The house martins, flying high in the sky, have formed a huge flock of hundreds of individuals; the nights, lit by a vast moon, ring out to the incessant calls of tawny owls; and even after a cool summer, there is a perceptible nip in the air. The fields throng with newly released pheasants.
Autumn is upon us. After one of the finest years for gardens-the cold winter followed by a warm spring and damp summer we may now be in for one of the most spectacular shows of autumn colours in living memory. Already, the hawthorn bushes are bejewelled with ruby fruits beside the purple sloes of the blackthorn.
We've been busy making apple tarts, jellies and chutneys, but have hardly made a mark on the huge crop still on the trees. The blackbirds feast on the windfalls. When I was a teenager, we would take our apples to a local man who made cider on an ancient press. That process once rather haunted me when I picked up the juice in my father's Volvo, I went round a corner too fast and 20 gallons tipped over the back seat. But now that the trauma has faded with time, we're going to borrow a press this weekend.
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17 outstanding homes for sale across Britain, from under £250k to £6.5 million, as seen in Country LifeSomething for every budget in this week's round up of homes across the country that have come to market via Country Life.
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'We started thinking: if we were going to design a bike for Aston Martin, what would it look like? And then we simply couldn’t stop': Aston's new bike has everything you could ever dream of — except a price tagThe new Aston Martin .1R bicycle, a collaboration with manufacturer J.Laverack, leaves Paul Henderson stirred rather than shaken.
