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Are you brave enough to take on Cornwall's 40-foot answer to Hawaii's big waves?Cribbar attracts some of the best surfers in the UK. Ahead of the big wave season, Andy Martin went to meet them. Photographs by Adrian Bagley.
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Going against the grain: Meet the British bakeries championing ancient and heritage cropsLargely beholden since the 1960s to industrially produced wheat, many British bakeries are now seeing a chance. Tom Howells meets a series of pioneering growers and makers.
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The 'hounds of heaven' are in the skies above, and it's one of Nature's greatest sightsOur Country Mouse columnist Mark Hedges on the joys of watching the V-formations of wild geese that dot the skies above us at this time of year.
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Meet Gerald of Wales, the medieval Bill Bryson who was Britain's first great travel writerPlagues of toads, bands of robbers and ‘remarkable’ eagles were no match for Gerald, discovers Nicholas Crane.
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If any animal could be considered an artist, it is surely the redstartThe redstart or ‘fireflirt’s’ painterly good looks aren’t the only attribute that bewitches Mark Cocker–its extraordinary talent for mimicry brings the whole world within reach
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Bog standard? We beg to differ. These fascinating wetlands have a fearsome historyJohn Lewis-Stempel digs in to the history of the bog.
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'The council thought it was a useless bit of scrubland and nobody would care, but we knew different': David vs Goliath in our green and pleasant landIf the Government and developers had their way, vast swathes of the countryside would be covered in new homes. Charlotte Cooper finds out which rural communities are fighting back.
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In defence of sheepWhat have the ovines ever done for us? A fair bit, as it turns out.
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Don't bat away the fruit fly! This humble pest has six Nobel Prizes to its nameThey may be small insects with a taste for fermenting produce, but fruit flies are both a gift to scientific research and the first living creature in space, discovers Ian Morton.
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Why the treacherous lure of quivering quicksand haunts our nightmaresThe seaside sludge has captivated the minds of writers and film-makers for centuries. Harry Pearson gets to the bottom of why.
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We're heading for an autumn of unparalleled colour — but why?If the days stay warm and the nights are cold, Charles Quest-Ritson is optimistic.
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The ocean is dying. Titouan Bernicot is regrowing it, one coral at a timeThe world (and Rolex and Prada) are betting on a 20-something-year-old's coral gardens.
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What is everyone talking about this week: Is this to be the worst apple harvest in history?Record heat and next to no rainfall all summer means Britain's orchards are set to suffer devastating losses.
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The pretty and practical art form documenting Britain’s great estatesLandowners have long documented their demesnes in finely drawn estate maps.
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In classical times this bird was sacred to Aphrodite and for millennia served as an erotic symbolThe braying cacophony of a greylag goose flock in full chorus has made the breed unlikeable, despite their amorous connections, writes Mark Cocker.
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'A shared experience unlike any other in Britain since the Blitz': What have we learned since summer 1976?This week's leader asks what we've learnt since Britain's last major heatwave.
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Would you still charm me if I was a worm?Every summer, a quiet Cheshire village becomes the scene of one of the world’s most unusual sporting contests: the World Worm Charming Championships. Tom Howells reports.
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British wool is booming, but where are all the sheep?The wooly good news is that demand for British wool is rising sharply. The wooly bad news is that global sheep numbers are declining.
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If this drought has one upside, it's that it's revealed many of our landscape's long lost treasuresThis week's Athena notes that at Portchester Castle, and other sites, more history is on show than usual due to the heat and drought.
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The ultimate shapeshifters: There's more to clouds than meets the eyeConstable spent hours re-creating them on canvas and Shelley was so obsessed that he wrote a poem pretending to be one.
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Why centuries of superstitions cast this bird as a villain and an omen of ill fortuneThe swaggering corvid with the chain-smoker’s rasp carries around centuries’ worth of superstitions. Mark Cocker asks if the magpie’s reputation has been unfairly tarred.
