds who live in London, Manchester and Bristol and want to mark a special occasion. Solo travellers also like them. ‘They’re one of the fastest growing parts of our collection,’ agrees Sarah de Vere-Drummond of Kip Hideaways, ‘especially those that have something special, like an outdoor bath, or a wild swimming spot or re-wilding landscape on their doorstep.’

The rising popularity of cabins reflects a wider shift in hospitality, say the founders of Koto, who make place-specific cabins for private homes and, increasingly, members’ clubs, luxury wellness and international hotel groups. ‘Guests are moving away from traditional hotel formats towards something more personal and immersive, closer to a private retreat than a standard room.’ Architects Holiday are more direct: ‘We offer an alternative hotel solution for a new world demanding change, with health, wellbeing and environmentalism at the forefront.’

This need for change is often informed by disillusionment or burnout — including among the cabin owners themselves. Kabn founders Amber and Charlie Teale both had ‘risk-averse corporate careers’ before they realised their passions lay elsewhere. Jimmy Roupell ran a toy company (it went down a storm on Dragon’s Den), but dreamt up Rest + Wild because the ‘pace felt unsustainable and the purpose no longer felt right’. Hector Hughes worked for a tech startup, ‘flying around the world, spending all day on my phone’ and launched Unplugged following a 10-day stint in a Buddhist temple on top of a mountain. He wants to plug a gap in the market between high-end and spiritual retreats. ‘The big reflection for me is that we have ended up, for better or worse, with an environment, lifestyle and society that’s unsuited to how we’re biologically designed,’ he says.

Unplugged suggests that you lock away your phone, but even if you cannot quite do it, a cabin is a great way to disconnect, says cabin-goer and Country Life’s Digital Commissioning Editor, James Fisher. ‘It’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but the real break these days is from your emails. When you go to a cabin where you’re left alone and you open the curtains in the morning and the whole natural world is revealed to you, your brain switches off in a way it doesn’t necessarily when you’re staying in the nicest suite at Claridge’s. It’s a different kind of luxury that only the natural world and a true sense of escape can provide.’

When nature is at the heart of something, design that prioritises low-impact construction, locally-sourced materials and energy-efficient operation is part and parcel. Japanese and Scandi influences run rife; clever storage is key. They rarely feel too pared back though, because cabin owners are experts at ‘finessing the wild luxury experience,’ according to Sarah. At the time of writing, 155 of Canopy & Stars’ cabins come with hot tubs, while 58 have a sauna. However, cabin goers do not expect, or even want, too much luxury, and to be waited on hand and foot. ‘It’s that feeling of being fully independent and away from it all,’ says James. ‘I think we are starting to realise, especially with the advent of AI, that we’re slowly losing the ability to even think for ourselves, and that is really what we need a holiday from — that sense of being swaddled.’

For some guests, taking time out has proved a profound experience, even a life-changing one. ‘People write letters to us saying, “This has helped our marriage”, “This has helped us have a baby”, “This has helped me grieve”,’ says Jimmy of Rest + Wild. The visitor’s book at Kabn is further proof. The comments — ‘We watched the weather change, spotted otters and spent time reading and sketching; I leave feeling restored and hopeful.’ — are heartfelt, ecstatic even, waxing lyrical about the scenery and the wildlife.

During our two-day stay, my twin sister and I spend a lot of time tracing the water’s edge, watching the oyster catchers and the seals, reuniting a tiny lamb that found itself on the wrong side of a fence with its mother and enjoying the sense of joy that comes with being a part of something bigger.

Cabins make it easier for city dwellers to dip their toes into the ‘simple life’ — with minimal fuss and footprint. We get to stay on farms and the grounds of stately homes; in return, landowners get to better balance their books. They reinforce the beauty and value of nature and the need to protect it. Sometimes, they even encourage us to make changes to our lives. And they offer the same restorative effects as a good spa break in a shorter space of time and at a lower cost. They really are a win-win.

Kabn, Loch Fyne, Scotland

Amber and Charlie Teale were inspired to set up Kabn following holidays in Africa and Japan. They loved ‘staying in a really lovely property in the middle of nowhere,’ and the ‘feeling that the minimalist aesthetic of Japan creates.’

Food is a priority. Guests can eat or buy fresh seafood from the brilliant Loch Fyne Restaurant & Oyster Bar and Inveraray Seafood Shack.

Cabins in the Cairngorms and Sutherland are on the horizon (in September 2026 and 2027 respectively).

Two nights in a Kabn cabin start from £510.

Elsa, Unplugged, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall

The focus at Unplugged is on digital detoxing, with guests invited to lock away their phones for three nights. An instant camera is provided for photographs, and a Nokia for emergencies.

The startup now has more than 50 cabins spread across the UK and Spain; Elsa is one of 10 with a hot tub and sits in a dark-sky preserve on farmland grazed by wild ponies and Highland cows. There are more Unplugged cabins to come, says co-founder Hector Hughes. ‘We want to get as many people as possible doing this. The challenge for us is, can we make it socially acceptable and cool and aspirational to spend three days offline in a cabin?’

Three nights in Elsa start from £575.

The Red Cabin, Oare, Kent

The Red Cabin was always going to be in good hands with Tally Rix, who used to edit Architect’s Journal Specification and still publishes Open Air Business Magazine (a trade publication for diversifying landowners) alongside husband Steve.

There are now five locally-hosted Red Cabins in Kent, Norfolk, the Somerset Levels and the Cotswolds — the latter on the regenerative farm of Andy Cato (of Groove Armada and Wildfarmed fame). All sleep up to three or four, and have integrated wood-fired saunas, hot tubs or plunge pools and Passivhaus insulation; at Red Cabin Oare, outside Faversham, guests can swim or paddle board on twin lakes and walk through the Oare Marshes bird reserve to the Three Mariners pub. A firm favourite.

Two nights in a Red Cabin for four people start from £450.

Architects Holiday, Great Park Farm, near Battle, East Sussex

This growing cluster of cabins is a passion project of Built Works’ architects Will Gowland and Harry Kay — and sits on Will’s family farm outside Battle. Rituals are the big thing here: new Yogis Cabin comes with a yoga studio, spring-fed natural swimming pool, engawa wraparound deck and woodland views. There is also Bather’s Cabin, Cabin X and Hill Cabin, plus a farm shop and a wood-fired sauna that guests can book for private three-hour sessions.

Yogis Cabin starts from £320 a night; sauna sessions from £45.

Rest + Wild, Shropshire

Rest + Wild is all about taking time out, sinking into an outdoor copper bath and immersing yourself in ‘pockets of the country where you don’t hear anything but birdsong.’ Jimmy and wife Sarah now have four collections of three cabins in Exmoor, Yorkshire and Shropshire. The latter are buried in 5,000 acres of ancient woodland and rolling hills on the Downton Hall Estate, outside Ludlow, and are being refreshed for the summer holidays.

Two nights in a Rest + Wild cabin start from £400.

Denton Reserve, near Ilkley, North Yorkshire

Denton Reserve turned to Koto when it came to installing cabins on their 2,500-acre estate, plumping for their Haku off-grid suites on wheels model, which can be moved to make the most of viewing points and wildlife.

The three cabins join a Grade I-listed Georgian hall, The Penny Bun gastropub, wild swimming site and walled kitchen garden. You’ll fall asleep to the soundtrack of hooting tawny, little and barn owns.

Denton Reserve’s cabins start from £220 a night.

Before he drafted the plans for Charleston, South Carolina, the philosopher John Locke was already thinking about religious tolerance. In his Two Tracts on Government, written from 1660 to 1662 but not published until long after his death, Locke was actually pretty down on the very freedom of conscience he would become canonical for championing. ‘In every commonwealth there must be supreme power,’ he writes in these earlier, rarely discussed works. This reticence to express the values he became famous for is often put down to Locke cutting his cloth to suit the absolutist Stuart kings; his liberal turn came after their fall goes the story. Yet this change also came after he planned a new town in the American colonies.

Locke had joined the staff of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a medical capacity, but once his political skills were noted, he was promoted to private secretary. At the time Shaftesbury was not only Chancellor of the Exchequer, but one of The Lords Proprietors of Carolina; a coterie of colonising landowners with legal privileges emanating from ownership of these apparently virgin lands. Shaftesbury and Locke together drafted a document that offered English settlers inducements consisting of land, religious toleration and limited political representation. (Limits that would prove to be highly problematic towards the end of the 18th century). The plan offered Locke a chance to rationalise society to its purest balance; accepting order and risk to achieve freedom and thereby taking a good bet on some prosperity.

Locke's role as the city planner was not simply legal, but spatial and included the creation of a regional plan across the whole of the Carolinas. Charles Town, as it was called, was allocated 12,000 acres, with a further 12,000-acre area for settlers and the colony’s nobility. Counties and towns would be the administrative units. Locke drew up plans to ensure that riverfront plots were narrow but deep, to ensure that the number of properties were high and access to the water was for the many and not the few. Informal settlements were prohibited. Street grids would exist for even the smallest settlement. Each planned town, from Charles Town down, was ‘to be laid out into large, straight and regular streets, and sufficient room left for a wharf if it be upon a navigable river’.

The settlement became Charleston when the focus of the colony moved slightly down the coast. Its relationship to England is far closer than is generally given credit and not because it was designed by one of the nation’s key philosophers when he was still in a secretarial position. The intent was to prevent overdevelopment that would impede access and prevent overcrowding. The plan for Charleston was written following the Great Fire of 1666, after which a City of London edict established a buffer along much of the Thames in which construction was prohibited. The raised promenade at the tip of the Charleston peninsula is a vestige of it; a corner of the USA that is forever Putney.

It doesn’t take long to wander through Charleston’s old town (or ‘south of Broad’ as it is known) to realise that Charleston for a Brit is legible as an utopian outgrowth of London; much as Welwyn Garden City was 250 years later. After the Great Fire, Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for a more rationalised capital were ignored; and the opportunity to rethink the city was gone, as the government dodged making compulsory land acquisitions and the existing landownership patterns were held over. Charleston was a chance to fulfil this desire for a new intellectual class to create a city from scratch. Although the plan standardised spatially the class system of early colonialism, it was itself based on rationalist principles and writing them down arguably made them easier to attack.

The impact of the London blaze can be sensed in many of the instructions in Locke’s letter, completed in May 1671. Streets should be ‘large, convenient and regular’. The specifications are unsurprisingly hierarchical given that Locke worked for a Lord. Principal streets were to be 80-feet wide, alleys from them 40-feet. Secondary streets were 60 feet, with back streets 30 feet. The street grid would form squares of 600 feet on each side. Lots associated with principal streets were standardized at 75 feet by 280 feet, while those for secondary streets were 60 feet by 285 feet. This mediation in scales is what makes the town so beautiful. Impressive frontages give way to intimate gardens down side streets.

Edinburgh’s New Town is an impressively rigorous piece of Georgian planning. It is however an austere experience living and working in it. The rigidity of the façades, the regularity of the scale: that is until one gets to its edges at Dean Village, the Water of Leith or Carlton Hill and the rhythm relents to meet the topography and the urban grain undulates. This subtlety of texture is built into Charleston, which being away from the centre of political power and filled with entrepreneurial new frontier types who brooked at rule making, was built out in many different ways — albeit according to the plan’s limits. Arrivals from the Caribbean, for example, built houses perpendicular to the street, so cooling breezes could run east to west along exposed verandahs, or piazzas as they are bizarrely called in these parts.

Charleston is a masterpiece of urban give and take. Locke never visited and never embraced his role as planner, so it is impossible to say whether it had any influence on his ideas about tolerance and freedom. Walking through the astonishing variety of Georgian architecture, wedded to the grid, it is very tempting to think that the way in which he reconciled ideas about individual liberty to public order through the ideas of privacy and public space, emerged from how an ideal new town might operate.

North Oxford in the early 1980s, sometime around noon. It’s a typically dreary Lenten day and, as dozens of ravenous prep-school boys clatter into the dining hall, battered aluminium trays are unceremoniously dumped upon scruffily scuffed tables. One glance at their contents and the happy hubbub suddenly ceases. Salad.

Oh, God, please not the salad. For this is no crisp, refreshing bite, well dressed as a Jermyn Street dandy, nor happy hors d’oeuvre, designed to pique the palate for the pleasures to come. Hell no. It’s an insidious study in sorrow, a masterpiece of barely edible melancholia, a poisonous paean to the limp and unlovely.

There’s the mass of flaccid lettuce, still soaked from its desultory wash, harbouring the occasional invertebrate beastie; a half-hearted grating of carrot, alongside a chunk of something that might officially be known as a tomato. Rock hard, this sorry fruit has all the flavour of distilled water. A few slices of cucumber, gently rotting, add their primal slime, alongside hard-boiled eggs that seem to have been on the simmer since Cain killed Abel.

Worst of all — more deranged than the shiny flaps of processed ham, with a mean splodge of salad cream so acidic it strips the enamel from your teeth — is the beetroot, deep purple and sinister, which stains the whole sorry melange with barely contained contempt. Our hearts sink. Our spirits droop. Welcome, dear reader, to the Great British salad.

Back then, it was the same in cafés and institutions across the land, the Winter of Discontent in vegetal form, a hangover from rationing, 30 years on, something to endure, rather than to enjoy. This joyless medley was made all the more awful in comparison to the simple green salads of home. Butter lettuce, freshly dug from the garden, cleaned, dried in a plastic spinner, then tossed in a mustard-heavy vinaigrette.

For us, salad was a delight rather than dirge, no mere side dish, rather a star in its own right — but it is a dish that defies easy definition. From the blessed simplicity of tomatoes, sun warmed and fresh from the vine, eaten with a pinch of salt, to the modern Instagram excesses of the Baroquely bonkers, salad has something for everyone.

What unites them all, I suppose, is not so much the ingredients (although vegetables, pulses and herbs will generally play a role), rather some form of dressing involving oil and vinegar, which takes a bunch of disparate elements and gathers them into one harmonious whole. Had I the space, and you the patience, I could fill tomes on the subject.

Caesar salad, born in Tijuana and splendidly punchy; the abundant generosity of the Cobb (see recipe) and the robustly American, blue-cheese-drenched charms of an iceberg wedge. Panzanella, all sweetly sharp, juice-soaked bread; the lactic cool of a proper Greek salad and the eternal allure of caprese. There’s that salad in Brideshead Revisited, of ‘watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives’, and the niçoise, of course, seasoned with sun. There’s even salad as ritual and remembrance, maror, the bitter herbs eaten at Passover Seder to symbolise the bitterness of slavery.

Move east, to tabbouleh, that Middle Eastern masterpiece, and Thai som tum, as fiery as it is bracing, eaten on the streets of Bangkok; Laotian larb mixes finely chopped meat with a tangle of herbs and warm chilli burr. Smashed cucumber from China’s Sichuan province combines the numbing (ma) with the spicy (la), whereas Indonesian gaddo-gaddo and karedok provide a riot of tastes and textures, as do Malaysian kerabu timun and Mexican ensalada de nopalitos.

Every culture has its own take, each individual their own taste. As to its construction? It takes four people, according to the old Roman saying, to create the perfect salad — a miser to put in the vinegar, a spendthrift to add the oil, a wise man to season and a mad man to toss it all together. At their most basic, Roman salads, known as ‘salata’ or ‘salted things’, were little more than raw vegetables or herbs, sprinkled with a little salt, vinegar and oil.

Recipes from the likes of Columella and Apicius were altogether more complex affairs, featuring everything from almonds and fresh cheese to figs, octopus, olives, dates and bread. Dressings often used garum (Roman fish sauce) with liberal aplomb. These salads were as much medicinal as gastronomic, gentle digestive aids to prepare the stomach for the oncoming onslaught.

Greek physician Galen not only believed that raw vegetables were essential in balancing the four Humours (blood, phlegm and biles black and yellow), but managed to cure his insomnia, too. The Romans may have introduced the concept to our shores, but it was here, from medieval times, where the dish flourished. The Forme of Cury, a 14th-century proto-cookbook, defined ‘salat’ as a variety of herbs, flowers, chives, green garlic and onion, wearing a dressing made from oil, vinegar and salt. A few years later, slices of orange and lemon were added for decoration.

Then came Robert May, in 1660, with The Accomplisht Cook. In it, 14 recipes for the ‘grand sallet’, which were, like salmagundis a century or so later, epic feasts for eyes as well as belly. Cold capons, salt beef, pickled oysters, potatoes, olives and samphire were all thrown in with reckless abandon. These were the stars of the Golden Age, upwardly mobile salads, food as a show of one’s wealth.

It was with the publication of John Evelyn’s 1699 classic, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, that the art of the salad reached its peak. For here was an entire book dedicated to the subject. ‘We are by sallet to understand,’ wrote the great herbalist, ‘a particular Composition of certain Crude and fresh Herbs, such as usually are, or may be safely eaten with some Acetous juice, Oyl, Salt, &c. to give them a grateful Gust and Vehicle.’

He lists 82 different vegetables and herbs, together with notes on their growing seasons and a nine-step guide to their dressing. Another salad obsessive was the French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas. ‘There is almost always some on hand, and it generally tastes good,’ says the sage of the salad bowl, before going into intricate detail as to exactly when to eat what.

Chicory in autumn, seasoned with nothing more than a stale crust of bread rubbed with garlic and placed in the bottom of the bowl. At Easter, lettuce dressed with herbs, marinated oysters, shrimp, turtle’s eggs, Indian pickles and Chinese soya sauce. Salad, for Dumas, was no mere whimsy, rather a concoction worthy of serious study. However, the less said about Russian salad, a modern mountebank, the better.

I once had a deconstructed version in a grand Milanese place where the pea-studded mess (which resembles cat sick) was topped with a dome of spun sugar. It still haunts me to this day. Waldorf salad holds little appeal, a turgid mess of grape and apple — I share Basil Fawlty’s pain. As for those American ‘Jello’ aberrations… get thee away, Satan.

But enough of the base and deranged. Great salad is not only about balance, of taste and texture, oil and acidity, but about feeding a very personal yen. ‘There are few dishes which are used so widely in all classes of society as this one,’ says Dumas — nor any quite as universally adored. Salads were once in a sorrowful state in Britain, but they can be a thrilling riot of tastes and textures.

Cobb salad

The Cobb is an American classic, created in 1936 at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood, California, either by, or in honour of, owner Robert Cobb. This should be big and unashamedly bounteous, with gently poached chicken, and a dressing that is sharp and coats every part. If you’re not a fan of blue cheese, replace with a similar amount of Comté, cut into smallish cubes. The greens are traditionally mixed, then the rest of the ingredients laid out in colourful lines or blocks on top.

Ingredients

Serves 6

2 skinless chicken breasts

6 black peppercorns

1 bay leaf

1 celery stalk, split

½ onion

6 strips of smoked streaky bacon

Bunch of watercress, thick stems removed

1 head of chicory, separated

1 large head of Romaine lettuce, separated

4 hard-boiled eggs, finely chopped

1 avocado, chopped into small cubes

4 tomatoes, finely chopped

100g/3½oz Roquefort or other well-behaved blue cheese, diced or crumbled

For the dressing

3 tbspn white-wine vinegar

Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Big pinch of mustard powder

½ tsp caster sugar

Jig of Worcestershire sauce

150ml/5fl oz extra virgin olive oil

Method

• Put the chicken breasts in a pan with the peppercorns, bay leaf, celery stalks and onion and add water to cover. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a mere ‘blip, blip’, cover and poach for 15 minutes, until the chicken is piping hot and cooked through, with no sign of pink in the juices when the thickest part is pierced with a skewer. Transfer the chicken to a plate and leave to cool

• Fry the bacon until crisp, then roughly chop and set aside.

• Cut the chicken meat into 2½cm/1in cubes and put in a large bowl. Add the bacon, watercress, chicory, romaine lettuce, eggs, avocado, tomatoes and cheese, and toss

• Make the dressing by whisking together the vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard powder, sugar and Worcestershire sauce. When combined, whisk in the oil. Taste for seasoning, then dribble over the salad so every leaf is gleaming with it, but not drenched

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There’s a tendency to think of great artists being inspired by the muse, sitting down at a desk with reams of blank paper before them, then pouring out pure originality from their imaginations.

In reality it doesn’t often work like that. Not for the greats, at any rate: Shakespeare never came up with a story in his life (even The Tempest is derived from other sources), Herman Melville based Moby Dick on a real-life albino whale, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy was Tolkien’s mash-up of Anglo-Saxon sagas, his research into linguistics, and the trenches of the First World War.

As for JM Barrie’s Peter Pan? That was inspired by his neighbour’s children, his dog, and the spectacularly unspoilt landscape of the Surrey Hills. And the house where Peter Pan, Wendy and the Lost Boys came together in his head is now for sale: Barrie House, a part of Lobswood Manor — formerly known as Black Lake Cottage — is on the market with Savills at £1.25 million.

Barrie had been born in Scotland, but by 1900 was a successful playwright living in Kensington with his wife, next door to the Llewelyn-Davies family and their three children, George, Jack and Peter.

That year, Barrie's wife, the actress Mary Ansell, decided to lease a summer retreat called Black Lake Cottage, on the outskirts of the village of Tilford, close to Farnham. The Barries would have the place for eight years, and the Llewelyn-Davieses were invited to come regularly — an offer which they happily took up.

The three boys threw themselves in to this bucolic spot which, then as now, is a vast landscape of hills, woodland, lakes and rivers. Their roaming and games inspired Barrie, who created a photo book called The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, featuring the three boys and Barrie’s dog, a placid and endlessly-patient St Bernard (sound familiar?). He also began to spin tales of how the youngest brother, Peter, somehow knew how to fly, and Peter Pan was born.

Barrie didn’t publish the photo book (a copy does still survive, and can be seen at JM Barrie website), but it wasn’t long before Peter Pan was shared with the world — initially in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird, and then two years later with the stage play Peter Pan, which was an instant and enormous success. A plaque adorns the front of the house, commemorating its pivotal role in one of the most enduring literary creations of the 20th century.

Black Lake Cottage came to be renamed as Lobswood Manor, and was split into three separate homes back in the 1970s, but the wing that is now for sale, Barrie House, forms the front portion of the building, and is full of charming, original features that Barrie would surely recognise were he to walk in today.

Take the fireplace in the sitting room, for example: its huge inglenook fireplace is framed by a carved timber which is believed to have been sourced from a 16th century shipwreck.

The ground floor has the aforementioned sitting room, a dining room and a huge kitchen-diner, with french doors opening onto the magical gardens — gardens which Mary Ansell herself created, and wrote a book about (copies of The Happy Garden remain prized today) while her husband stayed indoors working on his writing. (If that makes their life sound idyllic, it shouldn't: the couple divorced after Mary had an affair, while the Llewelyn-Davies boys would be orphaned in 1910, when their mother Sylvia died of cancer.)

One of the four bedrooms, with its own bathroom, is on the ground floor, with the others all on the first floor, and all en-suite.

There's also a cellar and a garage, and a separate one-bedroom annexe bringing the space here to well over 3,000sq ft in total. The annexe, separated from the main house by a stud wall, could easily be reincorporated to the main house; it could make an ideal part of a multi-generational living set-up; or you could just use it as a writer's retreat from which to create your own enduring story.

Barrie House, within Lobswood Manor, is for sale via Savills — see more details.

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

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

If you loved this quiz and want more, click here to read James's Fisher's festival feature: What's the difference between Glastonbury and Wilderness? Apart from a posh loo, not much at all

There's growing nuance to the burgeoning focus on longevity in interior design. Of course, it’s good, vital even, that furniture doesn’t end up in landfill and a visit to a historic house reveals that well-made furniture should never do so.

Yet the appeal is about more than merely avoiding obsolescence; old furniture improves with time and use, gaining character as it passes from one generation to the next, and, when it needs fixing or refreshing, it’s easily done.

Natural materials, such as wood and stone, age beautifully, improving rather than degrading. Many metals do, too, except for iron, which tends to rust and lose strength. In contrast, copper, brass and bronze develop a deep-blue patina over time, ranging in colour from turquoise to green, a process that can evolve over the course of centuries.

Their surfaces oxidise, most memorably on statues and monuments, such as the magnificent dome of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, echoing its Triumphal Quadriga, four copper horses that were taken during the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and which date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC.

In painting, verdigris pigments became highly prized in the Renaissance; artists valued them for their depth and gem-like glow, as demonstrated so beautifully in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, where the colour demonstrates its supernatural capacity to add both depth and a three-dimensional quality to a one-dimensional representation.

Leonardo da Vinci found it challenging to work with: ‘It loses its beauty like smoke if it is not quickly varnished. It not only goes up in smoke, but if it is washed with a sponge... the verdigris will disappear.’

Because it is the result of an evolutionary process that enhances, protects and improves with age, verdigris has become emblematic of the benefits of timelessness. At this year’s WOW!house (which runs until July 2), it played a key role in the Hector Finch Garden Folly, the façade of which was designed by Adam Architecture’s Darren Price and which featured its sponsor’s new verdigris Zeus lantern.

Given that this highly atmospheric structure came to life in a matter of days, the pervasive sense of permanence is a testament to the combination of classically inspired simplicity and the magical character of this revered finish.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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

A place to touch the earth

Michael Hall visits the rural Dorset hideaway Lawrence of Arabia created to escape from his worldwide fame

The end of an age

Almost 20,000 men died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme 110 years ago. Allan Mallinson relives events through the eyes of those who were there

Winging it

Mark Cocker profiles Britain’s exotic ring-necked parakeet, now the most northerly breeding ‘wild’ parrot on the planet

Having a ball off court

Will Hosie goes behind the scenes at SW19 to meet the people serving up a successful Wimbledon Championships

Sir Michael Moritz’s favourite painting

The patron of the Arts chooses a work awash with grand ambition

Country-house treasure

John Goodall eyes a plasterwork rendering of the Aesop fable of the fox and crow that adorns Kenmore House in Virginia,

The legacy

Octavia Pollock salutes John Judkyn, the designer behind the American Museum in Bath

Interiors

Arabella Youens admires a British Museum-inspired hotel bedroom and Amelia Thorpe unearths accessories that cut the mustard

London Life

Will Hosie talks to Andy Cato about reconnecting Londoners with their food and scours the capital for seven of the best homes on the market before overcoming his distaste for breakfast with a week of early-morning meals over meetings, plus our writers have all you need to know this month

Dare to be square

Matthew Dennison pieces together the story of mosaics left as a legacy of Roman rule in Britain

Luxury

There’s bags of summer fashion fun for Amie Elizabeth White, who also dares to branch out with tree-inspired accessories

To the lighthouse

Kathryn Bradley-Hole finds that harmony abounds as the garden of Underhill House settles into the South Downs in East Sussex

Arts & antiques

Ceramics are a source of joy for fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who tells Carla Passino of her enduring passion for pots

Home from home

The American Revolutionary War ended British rule in the US, but an architectural influence lived on, as Patrick Monahan reveals

Travel

Pamela Goodman is intrigued by a slow-burning literary-art library in the Norwegian capital

Retro and French — that seems to be the flavour of the month, or year, when it comes to new electric cars. The success of the Renault 4 and 5, and the much heralded announcement of the new 2CV from Citroen, shows that there is a desire and demand for new things that are based on old things. Make em small, make em cheap and make em stylish. It is une formule gagnante, as the French might say.

With that in mind, we considered what else we might like to see return to the roads over the coming years. Will MG provide another small, sporty roadster for us? Is Rover still a thing? Will the 504 light up our driveways once more? All important questions. Not questions we have the answers to, of course, but questions we would like to consider.

Below is a small selection of cheap, affordable(ish) and iconic motors from history that we think are long overdue a return, ideally in a similar style to what made them so great in the first place.

Mark Hedges, Editor — MGB GT

The MGB first rolled out of the factory doors of the British Motor Corporation in 1962, a sports car so iconic that many still terrorise the sunny B-roads of the British countryside, before inevitably breaking down in a cloud of smoke.

In 1965 came the MGB GT, a 2+2 coupé part designed by Pininfarina and one of the first ever ‘hatchbacks’. Mark Hedges’s father was a fighter pilot, but unlike Tom Cruise in Top Gun, he swapped the motorbike for an MG. ‘When I was born my father had, very impractically, an MG, a labrador, and me,’ he says. That said, it had space enough for him, his parents, and said labrador to make a journey from Cornwall to Yorkshire when required to visit the in-laws.

MG did launch a sports car back in 2023, known as the Cyberster. While it is quite handsome, it lacks the clean lines of the MGB, and it also costs north of £50,000. Not quite there.

Kate Green, Deputy Editor — Small SUVs please

In the wilds of the West Country, the small SUV is king (or queen). The potholes and fields make four-wheel drive essential, while narrow roads make size a significant issue. It’s all fun and games in the Bentley Bentayga until a tractor is coming the other way down 'take-a-deep-breath' lane.

Our correspondent tells me that on their side of the A36, the general lament is that all the cars they like have got too big. The Skoda Yeti, the Toyota RAV4 and the Suzukis Jimny and Ignis were all perfect for life out West, but the new versions of all these cars have all added on a few pounds and inches in places they shouldn’t, ruining their appeal. Bring back small, they say.

Rosie Paterson, Digital Content Director — MG Midget

Back to our friends at MG, the Midget was revealed in 1961 as a lightweight sports car that brought driving to the masses. Executed in that timeless MG style, the car was a tremendous run around, and one that is still very much desirable to this day, as Rosie Paterson explains.

‘I've always wanted one, and an electric version would be rather lovely for quietly cruising around in at the weekend’. Well said Rosie, well said.

James Fisher, Digital Commissioning Editor & Motoring — Saab 9-3

To be bewitched by a Saab is a privilege, and many were disappointed to hear of the Swedish manufacturer’s demise in 2016 (but perhaps none more so than me). It’s hard to put a specific finger on what exactly it was about a Saab that made them so cool and interesting, but like an ouroboros, that sense of mystique only added to the cool and interesting. They just looked right.

The 9-3 was always my favourite. Sportier and more raked than the 9-5, the 9-3 looked fast, but not too fast, and was always a little left-field when compared to more traditional European counterparts. That iconic Saab underbite has aged even better as modern cars become ever more smooth and aerodynamic. Also, Saab’s other business was making jet fighters, which needs no explanation.

I realise that not only am I asking for a new car, but also the revival of an entire brand. But this is a hypothetical world we are currently living in, so I am allowed to take big swings.

Toby Keel, Digital Director — Rover SD1

In 1977, Rover's engineers were charged with making a new executive car — and they went a bit wild. They lifted the design of the Ferrari Daytona, took a 3.5-litre V8 engine, and crafted a four-door grand tourer that was a sensation: the Rover SD1 was a generational leap compared to the other British Leyland designs of the 1960s and 1970s. And while most GTs were two-door coupés in disguise (think Alfetta GTV, Jaguar XJS), this was a proper five-seater — just what the well-heeled family man needs on the driveway. It was named European Car of the Year, and orders came flooding in — not least from most police forces across Britain.

The problem? A wildly thirsty engine and appalling build quality — both things that against the backdrop of the oil crisis and the workforce strikes of the 1970s, hit the car’s success hard. Both of these problems are solved by electric powertrains and modern auto construction skills, so it’s surely time for the SD1 to be reborn.

Agnes Stamp, Assistant Features Editor — Peugeot 504

Considering the rocky relationship between France and the continent of Africa, it is perhaps surprising that ‘Africa’s workhorse’ should be a car made by Peugeot. But that is precisely what the 504 was and, in many cases, still is.

It is likely that over the course of its production lifespan, which officially ran from 1970 until 1983 (with knock-down versions still produced until 2006), more than four million 504s were produced during the 20th century. That a car that looks as good as the 504 and runs as reliably as the 504 was so well produced is a testament to the car’s enduring status as a classic.

But most importantly, the 504 had a face. Cars used to have expressions, and the 504, with its slightly frowny face, was one of the more expressive autos out there. Absolutely ripe for a comeback, if you ask me.

Tim Bentinck has been the voice of David Archer in 'The Archers' on BBC Radio 4 since 1982. He has made dozens more appearances on stage and screen, is a prolific voiceover artist, and is also both the 12th Earl of Portland and the 11th Count Bentinck.

Where was it?

Potten End, Hertfordshire

A quick description.

A 1930s detached house with half an acre of land — bucolic bliss. I climbed trees, built treehouses and had a sand pit. When a rich relation came to stay (whereas we were impoverished aristocracy, our relations lived in vast castles in Holland), her comment on seeing the bathroom was: ‘Do you all change in zis tiny room?’

When did you live there?

Between the ages of 18 months and 21, after my parents returned from Tasmania, and before I headed to the University of East Anglia and then Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

How did it come about?

After the war, my father, Count Henry Bentinck, thought there would be nuclear war and he worked out that the last place on earth to have fallout would be Tasmania, hence he moved the entire family (I would be born there), the furniture and the paintings and worked as a jackeroo. His dream of buying a farm was thwarted, hence we all returned to the UK and ended up in Potten End. If not for that, I would have been a real farmer rather than a pretend one on the radio.

Best memory of living there?

Being outside, cycling to school, working on the local farm and shooting things with father’s shotgun. There were sad memories, too, as my mother died there when I was 14.

Biggest indulgence?

I went on holiday to Italy with mum once and on our return father had redecorated my bedroom and built a bookshelf. They did nothing other than redecorate, but after it was sold, the new owners transformed it.

What happened to it?

Father sold Potten End and, with my stepmother, lived off the land on a 10-acre Devon small-holding. After meeting Judy, who would become my wife, we bought a house in Bristol that we renovated, sold and, with the proceeds, bought a house in London, where we still live today.

Timothy Bentinck will appear at selected performances of ‘The Archers: Live at 75’, a national tour celebrating 75 years of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Archers’, until November 26. See more details here.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sir Anish Kapoor must be the most beloved artist among London children. His ArcelorMittal Orbit, soaring 375ft above Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Park, is not only the UK’s tallest public sculpture, but doubles up as a thrilling tunnel slide.

Not quite as high, but still monumental are many of the installations on show at a newly opened exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (until October 18) which features new and previously shown pieces, including these:

Descent into limbo (1992–2016)

Tsunami (2018)

Non-Object Black (2018–2021)

Mount Moriah at the gate of the ghetto (2022)

Blinded by eyes, butchered by birth (2024)

For more information on how to visit the exhibition see here

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe