How many of us, on a warm autumn day, have shaken some seeds from the dry, ripe pod of a favourite garden plant or scooped out seeds from a much-loved tomato to sow the following season? In so doing, we become part of a continuum that began about 12,000 years ago, when our Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors gave up foraging for wild plants and settled to farm.

In collecting the seeds of wild plants that grew well for them to sow the following season, these accidental plant breeders kickstarted a journey that all the crops we grow and eat have taken — evolving from wild parent to cultivated offspring. This process of selection naturally focused on plants that flourished in the collector’s soil and climates, a system that continued unchanged until early in the 18th century, when a new generation of enthusiastic amateur breeders and entrepreneurial plantsmen and women started to take an interest.

Echoing our farmer forebears, their method for developing and improving flower, fruit and vegetable crops was through careful observation and the selection of perceived changes that were occurring naturally. The result was the development of a huge range of new varieties.

It wasn’t until 1837 that seeds were produced commercially, when Suttons Seeds and Carter’s Trusted Seeds started growing flowers and vegetables with the specific purpose of collecting their seeds, which were sold through catalogues published the same year. This marked the start, in this country, of commercial phenotype breeding; that is, the deliberate crossing of different varieties based on their morphology (observable characteristics) by the transfer of pollen from a male flower to a female, thus creating something entirely new.

Gardeners and estate owners could now buy packets of countless different varieties of favourite garden crops by mail order. Not surprisingly, breeding new cultivars became an obsession with the Victorians and seed producers sprang up across the country. Catalogues were often richly illustrated and their arrival through the letterbox was eagerly anticipated. Many home gardeners continued to save their seed and were instructed in doing so with ‘saving one’s own’ advice in gardening books.

Everything changed again with Gregor Mendel’s discovery of the laws of heredity towards the end of the 19th century. As a result, plant breeding became a science and, early in the 20th century, moved from the farm and garden into the laboratory. Genetics, a word invented by the biologist William Bateson in 1905 to describe the laws of inheritance has, since the Second World War, revolutionised our approach to plant breeding.

This often involves another traditional breeding technique known as mutagenesis — the forced mutation of a plant using chemicals and radiation to select for specific traits. This has enabled highly inbred types with the development of F1 hybrid cultivars. Most recent advances are in selective molecular plant breeding of genetically modified and engineered (GMO) crops, initially rice, wheat, maize and soya, with increasing numbers of fruits and vegetables being added to the list of GMOs every year.

Traditional open-pollinated varieties are very different from genetically narrow and homogenous modern hybrid cultivars. They are highly heterogenous with complex genomes and they are adaptive, meaning their traits can flex with changing biotic and abiotic stresses. Their seeds carry within their genomes the memories of their wild relatives: as growing conditions change, so underused genes ‘wake up’ and play their part in ensuring the survival of the whole organism.

Why did the tradition of home seed saving go out of fashion? It is thanks mostly to a misguided perception that home-saved seed is not as good and the belief that a greater choice, particularly of modern hybrid cultivars, promises greater yields and better disease resistance. However, with about 80% of all the seeds we buy now imported, mainly from the EU, but also from America, North Africa and the Far East, it is becoming ever more important to increase the amount of homegrown seed and so ensure we have the greatest diversity of well-adapted edible and ornamental plants in our gardens.

In the past 50 years, the vast majority of small, family-run businesses selling open-pollinated seed have either been bought out or gone bust, leaving only a handful of companies supplying most of the seed we buy mail order or from local garden centres. (Three of the biggest, Suttons, Dobies and Thompson & Morgan, are all owned by BVG Group, a multi-channel retailer.) There are still several independent seed companies with long and distinguished reputations; Kings Seeds, Marshalls, Mr Fothergill’s, Unwins and Chiltern Seeds to name but a few.

Most encouraging, however, is the emergence since the start of this century of a new generation of small-scale seed suppliers and breeders. Two of the oldest are Tamar Seeds in Cornwall and Real Seeds in Pembrokeshire. The smaller companies that champion cultivating open-pollinated varieties also provide guidance on how to save their seeds. Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library, which holds the national collection of more than 800 heritage and heirloom vegetables, actively encourages its members to save seeds of the varieties they share out every year. Not only does this make economic sense, but, by saving our own seeds, we become part of the solution to restoring genetic diversity, resilience and adaptability in our gardens. By selecting seeds, year after year, from the best flowers and crops we harvest, we are acting as evolutionary plant breeders, exactly like our Neolithic forebears.

Adam Alexander’s latest book ‘The Accidental Seed Heroes’ (Chelsea Green, £20) is out now. Look out for his seed-buying guide in a January issue of Country Life.

This article first appeared in the September 2, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

'It happened to be my daughter’s 17th birthday when I collected the first alpacas I rehomed,’ food writer and recipe creator Anna Stanford recalls. ‘She had friends over and it was hard to keep them calm (the friends, not the alpacas) when the four balls of fluff arrived.’ However, Stanford had underestimated how stubborn the new arrivals could be and they refused to get out of the horsebox. ‘We tried everything. Eventually, as I was straddling one, she suddenly took off with me on her back — my first rodeo experience!’

Traditionally kept as herd animals in South America and prized for their wool and hardiness, alpacas (Lama pacos) only came to the UK in any number about 30 years ago — perhaps with as much reluctance — but have grown in popularity to near 60,000. There are two types: huacaya and suri. The former is identifiable by its crimped, teddy-bear-like fleece and is more prevalent; the latter has long, silky dreadlocks. The blanket (the fibre that extends from the base of the neck to the tail and along the flanks) is highly prized for being soft, lightweight and warm; the finer and more consistent the fibre, the more valuable it is.

It transpired that the Stanfords were destined to find those particular alpacas. ‘They were introduced to us as Mia, Matty, Nora and Grunt. Mia is my daughter’s name, my nephew is called Matty and Nora was the name of my husband’s grandmother. I saw it as a sign,’ Stanford says. ‘Luckily, we don’t have a Grunt in the family, but that name suited him. He was such a character with big buck teeth and a fantastic quiff.’

For Olympian Dame Kelly Holmes, who acquired her six ‘boys’ when they were six months old — ‘I needed a field to be kept mowed and they are brilliant at that’ — she named them based on their fleece colour: Liquorice (black), Polo (white), Truffle (mid brown), Crème Caramel (two-tone brown and white), Toffee and Fudge (light brown).

Seventeen years later, and sadly without Fudge and Crème Caramel, it is evident how besotted Dame Kelly is with the animals, although the same can’t always be said for them: ‘Liquorice acts like Polo’s shadow and is very protective, so he tries to bite you or spit when you get close to Polo. He is a little sod! He still has all of his teeth, whereas the others have lost theirs, so he chases people and bites them, including the vets.’

Northamptonshire-dwelling Polly Westley wasn’t afforded the same opportunity when it came to naming. ‘I had originally planned to give our alpacas Spanish names as a nod to their Peruvian heritage, but when they arrived they already responded to the ones they had been given: Disco Inferno (thankfully shortened to Disco), Abbandando (after Genco Abbandando from The Godfather) and Liberace. Ironically, Abbandando is the gentlest, Liberace isn’t remotely flamboyant and Disco is a drama queen. He is the most handsome and he knows it — the moment he spots a camera, he turns and poses.’

Names were similarly established with Molly Raven’s current alpacas, as they were inherited from the Revd Richard Coles’s late husband, David, who lived within spitting distance in another nook of Northamptonshire. ‘David knocked on my door and asked if I knew where the alpaca lady lived (I had my three old ones at the time),’ remembers Raven. ‘He told me he had been given three, but that the church was selling the field next to their vicarage so asked if I could have them for a few weeks. He named them Anneka (after Anneka Rice), Belinda (a priest he knew) and Margo (I think after Margot Leadbetter). Sadly, David died months later, but he regularly came to see the alpacas and was great fun.’

Having previously owned sheep — ‘suicidal escape artists’ — Raven was drawn to alpacas after seeing them in Peru. ‘I found a lady who kept some and arranged to go when my husband was away. However, he got suspicious and asked to come, hoping to put a halt to more animals. Fortunately, he really liked them and so he bought me three for my birthday nine years ago.’ From having a herd of nine at its largest, she is back to three again. ‘We lost three old ones and sold three young as they were males and alpacas don’t really live in mixed herds, plus the unneutered males can be a bit feisty. Females also come into season when a male is present so it makes it hard work if they are being kept for fun.’

This isn’t the case for Tess Homewood and her husband, Mark, at Bonnington Farm in Kent, who have a serious venture going. After buying three alpacas in 2020, they now have 43. ‘We primarily breed huacaya, but also run British Alpaca Society-affiliated training courses, host farm experiences and take alpacas to weddings,’ Homewood reports. At her own wedding, ‘our cake featured a felted bride and groom created using fibre from our own alpacas and every table was named after one. With a loose theme of “creatives”, there are names such as Picasso, Björk, Marlon and Brontë among the herd’. Each cria (newborn) is given the same initial as its dam, making it easy to follow lines from one generation to the next.

‘Alpacas’ breeding behaviour is amusing,’ Homewood says. ‘When introduced to a male, a female leaves absolutely no doubt about whether she is receptive. If she isn’t, or is already pregnant, she will spit at him.’ Although tales of vets and neighbours being spat at suggest that this behaviour isn’t directed at male alpacas exclusively, the reputation for regular expectorating appears unwarranted.

A more noticeable indicator of their mood is their humming, as they use different tones to express everything from curiosity and contentment to uncertainty or irritation — and taking the time to observe and understand them is vital, as Dame Kelly discovered. ‘You don’t always know when they are ill, so it is important to observe changes in their character and demeanour,’ she advises. ‘I realised that Crème Caramel had an extremely bad neck and it was causing him to start choking on his food.’ Sadly, she had to have him put down, but her awareness of the issue reduced any suffering.

One thing alpacas certainly don’t seem to enjoy is a manicure. ‘For me, the most challenging part of the husbandry is toenail trimming,’ Westley admits. ‘They wriggle around and even sit on their feet to avoid it. They are strong animals, so it can be a bit of a task.’ Whether they are halter-trained or not doesn’t seem to make much difference. Whereas Dame Kelly holds her hands up — ‘You can tame them to a point that they can use a halter, but I never had time for that when I first got them’ — Raven washed hers of trying to make one alpaca biddable. ‘We attempted to take her to a pet service in the church we live next to,’ she recalls. ‘However, she didn’t want to leave the herd and was prancing everywhere, so we had to take her back. We took a stuffed turtle on a lead instead.’

The annual shearing is an equally challenging task, with the consensus suggesting it is not for the faint-hearted. ‘I will turn my hand to most things, but would not attempt to shear an alpaca,’ Stanford confesses. However, the results are worth it. ‘Their fleece is wonderful,’ Raven remarks. ‘I have about 20 bags of fleece in my loft waiting to be made into something lovely… perhaps next year.’

With such luxurious coverings, it is unsurprising that alpacas enjoy any opportunity to get wet. ‘The first summer we had Matty, I found her trying to get her entire body into her water bucket,’ Stanford remembers, ‘so I bought a padding pool, which they bathe in when it’s hot.’ Westley’s receive similar treatment: ‘We put the sprinkler out so they can cool off. Abbandando dances around it bucking in delight as the water splashes his legs and belly.’ Other bathroom habits are, fortunately, more controlled. ‘Alpacas may be elegant, but they produce an impressive amount of poo,’ Homewood laughs. ‘Thankfully, they are remarkably tidy and use communal poo piles, which makes the daily task considerably easier than it might otherwise be.’

‘If you are looking for a low-maintenance animal to enjoy then they are great, but they aren’t “no maintenance”,’ Westley concludes. ‘They require daily care, which is a commitment (although personally I enjoy the discipline of going out every morning and evening). If you are looking for a fun, affectionate pet, they also might not be the right choice, but if you want a peaceful animal to share your space with, they are perfect. I keep them for the sheer joy they bring. At dusk each evening they start “pronking” — a joyful, bouncing dance. It is such a treat to watch them frolic with obvious happiness.’

Homewood agrees: ‘They are inquisitive, gentle and endlessly entertaining, bringing a sense of peace wherever they are. Watching the herd together on a summer evening is one of life’s simplest pleasures.'

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

‘Our vines span 230 acres,’ beams Sarah Perrin, a tour and tasting guide at Rathfinny wine estate in East Sussex. It’s a grey autumn afternoon and a gusty sea wind hailing from the nearby Seven Sisters smacks us across the face. A hawk cries overhead. ‘The Romans always said the ideal spot for a vineyard was three miles from the sea,’ Perrin explains. ‘It diminishes the risk of frost, which can be fatal for vines not only in winter, but in spring.’ What about the hawk? ‘He scares away smaller birds,’ she laughs, ‘more cheaply and efficiently than would our plastic coverings.’ Inside a warehouse is a wine factory with towering basket presses in fashionable stainless steel.

As the wine harvest draws to a close, England’s vintners have cause to celebrate. ‘2026 has been a landmark vintage for Rathfinny,’ says the estate's co-founder, Mark Driver. ‘We’ve brought in top-quality fruit from across the estate that will be vinified and aged in our cellars, then sold in 2030/2031.’ The company is hoping to make roughly 30,000 cases of Sussex Sparkling this year, released through restaurants, hotels and independent merchants. ‘Our yields are up 30% from 2025 and akin to 2023,’ Driver explains: a year that produced what's known as a bumper crop.

He and his wife, also called Sarah, bought the farm where Rathfinny now sits in 2010 after both had made a fortune in the City. They converted the barns into accommodation and decided to become winemakers. A business such as theirs can take 15 years to become profitable — assuming there are no snags. Years like 2026 are few, far between and play an outsize role in ensuring that things break even.

Forty miles away at Nyetimber, the atmosphere is equally ebullient. ‘The year is tracking very closely to 2025,’ says Cherie Spriggs, the estate’s head winemaker (last year’s crop, though not as bountiful as 2023’s, was sweeter and of higher quality due to an exceptionally sunny summer). ‘We should produce about 1.5 million bottles this year,’ she continues, of which many will go to overseas markets such as China, Japan and Scandinavia. ‘It pairs well with the stalwarts of their cuisine,’ Cherie notes of these jurisdictions, ‘primarily fresh fish.’

Although Nyetimber does not yet allow purveyors to buy bottles en primeur, such an allocation could easily become more desirable for English wines in the future, Cherie warns. As vintners like herself celebrate outlier status in a landscape that has borne, overall, less than it usually would, this is a space well worth watching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We need to get rid of the sheep,’ says Derek Gow as he shepherds his flock into a truck, never to be heard of again. Thus goes our first encounter with the farmer and rewilding enthusiast in James Dawson’s documentary Derek vs Derek, which lands in cinemas on Friday.

The film pits the farmer against his neighbour, Derek Banbury, a follower of the old church who worships livestock and neatly trimmed hedges. Gow, for his part, prefers the chaos of the natural world — and sheep are the enemy. ‘They eat everything right down to the root,’ he says. Must they go so nature can flourish?

It is a fair question. Dawson’s film reveals that Gow’s rewilded land continues to flourish even in the summer. The neighbouring land does not. As the heatwave rages on, it turns arid and grey. Is it fair, however, to point the blame at sheep? Although their narrow mouths and split upper lips can certainly make meat of grasslands, the right rotational management can ensure, conversely, that wildflowers flourish. Like Banbury’s farm, it is a grey area.

So, too, is rewilding. Not all initiatives have led to bountiful growth; some, in fact, have been blamed for August’s wildfires due to increased fuel loads. Yet the sheep remains a scapegoat. Wool, too, is facing renewed scrutiny from activists, who crashed several shows at London Fashion Week brandishing placards attacking the sector. In our ecologically critical era, it beggars belief that anyone would chastise the cultivators of a natural material over those who produce synthetic fibres such as nylon and polyester. Yet here we are.

Elsewhere, some sense prevails. Connolly, a leather-goods brand in Mayfair, has doubled down on its support of local wool manufacturers via its Knitwise initiative launched in 2019 with The King’s Foundation. Makers have been commissioned to create knitted artworks for the 2026 collection, which will be launched on October 7 and is inspired by the rare breeds of Dumfries House in Ayrshire, where Shetland, Boreray and Castlemilk Moorit sheep roam the open pastures. Winemakers, polishing off this year’s harvest, have found in Babydoll Southdowns — a miniature English breed — and their French cousins, Ouessants, organic landscapers of the highest order; which, unable to reach the fruit of the vine, munch instead on the weeds that might corrode it.

Clearly, getting rid of sheep for nature’s sake is not so cut and dried.

Derek Vs Derek (Dartmouth Films) is out in cinemas now.

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

Maybe the old veteran shouldn’t have told the 11-year-old Tom Butler: ‘Oy! You shouldn’t be going out there!’ It only provoked him. It led him, ultimately, down the rocky path to the Cribbar.

When a wave the size of a dinosaur rears up out of the water and starts furiously charging towards you, most sensible people evacuate and head for higher ground. Then again, there are some — an elite few wave warriors — who can’t resist the opportunity to shove their heads into the jaws of the beast. Serious surfers like Butler, a Newquay native, wax down their boards and paddle out to meet the challenge. ‘If you’re born here and grow up here,’ he says, ‘the Cribbar is the big one.’

There is one thing that you might care to thank climate change for: the Cribbar is becoming a more frequent visitor to our shores. The ‘Cribbar’, from the Cornish ‘kribow’ meaning ‘reef’, is not so much a part of the landscape, more the occasional, colossal end product of a perfect storm of topography, far-off hurricanes and the jet stream. On calmer, settled days, with children playing on the beach, big waves can seem like a memory, a ghost, possibly a hoax. But then, in the right season, they come roaring back to life, regularly reincarnated. And now, with glaciers in retreat and temperatures rising, the big-wave season is getting longer and more spectacular than ever.

As someone whose biggest wave was, at most 10 feet (and a fair chunk of that surfed upside down), I can’t help but take my hat off to Tom Butler — and feel a degree of justified awe. When I started out, some time in the last millennium, the Cribbar was more myth than monster. The massive wave that breaks off Towan Head (beyond the Headland Hotel) on a submerged pinnacle of rock was once thought to be unsurfable: too huge, too wild, too out of control. According to legend, it was first tamed way back in the 1960s by a crew of migratory Australian lifeguards. But it wasn’t until the early noughties that it landed in the history books. The Cribbar is our Waimea Bay, the closest UK approximation to Hawaii’s classic big-wave arena. Admittedly, a lot colder and greyer with fewer palm trees, but comparable in scale and intensity: a solid 20-feet wave, on its day, with reportedly 30-40-feet faces. It is strictly for battle-hardened surfers used to putting themselves in the way of harm.

Butler is definitely that. He started surfing smaller waves around the age of three. He was tall for his age and as he got bigger, the waves did too. He became British surfing champion. Then, at the age of 16, the day came when he was finally ready to step up and take on the Cribbar. The paddle out on big days is from Little Fistral, hugging the headland that runs out to the Cribbar and using the rip next to the rocks to drag you out. Or if it’s too big for that, you go off the back of the old lifeboat slip behind the building in the car park.

It’s hard to line up the wave because the peak jumps around a lot. Then there is the classic conundrum of how to catch the wave and not get caught by it: too far out and you won’t have a shot; too close and you run the risk of a bunch of extremely heavy slabs of water landing right on your head, sweeping you onto the nearby rocks. But if grace descends and you are fortunate enough to find yourself in just the right position and you paddle like a maniac and leap to your feet and find yourself astride a huge spitting monster of spray and turbulence, riding on a dopamine high, then it feels as if you just won the lottery. Which is what keeps you coming back for more.

After overcoming the Cribbar (and finishing his GCSEs), Butler caught the attention of Quiksilver who became his sponsor and dispatched him on a mission, partly inspired by the film Endless Summer (1966), to Australia, Indonesia, and Hawaii. He went on to carve out a career as a professional big-wave rider. An adept of tow-in (in which you rely on a jetski to slingshot you onto the peak), he has taken on the most ginormous waves on the planet — freaks of nature such as Mullaghmore Head on the west coast of Ireland and Nazaré in Portugal, which has claims to attaining the magical, mysterious height of 100 feet.

But some years ago Butler turned down an invite to the Nazaré Challenge, ‘sick of the politics and the demand to monetise.’ He married, had a son called Ziggy, and now devotes much of his time to Coastal Crusaders, a community interest company which is enabling disabled people, young and old, to go to the beach and get in the water. ‘It gives the wheelchair world access to something extreme,’ he says. ‘Just not at the Cribbar.’

Now 37 and ‘cruising up to middle age’, Butler fondly recalls Cribbar swells of yesteryear. ‘Storm Hercules (2014), that was a big one. But the Covid year — 2020 — it was a spring tide: I’ve never surfed it as big as that.’ However, Butler is far from calling it a day. Big waves are a realm in which age and experience and wisdom count for as much as youthful ambition. ‘The worst thing,’ he says, ‘is to go out there all guns blazing. It’s a head game. I’m not reckless. But, still, you have to be willing to go for it. It’s not a sport where you can just dip your toe in.’

In his lifetime, Butler has seen the wave supercharged by climate change. It used to peter out in February: ‘This year we were still surfing it at 15 feet in April.’ He expects it to make a return appearance some time in September, whipped up by hurricanes in the Caribbean. Like dedicated birdwatchers, you have to be patient for a sighting. To be ready. Butler is lining up his big wave boards in preparation. ‘More people are going out there now,’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t encourage beginners.’ It’s more frequent, but it’s also more volatile. Having fallen in love with the Cribbar as a child, he describes his attraction to the wave as being like ‘a bad relationship: you commit so much, invest all this time — and then… it smacks you in the face.’

Up close a big wave can look like a mean, ugly, foam-maned leviathan that really wants to take you down with it: from the safety of the shore, it’s like seeing a precarious but majestic mountain, arching up to the sky only to collapse and die and pump out its life-force on the beach — and then be reborn.

Always head to an RNLI Lifeguarded Beach and stay between the black and white chequered flags. Never go out alone; always surf with a friend or let someone on shore know where you are and when you plan to return.

Ever since the covid-era sourdough boom, good bread has become hot property: according to a dataset from early 2025, there has been a year-on-year increase in sourdough sales of 56% and the UK saw a 237% rise in new bakeries opening between 2019 and 2022. A superlative loaf, however, depends on quality flour — and that requires great grains from which to mill it.

Unfortunately, over the past 70 years, Britain’s flour supply has become uniform and disconnected from the land on which it is grown. Many commodity flours are processed from monocultures developed around the 1960s Green Revolution, when industrial grain production took off with gusto. Although high yield, they tend to be uniformly short in stature and susceptible to climatic changes and diseases, requiring noxious chemicals to flourish. They’re also heavily processed, roller-milled into little more than starch — hence the pappy stodge that passes for much mainstream bread.

Now, a steady revolution has taken hold across Britain. A newer generation of artisans is bucking the system, looking back to our provenance-driven grain histories and embracing small-scale modern varieties in thrall to their forebears. There are a few different kinds. Ancient grains are erstwhile and hardy crops that have existed, unchanged, for sometimes thousands of years: think einkorn, emmer, spelt and khorasan.

Heritage grains, meanwhile, are historic British crops that were naturally cross-pollinated and re-sown over many years, eventually becoming genetically defined varieties, such as Red Lammas, April Bearded and Rouge d’Ecosse. Many were preserved for posterity in seed banks in the 20th century, later salvaged and regrown.

Both are usually tall (to outgrow weeds), resilient to bad weather, pests and diseases and grown without chemicals, often with biodiversity-boosting regenerative principles in mind, such as employing low-or no-tilling planting to preserve soil health and fungal networks or leaving borders around crop fields to encourage wildlife.

Population crops, meanwhile, are a sort of modern version of heritage crops, developed in the late 20th century by places such as Cambridgeshire’s Plant Breeding Institute and Suffolk’s Wakelyns, which aimed to record, preserve and promote our agricultural heritage through native crops and ecologically sympathetic farming. They have cross-bred myriad heritage varieties together to create evolving, diverse styles: Miller’s Choice, Oak Farm, Wakelyns YQ, Maris Wigeon and so on.

In addition to the nutritional and ecological benefits, these grains taste fantastic compared with their dowdy commercial cousins, especially when gently stoneground to retain their precious wholegrains — as these British bakers and millers are well aware.

Barony Mill, Birsay, Orkney

Windswept Orkney has many historic USPs — not least its ancient stone circles and burial chambers — and two more diminutive, but no less significant ones. Enter Barony Mill, the only place on the globe that grinds bere barley, a botanical cousin of wheat. Located on the western mainland, the mill dates back to 1873. It was going to seed (so to speak), but, in the 1990s, the local Birsay Heritage Trust set to its renovation, returning bere-milling to the cultural landscape.

Bere is a long-standing crop in this part of the world. ‘A close relation was found in one of the Neolithic digs,’ explains trust treasurer Tony Morley. It’s also a staple of the Orcadian diet: ‘Beremeal bannocks are something that everybody here knows.’

Bere is a hardy crop and grows quickly. ‘It’s called 90-day barley, because the period from sowing to harvest is three months, from May to August. You have to get it out as early as you can because the weather will take it — or the geese will.’

As well as fine- and medium-grain bere flour, Barony sells whole bere ‘berries’ and the three-storey stone mill operates exactly as it did in the 1800s, powered by the waters of Boardhouse Loch. ‘The water wheel drives everything from the millstones to the hoists, to the sieves to the fanners,’ Morley explains. ‘Even shovelling the grain off the kiln drying floor is done with water power.’ It’s a heritage exemplar for the ages.

Pinch, Kelsale, Suffolk

Just off the north Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, Pinch is the tiny fiefdom of Alice Norman, a Ballymaloe-trained chef long in thrall to sensitively sourced ingredients. During the pandemic, she returned to her native Suffolk and started a meal-kit enterprise, setting up in a former jam room at Maple Farm. Here, piqued by the farm’s wooden Austrian mill, used to grind various specialist grains, she began ‘feeling more passionate about flour and where it comes from’.

After crafting cones from spelt (for the ice creams she’d sell her kit customers), she began baking crullers — a fried doughnut — and then the crisp-bottomed Roman-style pizza for which Pinch is famed. Maris Wigeon is a farm staple and well suited to pizza dough, but Norman will use whatever’s thriving, all milled into semolina, a wheatgerm-flecked plain flour and bran, ‘which goes into the chicken food’.

Next in the running is a coarser, ‘proper’ wholemeal. The flavour, Norman explains, is slightly nutty, ‘like the smell of a health-food shop. We tried it in our pizza; it was actually a bit too much flavour. We need to introduce it gradually, so people’s palates can get used to it’.

Soon, she hopes to have a single wheat variety aligned to each product she’s crafting. ‘It sounds cheesy, but it’s bringing people back to the roots of where an ingredient comes from and the idea that this year’s bag of flour will be different to the next,’ she says. ‘It’s a reminder to be mindful about what this ingredient is.’

Shipton Mill, Long Newnton, Gloucestershire

Back in the early 1980s, John Lister and some friends were ambling in the Cotswold wilds when he came across a ruined, Domesday-era watermill. Inspired by the principles of William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement — which sought to reinstate craft skills in the face of rank mechanisation — they set about returning the site to glory. ‘It was an amazing opportunity to get stuck into the making of something wholesome,’ he recalls.

Shipton, which has been granted a Royal Warrant by The King, is now one of the country’s preeminent mills. At first, it ground plenty of Maris Wigeon (and still does; the 100% Maris flour ‘suits our organic production methods, as well as offering opportunities for thatching straw’).

Soon, it was experimenting with emmer, einkorn and spelt; even working with Italian mountain farmers on saragolla, propagated in the country’s south for centuries. Lister is also fascinated by teff, an East African grain familiar to Ethiopian and Somalian communities, but something of a curiosity to Western bakers.

Given Shipton’s size, it’s inevitable the mill has segued into some more refined flours, but the founding principles remain (not least in the heritage flour supplied to bakery behemoth Gail’s). The ecological appeal of specialist wheats over commodities is simple, Lister says. ‘These softer wheats have bigger root systems and they harvest more nutrients. You get resilience because you’re not planting a single variety in a field that has to be sprayed to keep all the weeds off, so the biodiversity is greater. It’s a completely different approach to producing grain.’

Landrace, Bath, Somerset

It was when working at Neal’s Yard Dairy that Andrew Lowkes developed the foodie ethos that would shape Landrace, the Bath bakery and restaurant he founded in 2019: ‘The better the farming, the greater potential to make something delicious at the other end.’ Back then, he’d been spending time with various growers and millers involved in the UK Grain Lab — a decentralised body championing interesting wheats. The quickfire nature of wheat cultivation and breadmaking appealed to his ‘impatient’ personality, he laughs. When the Bath site came up, he took the plunge.

At first, Lowkes was more concerned with locating stoneground flours than esoteric strains, but a burgeoning relationship with Ceredigion’s 16th-century Felin Ganol watermill inspired him to start grinding his own. After sourcing some fresh stones from a company in deepest Vermont, USA, and installing them at Somerset’s Westcombe Dairy, Landrace began milling: at first, self-grown wheats — Red Lammas and Orange Devon Blue Rough Chaff among them — before the bakery’s ascent necessitated purchasing grain again.

This year, the mill has been processing wheat from various growers, but Corston Fields Farm near Bath (for a red spring wheat called Mariagertoba) and Somerset’s agroecological don Fred Price (for rye and other heritage varieties) are go-tos. Despite being combined in the bakery’s mixing bowls, they’re milled and bagged as single varieties.

‘Our motto,’ he says, ‘is “Identity preserves stone milling”.’ As well as cornetti — an Italian-style croissant that ‘gives us hell! It’s really hard to make laminated croissants with British stoneground wheat’ — Landrace’s country sourdough remains a signature. It’s all in the retained wheatgerm, Lowkes notes. ‘It’s the grain’s little passport — it declares to your gut that it’s worth digesting.’

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

There are a few moments in the year that stand out above all the others. The first snowdrop flowering, swallows arriving from Africa in April, hearing the cuckoo, mayflies hatching in May and the roses and summer solstice in June, but for epic scale, drama and operatic glory nothing matches the wild geese arriving now.

There are about one million migrants, almost half of which are pink-footed from Iceland and Greenland, plus barnacle, brent, greylag, white-fronted, bean and others.

Geese fly in V-shaped skeins, which has been proven to be aerodynamically efficient, but that is only the beginning of the spectacle. The numbers can be enormous from hundreds to super skeins of several thousand birds forming vast avian chains across the sky and these are big birds weighing about 5lb with wingspans of 5ft–6ft.

However, it is the noise that sets them apart and makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Their ink-ink or ank-ank calls are used to keep the flock together, coordinate movement in the formation and communication between parents and young birds to keep the family group intact.

Together, it is a chorus of such beauty that it has been compared to a group of foxhounds in full cry: they are the hounds of heaven.

The Normans get a bad press when it comes to the history of British landscapes. Their destruction of English towns has been compared by one historian, George Garnett, to the Blitz, whereas environmental writer Marion Shoard blamed Norman land-grabbing barons for ‘putting the countryside out of bounds’. Yet, in the midst of the tumult, an adventurous cleric undertook a 1,000-mile journey on horseback and foot around the perimeter of Wales.

Hailed as Britain’s first great travel writer, Gerald of Wales (1146–1223), would go on to describe a route that was packed with edgy encounters, witty asides, extraordinary wildlife and the occasional miracle. He’s a kind of medieval Bill Bryson, bouncing along the trail in search of the next fabulous story, and he was well suited to the role. The son of a Welsh princess and Norman baron, he had been educated in Latin at the Benedictine Abbey in Gloucester and learned French during two lengthy visits to Paris. By 1184, he was Court chaplain to Henry II and was soon acting as a liaison-officer between the King and various princes of Wales.

Gerald was the perfect go-between: fluent in Norman and Welsh cultures and unafraid of travel. In 1188, he was told to accompany the Archbishop of Canterbury — who intended to preach the cross and to recruit archers for a forthcoming crusade to the Holy Land — on a tour of Wales. Nearly all of Gerald’s 1,000-mile route can be closely followed today and it’s no less wonderful than it was in 1188.

Beginning and ending in the fortified border town of Hereford, the route they took connected the ring of Norman castles and monasteries built around the edge of Wales, avoiding the hazardous heartland of Pura Wallia (Welsh Wales), prowled by warbands allergic to the rule of Norman kings. This was not a modern hiking trip, planned around cafés, inns and campsites. The Archbishop was an at-risk VIP who had to travel with a security detail, servants, fellow clerics and a vast amount of baggage.

Gerald records that a fortnight was consumed making ‘all the preparations necessary for so long a journey’ — pack animals and saddles had to be sourced, horsemen and armed escorts had to be recruited, and funds raised. Today, Wales can be circumnavigated by car in 24 hours; but, in 1188, anyone risking this complete route would have to set aside at least a month and, for anxious Normans, this was an expedition into the unknown. Today, by combining clues within Gerald’s text with tracks and place-names on modern Ordnance Survey maps, it’s possible to retrace almost all of his 1188 journey.

His party rode out of Hereford on Friday, March 4, heading west for the protection of the Norman castle at New Radnor and, after a night within its walls, continued south towards Hay-on-Wye, probably on the modern bridleway that crosses the exposed moorland of Gwaunceste Hill. I last hiked this bridleway in the company of a film crew shooting a BBC documentary about Gerald. All of us were protected from the wind and rain by high-tech, lightweight waterproofs and comfy boots, but the wools and leathers worn by Gerald and his companions were heavy and held the water. Faith was the medieval Gore-Tex.

That, and a belief in miracles: Gerald’s Wales was embellished with lakes of blood, plagues of toads and a knight called Gilbert who gave birth to a calf. On the far side of Gwaunceste Hill, the cavalcade descended to the village of Glascwm, recalled by Gerald as the home of ‘a handbell with miraculous powers’.

Over the next five days, they zig-zagged south through Llandew, Brecon, Abergavenny and Usk to the coast at Newport, where the journey got tricky. In the absence of a coast road, Norman travellers rode their horses along the beaches, which forced them to ford the fast-flowing rivers coursing across the sand from the mountainous interior of Wales.

‘As we approached the Neath,’ recalled Gerald, ‘which is the most dangerous and difficult of access of all the rivers of South Wales, on account of its quicksands, which immediately engulf anything placed upon them, one of our pack-horses, the only one possessed by the writer of these lines, was almost sucked down into the abyss.’

Horsemen and servants risked their lives to haul the animal free of the clasping sand — quicksand becomes lethal when an incoming tide submerges the victim’s head. Gerald acknowledged the risks taken in saving the animal and records the ‘damage done’ to his ‘books and baggage’. As are many locations on Gerald’s route, the mouth of the Neath is no less hazardous today, but is set in a landscape that reflects 800 years of modernisation: beyond the quicksands, you can see the M4 motorway gliding over the Neath on concrete stilts.

In an age before the Met Office, unexpected changes in the weather could lead to hypothermia. Wolf packs still roamed the interior. There was also a risk of attack. In the south, near Carmarthen, the travellers were told of ‘a young Welshman’ who had been riding to meet the Archbishop when he was murdered by ‘twelve archers from the nearby castle of St Clears’. In the north, a clash between a ‘local band of robbers’ and a ‘band of youths’ led to ‘some being killed there and then and others mortally wounded’. It’s not the kind of thing that happens on the Welsh Coast Path today.

There may be blood on the tracks, but this is also a land of wonder. Gerald writes of salmon leaping the waterfalls of the Teifi, of beavers that bite off their own testicles and of the abandoned Roman town of Caerleon, ‘beautifully situated on the bank of the River Usk’. His own place of birth, the Norman castle of Manorbier on the coast of Pembroke-shire, is set in a wild garden beside a ‘great crag of rock’, with a ‘most attractive orchard’ and ‘hazel-nut trees which grow to a great height’. Sea views and an ‘excellent fish pond’ fed by a lake with a watermill complete the idyllic picture. In the whole of Wales, Manor-bier was ‘the most pleasant place by far’. Today, it rises with undiminished charm above the Welsh Coast Path.

After three days in St David’s, the entourage continued along the coast then detoured inland to Lampeter and the new monastery of Strata Florida. The ‘Vale of Flowers’ has become a place of ghosts, its Cistercian stonework reduced to stumps and a single, gigantic arch framing that spiritual vale.

The travellers’ 51-day journey reached its climax some way before returning to the city of Hereford. The highpoint, literally and figuratively, was Snowdonia, soaring above the coast at the furthest corner of Wales. Gerald was overwhelmed: ‘The mountains are very high,’ he wrote, ‘with narrow ridges and a great number of very sharp peaks all jumbled together in confusion.’

Beyond Caernarfon, the Archbishop’s cavalcade was forced into a tight valley with ‘many steep climbs up and down’. It was too much for the horses and the riders had to dismount and walk. For Gerald, the enforced foot travel was an opportunity for ‘rehearsing’ the forthcoming pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but it was all too much for the English Archbishop, who ‘sat himself down on an oak-tree’ that had been flung to the ground by wind. Wearily, the cleric joked about the wisdom of nightingales in avoiding Wales: ‘We are not quite so wise, for not only have we come here but we have traversed the whole country.’

Snowdonia was another place of miracles. Gerald describes a ‘floating island’ on a lake high in the ‘Snow Mountains’. A second lake is unique for eels, trout and perch that have ‘only one eye’. Snowdonia also has a ‘remarkable eagle’ that waits on a particular stone to ‘satiate its hunger with the bodies of dead men’.

I was in Snowdonia recently and enjoyed the rare spectacle of a temperature inversion that filled the valleys with a tsunami of silver cloud pierced by peaks bathed in blue sunshine. As my son and I walked the ridge of Carnedd Llewelyn, each of our images was projected onto a cloud bank, haloed with a rainbow-striped corona. If Gerald had ever seen a brocken spectre, I suspect he’d have seen it as a miracle.

I think of Gerald whenever I’m in Wales. Another of his books, The Description of Wales, can claim to be the first, detailed geographical account of the country. In an age characterised in conventional histories by bloody battles, plagues and Court assassinations, Gerald diverts our gaze to the landscape and to its web of bridleways and footpaths, a reminder that we can still read his stories by taking a walk on the wild side.

This article first appeared in the September 2 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

If there is a more completely engrossing British bird than the common redstart, then I would struggle to name it.

One indisputable aspect of this charisma is physical beauty. Not only is the male colourful, there is also a jeweller’s precision placement to the parts. The back is smooth slate grey, the breast is glistening terracotta, whereas the face is notable for a crisp jet-black triangle outlined with a white brow.

Perhaps most remarkable is that, as he sings, he reveals a mouth lined with citrous yellow. Yet the defining feature is possessed by both sexes. They have glorious ferruginous tails and, even now, I vividly recall seeing my first redstart more than 50 years ago. She was a female and suddenly burst from hawthorn bushes close to my Derbyshire home as an entirely unknown fire-tailed bird. The first thought in that 12-year-old’s muddled head was for a nightingale. After all, I was armed only with The Observer’s Book of Birds, in which half the ancient plates were in black and white.

Slowly, it became clear that nightingales were never seen in my county. Disappoint-ment, however, was obliterated by the vision of this bird itself. She was not only beautiful in colour, but also in shape: slender and elegant. As she moved, her hind parts vibrated so that the red tail shivered — no wonder the bird was once called a ‘fireflirt’. Even the word redstart refers to this same detail and is rooted in the Old English word steort, meaning ‘tail’.

Redstarts are migrants, moving between Africa and those parts of Europe and Asia lying between the July isotherms of 10ºc – 24ºc. About 130,000 pairs breed in these islands, mainly in upland northern and western districts, and usually in broadleaved woods or in parkland-type country that comprises solitary mature trees — ash trees in Derbyshire — with mixed scrub and open rocky ground.

They can achieve very high breeding densities, with parts of western Scotland holding 50 pairs to a square kilometre. What places a limit on their presence is the availability of suitable nest-holes. These can be cavities in trees, but I have found redstarts nesting in crevices in exposed limestone scree or under rocks by the side of a footpath. To complete the impression of some overarching beauty, even the redstart’s eggs are exceptional. For the first time ever, I saw a clutch this year. Almost perfectly oval, they were an unmarked sky-blue with a soft lustre like unglazed china. Lying in a circular feather bed, they had the finished quality of six lapis jewels.

If there was an aspect to the bird that appeared to let it down, it was the redstart song. The author W. H. Hudson set the trend on a long pattern of denigration when he suggested that the sound was ‘interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority… It is impossible to listen for any length of time… without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is only the prelude of a song — a promise never performed’.

It is true that the song is short. Each passage is only two to three seconds long, but what the redstart appears to lack in content it makes up through persistence. Each sound unit is followed by a six- to seven-second interval when it delivers the next short phrase. The pattern can continue for hours. As a male plays no part in nest construction or incubation, he can deliver thousands of separate songs every day and sings for hours on end. What Hudson never appreciated is that each individual unit is packed with the mimicry of other birds.

Those gifts had been recognised for decades. In the 1840s, ornithologist William Yarrell noted that redstarts included the sounds of sparrows and chaffinches in their songs. However, it was poet John Buxton who, when incarcerated as a German prisoner-of-war in Bavaria, wrote more fully about these gifts. In his monograph The Redstart (1950), the Oxford scholar recorded 14 other birds copied by redstarts, including wryneck, night-ingale and golden oriole.

My own introduction to this ability in redstart arose during lockdown. I happened to hear one singing and incorporating snatches of nuthatch and redpoll sounds into its repertoire. That slowly unlocked a full-scale research project that has led me to astonishing personal discoveries. To date, I have recorded 70 species being copied by Derbyshire redstarts. As you would expect, the list includes birds that are their neighbours at breeding sites — curlews, great spotted woodpeckers, house martins and swallows, meadow pipits, pied wagtails, willow warblers, whitethroats and coal tits.

The song also features many species that can only be met on migration in Spain or further south in North Africa. The redstarts then bring to Derbyshire note-perfect renderings of little ringed plover, common sandpiper, European nightjar, little and scops owls and Sardinian warbler. Pride of place perhaps goes to the bird at Bonsall Moor, near the town of Cromford, that imitated a common bulbul, a species you could not find within 1,000 miles of Bonsall. That redstart had to have heard it somewhere in Africa and there it was — re-creating for me the soundscape of another continent.

I should add that none of this extraordinary vocal ability was new to European naturalists. They have long investigated the subject and these researches culminated in 2020, when a Spanish father-and-son team, Godfried and Pedro Schreur, working with friends, made a recording of a male red-start singing in Badajoz province. It was imitating the calls and sounds of 51 other birds in 60 minutes of song. There are so many aspects of the phenomenon that almost demand further investigation. Why do they do it and how long do they go on adding to their repertoire?

One reflection, however, stands out for me. Mimesis is a name we give to the reproduction of the world in some symbolic form. We often think of this skill at copying as both the bed-rock of art and a talent that is uniquely defining of our species. However, isn’t this precisely what a redstart is doing, conjuring moments and encounters from its long odyssey to and from Africa and rendering it in sound form? It is mimesis of the most sophisticated kind.

If we travel back in our imaginations to the caves of southern France where these mimetic gifts first emerged in our species, what we find are cave walls covered in beautiful representations of animals — bisons, horses, deers, mammoths — that shared the world of our Palaeolithic forebears. What those ‘artists’ copied in their paintings was a living community of neighbours. Should we not consider the possibility that redstarts have been practising exactly the same gifts — art, if you will — in the way that we do still? It may be a matter of manipulating the avian organ of sound, the syrinx, rather than our hands with their opposable thumbs. Yet the neural capabilities to conjure experiences that are not present and to revive them in symbolic format are identical.

There is a wonderful moment in Buxton’s The Redstart where he writes: ‘One of the chief joys of watching them in prison was that they inhabited another world than I… They lived only in the moment without foresight and with memory only of things of immediate practical concern to them.’ The sounds and sights of his redstarts were clearly a deep reassurance to the poet and prisoner-of-war, but I wonder whether the birds were really as different as he imagined?

This article first appeared in the September 16 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Even angels may fear to tread across bogs. Humans certainly do. You know when you have reached a bog: the sinking feeling as your booted feet disappear into the dark mire, the view before you possessing nothing above shin-height except apocalyptic aloneness, endless coarse-heathery hummocks and pools that are the upcast unseeing eyes of Earth.

In bogs, whimbrels delve carefree and adders brazenly sport the forked lightning down their backs cast from the spells of witches. Most north European nations have reposed their national psychic fears onto woodland (Little Red Riding Hood being the case in point), but, for the British, the peat bog of lowland heath or highland moor became the repository of dread.

Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic composed between the 8th and 10th centuries, was an early cultural iteration of the national psyche of bog-fear: the carousers in King Hrothgar’s mead hall are attacked and devoured by a monster, angered by their merry making: ‘Grendel this monster grim was called,/march-riever mighty in moorland living.’ This creature is exactly the sort you would find dwelling beneath a tarry mere of bog-land.

In the acidic peat of the bog, all manner of folk fears became deposited; over the Pennines, the ghosts of a lost Roman legion march eternally and everywhere in the mist-writhed boggy places at night, the will-o’-the-wisp awaits, an apparition of blue light that lures, devil-spritely, the travellers of bog-land to their death.

The bog will take more than your knees — its pools will swallow down your body and that of your horse, too. Hark the warning issued to Sir Henry Baskerville on his arrival from Canada to take up his West Country inheritance in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles: ‘As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.’ Dartmoor, that is, with its bogs.

A bog may be scientifically explained. A bog is acid peat fed wholly from the sky and forms in wet places, with which Atlantic-faced Britain abounds (fen, in chemical contrast, is alkaline peatland, watered from underground). There are two principal types of bog in Britain, this reducibility to numeration suitable, as bogs are simple mechanisms.

Our bog cover is threefold. First, the blanket bog of high-rainfall, high areas is our most common bog. Then we have the raised bog, a dome of peat in a low basin. A variant of the blanket bog is the quaking bog, where a mat of moss, perhaps a yard thick, floats on the surface of the bog. Cors y Llyn near Builth Wells in Powys will serve as the paradigmatic quaking bog, should you be tempted to visit.

The crucial ingredients of bog are binary, too: moss and rain, which together make peat. You know peat. It’s the stuff from the garden centre you formerly, before recent environmental legislation, thrust your hands into lovingly to pot-up plants, which was as sensually rich on skin and nose as Romeo y Julieta cigars.

Of course, like so much in Nature, the peat-making process is a deceptive miracle, if at sub-snail pace. Peat forms, on average, at 0.039in per annum. Rainwater gathers in a pool, where few plants like the acidic conditions, but the sphagnum-sort mosses thrive and, as they die, they fall into the bog-pool, to become compressed as peat.

You can play the bog-numbers game endlessly. The British have deplored bogs as brown, featureless wasteland, if not an actual waste of space. Hence the pejorative ‘bog-standard’ and ‘bogged down’. Peat has been cut unceremoniously as fuel and compost, the bogs drained victoriously for farming. This fitted the Anglo-Saxon mind, agriculturalist and suspicious of the mirey places where not only Grendel lived, but so did the recidivist remnants of the Celts and Britons, with their guard corps of midges and mosquitoes.

The hosts of raiding Vikings did little to promote the cause of the bog, as they were said to brew the habitat’s aromatic shrub bog myrtle for a pre-battle potion on which they went ‘berserk’ in battle against the Angles and the Saxons. None of it, the cutting and the draining, was intrinsically evil-intended, but it was always one vision of Britain, ordered and attended, against another that was wild and free.

Although Britain’s bogs have reduced and degraded, their story is not requiem, but resistance. Even in This Year of Our Lord 2026, 9% of Britain’s land surface is bog, with peat the single biggest store of our carbon, locking down the equivalent of 20 years of all the nation’s CO2 emissions. Another number: 70% of our drinking water comes from upland areas dominated by the spongy, boggy peatlands.

Bogs, however, quench more than human physical thirst. They are still avoided by the pars maior and, if you want to escape from the madding metropolitan crowd, the bog is the go-to, a place where you can drink solitude. Come to know the bog’s secrets, too, for they hold rare magic. Under their mottled flatness, they entice water with mystic mechanics; under each bog is a watery mass, a suspended subterranean lake. Regard again, the surface of the bog: it is a haunting thing of minimalist metaphysical beauty, silent and serene, except for birds crying.

Boglands have few animals, but birds proliferate, for wetness is avian fastness. It is a place where curlews (Numenius) probe mire with their decurved bills and golden plover (Pluvialis apricaria) tumble down the big sky that is suspended above the bog and which is its rightful partner.

Insects, too, are in adoration of bogland; the large marsh grasshopper (Stethophyma grossum) — Britain’s largest grasshopper, with the female of the species reaching 1½in— is a habitué. The rare fen raft spider (Dolomedes plantarius), lurks there too, dangling its hairy legs in the water to detect vibrations from potential prey, then rushing out over the surface to seize the victim, walking on water to kill. For variation, the raft spider can hunt underwater in a form of arachnid scuba-diving, by trapping air bubbles to its body.

Bogs belie their apparent boring blankness with dramas small, yet potent. Members of the dragonfly clan patrol the mirror-still pools scattered through the hummocks and use them as kill-zones. They are also places of preservation; the Old Time people called dragonflies ‘flying jewels’ and they would have pointed to the Highland’s azure hawker (Aeshna caerulea) as evidence, as it is lapis lazuli given gauzy wings. The flora of bogland, however, is its true private and preserved esotericism.

Sphagnum moss, miraculously able to hold more than 20 times its own weight in water, lives, dies and pickles itself in acid. The plants of the bog have names seemingly conserved from misty antiquity. Bog asphodel, golden-headed, is a lily once gathered by Lancashire maidens as hair-dye. In and near water, bladderwort, butterwort and bogbean grow. The first two eat insects trapped on greasy leaves.

A bog has reason to take you soakingly by the ankles, as you must then gaze down into its fantastic Lilliputian sparkling and strange plants. In among the many mosses lurks the tentacled sundew, with leaf-borne drops of mucilage (‘dew’) shining like elven diamonds, all the better to entice the bog’s midges and flies. The plant then slowly curls shut on the unlucky insects, fly-trap original, and consumes them carnivorously. There is nothing bog-standard about a bog.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Britain is facing its biggest surge in housing development since the 1970s, with 1.5 million new homes due to be built by 2029 and the ‘biggest council house building programme since the post-war period’ announced by Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

The mantra, regularly quoted by former Housing Secretary Steve Reed, is ‘build, baby, build’; seven new towns are proposed and, to facilitate this revolution, the Government has slashed red tape. Major infrastructure-project decisions have been removed from local-authority control and, at a smaller scale, planning committees are being bypassed in many cases.

The need for new homes is clear. Groups such as the Rural Services Network and Countryside Alliance have long warned that a shortage of affordable housing leaves rural towns and villages dominated by the well off and retired. Building 370,000 homes a year could allow young people and key workers to stay in rural areas. Local authorities also need to conform to mandatory housing targets, and this may mean more rural communities mobilising to fight inappropriate developments foisted upon them.

Packsaddle Fields near Frome is an eight-acre patch of former farmland that sat untouched in Somerset County Council’s land bank for 50-plus years. Originally earmarked for a school in 1973, the plan was dropped and the site had been left to its own devices.

‘It’s a really special place, with old hedgerows and tiny fields,’ said Janet Hague of People for Packsaddle. ‘Generations have used it and, when we heard in 2022 that the county wanted to sell it for development, we put out a call to try to understand local feeling. The council thought it was a useless bit of scrubland and nobody would care, but we knew different.’ The group gathered testimony from residents who love the fields — a green refuge bordered on three sides by housing — and secured Asset of Community Value (ACV) status in 2023. That same year, Somerset County Council recommended approval for a plan by LiveWest to build 74 houses and a specialist home for disabled children on Packsaddle, but the planning committee refused it after receiving in excess of 260 objections.

In August 2025, People For Packsaddle had to hire a barrister and fight a planning inquiry. They won and thought that was the end of the fight. However, this March, Somerset Council removed the land’s permissive access and put up temporary fencing to keep out local people. A council statement said that it was obliged under an Option Agreement to help the developer pursue planning permission or any appeal, including closing the permissive path and fencing the public footpath. Failure to do so, it said, could expose the council to legal action.

A survey conducted after the fencing went up found that 95% of respondents felt it had harmed community connection and their physical and mental wellbeing. ‘We’ve applied for a certificate of lawful use because we can prove people have used the land for more than 50 years,’ said Hague. ‘We fight on.’

Other campaigners who beat the developers only to face another threat include Woodhall, Faskine and Palacecraig Conservation Group (WFPCG), which has been protecting a mile-square area of green-belt land near Calderbank, North Lanarkshire, for a decade. In 2014, an application was made to build 1,000 homes, business premises and other infrastructure on the land that includes ancient woodland, the remains of the Woodhall and Faskine estates, old hedgerows and former canal ways that form a wildlife corridor. WFPCG fought and prevailed over that application and then an appeal earlier this year, but now fears the land is at risk of becoming subsumed into Scotland’s only AI growth zone.

‘It’s by the M8 and surrounded by housing. Everyone was told it was urban scrapland because it was mined a couple of hundred years ago, but Nature has totally reclaimed it,’ said Diane Davidson of WFPCG. The group mounted organised resistance — packed public meetings, a 6,000-strong Facebook community and volunteers leafleting across Calderbank. When the application reached the council, Davidson coordinated 18 speakers, a strategy that helped to secure victory. ‘We won that, but now we must start again,’ she notes.

Local concern now centres on the land housing potential solar arrays and other infrastructure linked to the expansion of the DataVita data centre. Developers have already bought adjoining land, although no new planning applications have been submitted. ‘Why should we have to do this?’ questions Davidson. ‘I feel totally let down by the system. Why should small community groups be left to fight for these sites? It’s exhausting.’

Running a campaign takes over people’s lives, but that is the price they must pay if they want to win, say Janine Lee and Dr Guy Esnouf who defeated a 10,000-home project that would have swallowed their Warwickshire villages. Wilmcote (home to Mary Arden’s Farm, Shakespeare’s maternal home) has 550 houses; nearby Bearley (where actor Richard Griffiths lived) only 320. ‘It would have been an 800% increase for Wilmcote,’ said Lee, who is now parish chair and a district councillor.

A year ago, they separately spotted the initiative in the South Warwickshire local plan and, finding their respective parish councils unaware, took matters into their own hands, canvassing local views and joining forces last October as the Bearley Wilmcote Action Group. ‘I told the parish council that we needed a public meeting,’ said Lee. ‘About 200 people came, including Dr Esnouf, and, when it seemed clear the parish wasn’t going to do anything, I took action.’ A similar meeting in Dr Esnouf’s village showed 97% opposition to the plan. ‘The first thing you need to do is find out if you have support,’ said Dr Esnouf. ‘It’s no good if it’s only a few individuals.’

Because the village demographic tended to be somewhat elderly, the pair ran sessions to help people make online consultation submissions. ‘I also ran a petition in the pub for those who couldn’t manage online and we knocked on doors to get responses from the elderly people who couldn’t even manage that,’ said Lee. ‘We had a march in November and I got the subject out to the press.’

‘My background is research,’ said Dr Esnouf. ‘We exposed the fact that it was not a well-planned site. It was not driven by Stratford District Council, but rather by the developer. The district had a need to build a certain number of houses and the developer offered them that, but it wasn’t appropriate or sustainable. It’s been hard work, but we’re now at the end of our fight. Bearley and Wilmcote are no longer on the list of suitable places for these houses.'

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Sheep don’t get much of a press do they? Apart from their categorisation as less than intellectual (‘being a sheep’ is a synonym for thoughtless following), ovines are the bête blanche of a vocal wing of rewilders for their alleged ‘sheep-wrecking’ of the uplands by overgrazing.

However, those who farm sheep are generally as keen as the next person on biodiversity restoration, likewise in recognising the national wellbeing and the preservation of the history of these isles. Poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning declared to her amour, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ In the same manner, we list the ways (15 of them) in which we love sheep and how they aid us, might even save us.

1. It was not slavery that gave Britain its original wealth, but the medieval wool trade, as celebrated in the magnificent ‘wool churches’ of the Cotswolds. Riches from that trade made Britain a notably stable society; in homage, the Lord Chancellor still sits on a ‘woolsack’ in Parliament.

2. Sheep meat is replete in protein, healthy omega-3 fats, selenium, niacin, zinc. If the lamb chop is a table familiar, remember mutton, the animals’ mature meat, with its profound depths of flavour.

3. Wool clothing is durable and biodegradable (unlike synthetics, made from fossil fuels).

4. Woollen carpets trap pollutants, leading to a healthier home.

5. Wool makes excellent loft insulation.

6. Sheep can be milked; ewe-milk cheese is undergoing a revival nationally.

7. A sheep is a walking muck spreader, reducing the need for artificial fertiliser.

8. Wool is an excellent organic fertiliser.

9. Dung from a sheep potentially fosters 250,000 insects per year, creating a natural food chain right up to apex predators.

10. The sheep is the emblem of innocence and compassion in the religion of the national church.

11. Shepherd’s Bush, Shepton Mallet, Lambeth — what would British toponomy be without ovines?

12. Tweed from Scotland, lamb from Wales — sheep are fundamental to local economies.

13. Sheep farms tend to be small family affairs and the backbone of rural society.

14. Britain has more native ovine breeds (about 60) than any other country, developed over centuries to place and purpose, from Shetlands for jumpers to Suffolks for plate. Regard the Cotswold sheep with its lustrous locks and handsome corporeality: it puts soul into the landscape. The ‘Cotswold Lion’ dates from the Roman era and is living national history, as are all native breeds.

15. Conservation grazing by sheep is essential for habitats such as chalk downs.

We could go on, but that would be like counting sheep to send you to sleep.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When the fruits of autumn beckon, with them will come those pestilential little flies. Across every continent and every island where fructification is celebrated, they will take to the air in search of sustenance and reproduction, an abiding nuisance wherever the pomaceous perfume of decaying orchard mesocarp ascends, sugary cooking odours arise and picnic goodies and wine glasses attract.

Diminutive they may be, but they bear a big name, Drosophila melanogaster, a classification vested on them in 1830 by German entomologist Johann Meigen. It means ‘black-bellied dew-lover’, a strange description for flimsy brownish insects with big red eyes and a taste for fermenting fruit. However, what they lack in stature they make up for in numbers, and here’s an extraordinary thing — as we wave them away, we should also celebrate the little blighters, for this creature is entomology’s greatest gift to scientific research.

Learned papers concerning fruit flies run into thousands, many confirming previous work, and six Nobel Prizes have been awarded for medical and physiological findings based on this humble pest. Investigations were first triggered in 1901 after California-based entomologist Charles W. Woodworth bred fruit flies in captivity, noted variations over generations and suggested that the species could be used as a model organism for research into the genetic results of inbreeding.

This notion was taken up by a Columbia University team led by Thomas Hunt Morgan, whose studies into sex-linked inherited traits (such as the insects’ eye colour) resulted in the monumental conclusion that the units of heredity were genes strung on chromosomes inside cell nuclei. Not surprisingly, Morgan was duly awarded one of those coveted prizes. Today, as ever, it demands a leap across the credulity gap to attribute this seminal discovery to the constitution of a flimsy fly barely one-eighth of an inch long.

The mass of research that followed included putting fruit flies into a US space ship in 1946, when they became the first living creatures to be subjected to a rocket trip. Another batch was retrieved safely from a second launch the following year. However, the greatest significance of the huge body of study into fruit fly genetics has been the conclusion that 60% of their genes coincide with those of humans and that 75% of human genes linked to disease find an equivalent function in the insects.

This is increasingly important, for the humble fruit fly has accordingly become the genetic laboratory model for research into neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntingdon’s diseases. It has also been pivotal in an extensive range of other vital studies, from immunity and addiction to stress, cancer, diabetes, dementia and the mechanism of ageing. A further element in this insect’s contribution to research is the presence of a ‘fat body’, a component that stores nutrients and is the equivalent of the liver and body adipocere in mammals, including us.

It regulates the circadian cycle, the natural 24-hour biological oscillation whereby nights and days are managed to maximise physical condition. Where will this creature’s contribution to our knowledge of the human condition eventually lead? It is estimated that 50 million fruit flies are reared annually in more than 3,500 laboratories in 72 countries and their study involves some 10,000 scientists.

They are also the basic subject of most biological and genetic university courses. It is clear that this tiny nuisance has more to tell us about ourselves.

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

In the spring of 2026, BBC News carried warnings of quicksand at Cocklawburn Beach near Berwick-upon-Tweed. Coastguard alerts about quicksand in the Aln Estuary and at Boulmer Haven in Northumberland followed shortly afterwards. Although none of these locations is within 50 miles of my home, the news still sent a shiver down my spine.

As a child, I was terrorised by the thought of sinking in quicksand. I envisioned myself being pulled down into the glutinous depths by unseen hands until the only sign of my presence was a few bubbles and perhaps a school cap floating on the stodgy surface.

My fear came not from personal experience (to this day, I have never encountered quicksand), but from reading Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ adventures (George and her dog Timmy seemed to spend part of every story sinking up to their necks in mud), watching television (a particularly traumatic quicksand scene filled the closing credits of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons) and the silver screen (in ‘Tarzan’ films, the only thing more likely to happen to the naïve European hunter than sinking up to his chin in gloop was awakening to find a giant spider crawling up his arm).

I am not alone in my anxiety. Social media reveals that my phobia about quicksand is shared by hundreds of thousands of people. Most of them, like me, were born in the 1960s or in the decade that followed. This was an era when quicksand loomed so large in the lives of children that Parker Brothers — the company behind Monopoly and Risk — brought out a board game devoted to its perils.

Baby boomers may have lived through a golden age of quicksand, but history suggests that it isn’t only our generation that has been scared witless by the thought of being sucked down by something that — at least in its screen appearances — looks similar to a semolina pudding. Quicksand has been the stuff of nightmares for thousands of years. It features on the Bayeux Tapestry — future English King Harold Godwinson is depicted rescuing two soldiers from quicksand near Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France — and in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in which it serves as an allegory for losing moral grounding. By the 1720s, slurping sands that swallowed heroes and heroines alike had become such a cliché of overwrought epic verse that Alexander Pope lampooned bad poets who thickened their descriptions ‘here and there with Quicksand’.

How to escape a sticky situation

• Stay calm — thrashing around will only make you sink faster

• Lighten your load and cast aside your rucksacks, backpacks and so on

• Lean back. Distributing your weight over the greatest possible area will help you float

• Wiggle slowly. Circular motions with your legs will allow water to gradually seep downwards and break the suction

• Roll or slither. Once your legs are nearer the surface slowly and gently roll or army crawl to safety

Undeterred by Pope’s sneering, quicksand continued to make its malevolent, squelchy presence felt in literature. Sir Walter Scott, who lived not so far from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was fond of ‘quivering sand’. In Redgauntlet, the protagonist Darsie Latimer gets trapped in some on the Solway Firth and narrowly escapes drowning as the tide races in. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Edgar Ravenswood in The Bride of Lammermoor rides into quicksand; all that’s left is the feather from his hat. This is more than survives of poor Rosanna Spearman in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The Yorkshire maid is both repelled and fascinated by the ‘Shivering Sand’ that lines the coast, fantasising that it holds the bodies of hundreds of souls. Eventually, she voluntarily joins them.

In R. D. Blackmore’s classic of star-crossed Exmoor lovers, Lorna Doone, the villainous Carver Doone disappears into the sands of the Wizard’s Slough and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr Watson watches in horror as a Dartmoor pony sinks into the Grimpen Mire. That there is no quicksand on Dartmoor was no matter in numerous screen versions of both novels — and the treacherous Devonian mires are indeed as sticky as reheated porridge.

If novelists and poets love quicksand, their passion for it is nothing compared to that of film-makers. Quicksand made its big screen debut in the 1909 Gaumont melodrama Saved from the Quicksands. Since then, it has swallowed up people and animals in Hollywood films as diverse as The Swiss Family Robinson, Lawrence of Arabia, Blazing Saddles and The Princess Bride.

In real life, quicksand is altogether less ubiquitous than in fiction. The quicksand of Dartmoor is a novelist’s fantasy, although that on the Solway Firth is not. It is also an ever-present danger at the extensive sandflats of Cumbria and Lancashire’s Morecambe Bay (where a Royal Guide has helped people navigate around it since the reign of King John) and along the notoriously dangerous Broomway in Essex. In recent years, quicksand has been reported near Whitby in North Yorkshire, Rhyl in North Wales, Walcott and Mundesley in north Norfolk and along the Channel coast at Lancing, West Sussex, and Barton on Sea, Hampshire.

No sooner has it arrived than it is gone again, because quicksand is a capricious phenomenon — which is one of the things that makes it dangerous. Formed of water-saturated sand, silt and clay, quicksand loses its structural strength when agitated. It is firm ground that turns liquid when something — or somebody — steps on it. This singular nature means that the more you struggle, the quicker you go down.

However, the gritty sludge is by no means as directly lethal as the fictional version. Physics dictates that an object only sinks until it has displaced its own weight. Quick-sand is roughly twice as dense as the human body, so most people will only go down up to their waist. Yet, it’s not all good news. The suction of quicksand is so powerful that attempting to pull your leg rapidly from it would require the strength needed to lift a family car. Quicksand won’t swallow you whole, but it can hold you in its powerful grip until hypothermia, exhaustion or dehydration sets in.

There’s also — as Sir Walter Scott’s hero Darsie Latimer discovers — the danger of a rising tide. It was this combination of sludgy suction and the incoming sea that resulted in the tragic deaths of 23 cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004. The shivering sands may not suck people down into the muddy depths as they do in stories and films, but they haunt our nightmares for a reason.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Glorious leaf colours are one of the joys of autumn. They fill our landscapes and gardens with red, orange and yellow — colours unknown in summer. Yes, the process is actually a by-product of the leaves dying, but it also serves a definite evolutionary purpose and brightens our way from summer sunshine to winter gloom. Autumn colour is a time to celebrate.

Why and how do trees and shrubs do it? The ‘why’ question is easy to answer. Trees started to evolve about 390 million years ago. All were evergreen and operated in warm, sunny climates. The emergence of deciduous plants about 135 million years ago was a logical development. They learnt to shed their leaves so that they could survive in cold areas with long, dark winters.

However, that does not explain why the dying leaves take on such brilliant colours. Everyone knows that leaves are green because they contain chlorophyll — a photosynthesiser that uses the sun to create the foods, mainly sugars, that plants require to live and grow — but other colours are present in foliage that are overpowered by chlorophyll’s green. Autumn’s hues come from useful flavonols and carotenes — respectively yellow and orange — and, later in the season, from red anthocyanins, which are a by-product of change. These compounds, and their colours, occur all through the vegetable kingdom, not only leaves: raspberries contain anthocyanins; yellow raspberries are dominated by a carotene called lutein.

Chlorophyll does not live forever. Scientists tell us that the individual chloroplasts break down and are constantly replaced throughout the summer. However, as autumn approaches, rather less green chlorophyll is recycled, so the underlying colour of the leaves is revealed. Some leaves turn pure yellow and others mainly red, with endless variations in between. The exact mixture of these compound chemicals varies between individual plants, as well as between species — hence the degree of yellow or red colouring in the dying leaves. An important part of the process is called abscission: the tree or shrub starts to lay down a layer of cork where the leaves are attached to the branches and, eventually, the leaves fall off.

Frost accelerates the process. The best autumn colour comes from hot, sunny days and cold, cloudless nights — what we call an Indian summer. If autumn is mild and wet, the process slows down and enough chlorophyll survives to mix with the reds so that the leaves appear brown. Most of us had a hot and sunny summer. Provided we have cold nights, autumn colour this year will be all the better for it. That said, the leaves of our red maples Acer rubrum and scarlet oaks Quercus coccinea will never match the splendour of those in New England and Canada because our summers — even this one — are cooler than theirs and our autumns usually damper.

You can see the carotenes in such trees as poplars, ginkgos and birches, each of which turns to a distinct and uniform shade of brilliant yellow or gold, but without even the merest hint of the reds that come from anthocyanins. Not all trees and shrubs make anthocyanins. Unlike the ever-useful carotenes — which help with photosynthesis — anthocyanins are not present in the leaf throughout the growing season, but a sign that the sugars are breaking down in the presence of bright sunlight. Japanese maples, liquidambars and rowans are some of the best — the most dependable — trees for good leaf colour in our climate.

Anthocyanins have another significant purpose: when the leaves fall to the ground they inhibit the development of rival plants. The technical term is allelopathy. Walnut trees and sycamore are good examples, but so are the tree of heaven Ailanthus altis-sima and the Canadian sugar maple Acer saccharum: they keep their competitiveness by killing off their rivals.

How long does autumn colour last? It varies between species. The tupelo Nyssa sylvatica may hold its brilliant scarlet colour for a week or 10 days, but the sweetgum Liquidambar styraciflua retains its autumn leaves for up to six weeks. The process is gradual and individual leaves die by stages, so a tree will have leaves of many changing hues as autumn progresses.

Hot, dry weather can also bring on a change of leaf colour. If you saw birch trees turning yellow in August, it’s because they are surface-rooting and suffered more than most trees from the heat and drought of summer. Their survival strategy is to shut down prematurely.

Japanese maples and cherries are among the first to show their autumn colour. Normally we have to wait a couple of weeks before our native trees start to turn. The beechwoods of the Chilterns and the oakwoods of Sherwood and Savernake are at their best in early November. The brown tinge to their leaves comes from tannins left inside when the chlorophyll fades away; they overwhelm the carotenes.

Elm trees are among the last to turn colour and drop their leaves. Young beeches and hornbeams hold onto their dead leaves until spring. Marcescence is the scientific word for this phenomenon and there are many reasons for it — but that is another story.

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

There was, in my mind, only one kind of gardener. They feature in this magazine; cultivating, planting and maintaining various acres of this green and pleasant land. Always on land. But then I met Titouan Bernicot.

Titouan gardens in a wetsuit off the coast of French Polynesia. He doesn’t grow tomatoes, tulips or trees, but organisms that predate the dinosaurs by 250 million years. His crop is coral.

Titouan’s horticultural career did begin on dry land: ‘I had my tomatoes, a little lettuce and stuff,’ he says. But, aged 16, when he was surfing over a bleached and dying reef, he discovered the crop that will likely consume the rest of his life.

Coral reefs are the ocean's great overachievers — they cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet shelter a quarter of all marine life and provide food security and livelihoods for more than one billion people. They also act as natural breakwaters, underpin tourism economies and, rather importantly, help to produce a about half of the oxygen on Earth. Coral polyps host microscopic algae called zooxanthellae. These algae convert CO₂ into energy and release oxygen as a byproduct.

Humanity has a nasty habit of ruining the most useful parts of the natural world and reefs are no exception. Live-coral cover has roughly halved since the 1950s and we are currently experiencing the aftermath of the worst mass-bleaching event on record: between January 2023 and March 2025, heat stress hit 84% of reefs across 82 countries. Rising ocean temperatures is the primary driver, compounded by pollution, coastal development, overfishing and coral-eating starfish outbreaks. The economic case for acting now is stark. Unchecked coral loss could cost $500 billion a year by 2100, against a fraction of that to protect ocean health today. There is a simpler, more urgent case too: our own survival. ‘No reef, no ocean, no air,’ concludes Titouan.

The environmentalist was still a teenager when he founded Coral Gardeners, which restores the ‘rainforests of the sea’ by growing coral in underwater nurseries — mostly on suspended rope structures — before transplanting mature fragments back onto degraded reefs. Rather than rushing the polyps into deeper water, the organisation deliberately lets them mature for up to two years in the nursery, prioritising resilience, species diversity and connectivity so the restored reef can function as a genuine ecosystem. ‘Nature loves diversity — a resilient reef has a lot of different coral species, not just one,’ says Titouan.

Since 2017, the company has planted 221,212 corals across 103 species and restored 25,100 square metres of reef — 20 Olympic swimming pools' worth — across 12 active sites in French Polynesia, Fiji and Thailand. And the team’s patience pays off: despite 2024's catastrophic bleaching event, their corals have maintained an average survival rate above 80%. The team combines hands-on gardening with in-house scientific research (CG Labs), AI-powered monitoring tools and partnerships with brands and institutions to fund the work and raise public awareness of reef decline. ‘We know restoration alone can't save reefs at the rate we're losing them,’ he says, ‘which is why we focus also on storytelling and building a movement, since real change starts when people understand how much we depend on the ocean.’

I visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters on Mo'orea a few years ago. It is not a subtle island. Nature does not so much exist as loom large in high definition. It is an earthly paradise, its soaring volcanic peaks iced head to toe in spongy vegetation. On moodier days, clouds snag in the steep crevices and raindrops the size of marbles plip-plop off palm fronds and pool inside hibiscus plants. The air becomes so thick with moisture you swear you can feel and hold it in your mouth. The people I met described how ocean water runs in Polynesians’ veins and that it’s not uncommon for older fishermen to ask for a shark’s permission before taking fish from their feeding grounds. It is, in other words, precisely the sort of place that produces people like Titouan.

There is, tucked away on page 44 of Coral Gardeners' latest report, a single sentence that ought to have made rather more noise than it has. In June, at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, the President of French Polynesia announced that his government would formally recognise ‘coral gardener’ as an official profession. On the face of it, it is a bureaucratic footnote. In practice, it is rather extraordinary: an environmental NGO, founded by someone not yet 30, has effectively willed a new career into existence by government decree.

Buried a few pages later is something else. On the atoll of Ahe, Titouan’s team repurposed the ropes of a defunct pearl farm — his family's trade — to grow coral instead, with growth rates nearly 20 times the original volume in under a year. Meanwhile, in Italy, the same methodology developed for tropical acropora (a genus of small polyp stony coral) is now tentatively being trialled on cold-water Mediterranean gorgonians (colonial soft corals).

You'd assume a coral-restoration project in French Polynesia and the great houses of Italian fashion and Swiss watchmaking would have little to say to each other. You'd be wrong. In nine years, more than 500 companies have come knocking, wanting to attach their name to Coral Gardeners. Titouan turns most of them away.

His filtering process is, to put it politely, unsentimental. He wants evidence of homework done before a single penny changes hands; partners who have ‘properly started even before our discussion to build a CSR (corporate social responsibility strategy) with some tangible goals’ — and, crucially, ‘not just giving us some financial support for us to do the thing.’

There are two big names who cleared the bar. Rolex and Prada Group. The watchmaker — who Titouan speaks of with something close to reverence, calling them ‘our North Star’ — has backed Coral Gardeners, via its Perpetual Planet Initiative, since near its inception. Earlier thsi month, the President of French Polynesia visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters earlier this month and joined the team underwater to inspect the nurseries. The moment was caught on camera by CNN for Call to Earth, the cable news networks's multi-platform editorial series that exposes some of the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. It launched in 2021 in partnership with Rolex.

Prada, in partnership with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, is helping to fund Titouan’s projects in the Mediterranean. He singles out the luxury fashion house's Re-Nylon collection, spun from recycled fishing nets. ‘Introducing nylon into [high] fashion is bold,’ he says, ‘but using recycled fishing net nylon’ — and sustaining it for years, as one of the label's bestsellers — is ‘brilliant.’

It would be easy to mistake all this for greedy ambition. However, Titouan doesn’t even consider himself a custodian of the reef, much less so its keeper. ‘The reef has given me everything in my life,’ he says, ‘so I want to give back… nature is not something we own, but something we live in harmony with.’ The billion-dollar question is whether it’s a philosophy that scales to planetary emergency. Titouan might be our and the ocean’s only hope, and the closest thing gardening has to a creed.

A month ago, preparing this magazine’s London Life pages for August, I wrote that the city is at its most verdant in summer. Our trees usually reach their apogee this season. How wrong I was.

The prolongation of the heatwave, despite last week's intermittent rain, means the trees are now experiencing so much stress that they have started shedding their leaves. Autumn has come early.

Perhaps none has suffered more than the apple tree. Orchards across the country started losing their fruit in July when the trees were forced to redirect wilting water reserves to their roots in order to survive. It is forecast to be one of the worst apple harvests in history — a nightmare for cider-makers. ‘The effect won’t be seen until 2027,’ says Nick Showering, whose family has been making cider in Somerset for 180 years, ‘when this year’s yield translates to sales.’

Last year produced one of the richest yields on record. Although not as voluminous as in previous years, 2025 benefited from last summer’s then record-breaking sunshine and produced an unusually, delightfully sweet mixture. Apples of exceptional potency translated to top-notch drinks. The fine cider on sale this summer has been phenomenal.

Too much heat, however, can be fatal. Until last week, it hadn't rained properly in the West Country — cradle of British cider-making — since late June. Producers are expected to make a heavy loss in 2027. Suggestions, from some, to diversify a specialist industry are as oxymoronic as they seem inconceivable.

Importing apples, meanwhile, offers little in the way of compensation. ‘Producers in Europe are most likely experiencing similar issues,’ Nick explains. ‘It would constitute an additional cost to import and potentially dilute [our] product’s quality.’ A fine cider, akin to the one made by his family, prides itself on using local ingredients. For more mass-market brands, a few things could still be done. ‘Instead of importing apples,’ Nick says, ‘they might look to import apple concentrate’: that is, transporting a higher density of product across borders at a lower cost.

As is the case for other, equally water-reliant industries, creating infrastructure to capture the winter rain is paramount to preserve our orchards’ future. Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992: the result of red tape and resistance from residents near suggested sites. This is neither fair nor right. Cider is one of our greatest and proudest creations — an industry with huge potential as changing tastes lean in favour of lighter booze and national produce.

Supporting our makers goes beyond merely buying their products: it demands a proper strategy. Even our most robust trees need deep watering in times of drought.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Our understanding of early country estates comes largely from written chronicles rather than maps, but the Elizabethan era marked a turning point. In the second half of the 16th century, Dutch Protestants brought advanced drafting skills and new measuring instruments that honed cartographical accuracy.

These developments coincided with the transformation of the old medieval feudal order under the Tudors: Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries blurred boundaries and created a demand to survey and establish distinct ownership over tracts of land. Enter the estate map, a declaration of status and possession.

Suffolk-born Ralph Agas (1540–1621) is largely known today for his town plans, especially the one he created of Oxford. However, he was also one of the first cartographers to map landed estates, such as Henry Cheney’s Toddington estate in Bedfordshire.

More than 100 years later, the 3rd Duke of Richmond employed Dutch engraver Thomas Yeakell — who had served under him in the army — as his personal surveyor to the Goodwood estate in West Sussex. Yeakell was joined by surveyor William Gardner and the duo became celebrated cartographers, embarking on the first complete mapping of an English county: Sussex.

After Yeakell died, Gardner worked with Thomas Gream to complete the map, which was published in 1797. A precursor to Ordnance Survey maps, it includes a detailed rendition of the medieval park at the Duke of Norfolk’s Arundel Castle and the estate’s Rewell Wood. Every farmhouse, barn and garden is carefully depicted, as well as the type of fence in each enclosure.

‘The map illustrates the area before it became the home farm in 1797, showing the landscape as a mix of ancient woodland and deer park,’ explains Dr John Martin Robinson, librarian to the current Duke. ‘It’s a valuable record of the evolution of the estate and is a landmark in British mapping.’

A 1788 map by Claude Joseph Sauthier, meanwhile, shows Alnwick Castle in Northumberland and its domains. Born in Strasbourg and the son of a saddler, Sauthier trained as an architect and surveyor before sailing to America, where he carried out military mapping for the British colonial government.

In New York, he met Hugh Percy, the future 2nd Duke of Northumberland, who was serving as a British officer during the American War of Independence. When Percy returned to England in 1777, he brought Sauthier with him. Sauthier completed more than 20 maps of the ducal estates, which are still in use today.

‘The forestry department will refer to Sauthier’s maps showing the layout of Capability Brown’s planting efforts in order to guide plans for replanting, for instance,’ notes Ralph Percy, the 12th Duke of Northumberland. ‘They are used in registration of ownership, particularly mineral registrations, and are relevant in relation to planning applications for developing land.’

Modern-day equivalents continue to be commissioned, physically documenting land-holdings of all shapes and sizes. This may seem surprising in an increasingly digital world — yet to many this is the attraction.

‘You may have a 1,000-acre-plus estate, but only a handful of people have a deep knowledge of it and how it works,’ points out sixth-generation Hampshire farmer and owner of Rural Maps Anthony Pelly, who creates maps of all kinds for private landowners worldwide. ‘As that knowledge is being steadily eroded, it needs pinning down. Despite the availability of digital versions, physical maps are still very much in demand: I have been in a room with Gainsboroughs ignored as everyone crowds around an estate map. They invite comment and engagement in a way nothing else does.’

Although estate maps serve as tools for land management, in their decorative form they also present intimate family portraits. Often personalised, today they are more likely to feature a leaping salmon for the keen angler or a ruined Roman temple for the antiquarian than an array of heraldic flourishes.

‘My maps have included cherished details such as a wedding marquee on a hill, a beloved dog or children jumping ponies in the corner of a field,’ continues Pelly. Actual portraits are rare, but this was ever the case: the estate map of Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, of about 1607 is highly unusual in having a medallion portrait of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, at the top of the title cartouche.

Securing their owner’s place in the long line of custodians of the land, these maps serve as a time capsule for future generations. ‘It’s early days, but I would like to see the profession evolve so that when someone buys a significant estate for the first time, they not only employ a gardener, an estate manager and an architect, but a cartographer as well,’ says Pelly.

Estate maps can also reveal hidden features that could present difficulties for owners. ‘We were once instructed on a Cotswolds estate that had been deliberately left to run fallow for 30 years,’ he adds. ‘On site, we found hidden pools of water no one knew about, even the local shepherds. It explained why some of the fields became waterlogged and allowed for drainage to be improved.’

There can also be a poignancy in what is captured. ‘Within field names, you get glimpses into the past,’ observes Edel Fenelon, an artist from Co Carlow in Ireland who draws rural landholdings. ‘They categorise functions, preserve the names of families long gone or record events: you might have Kiln Field, where the bricks were laid out, or Kelly Field, even when the Kellys haven’t lived in the area for hundreds of years.’

The idea for her business sprang from a map she created of her childhood farm as a birthday present for her father. ‘Growing up on a farm, you see how much work and dedication goes into its upkeep and that’s not only one lifetime: you have three, four, maybe five generations working the land for that estate to still exist. The maps show heritage and roots.’

Although many estate maps include farms as part of the demesne, the earliest dedicated farm maps in England and Wales were mid-19th-century tithe maps. An extraordinary achievement, depicting almost every landowner, farm and field — noting whether it was arable, meadow, pasture or woodland — they were commissioned to create a nationwide record so that tithes (payment in kind through crops or livestock) could be replaced by cash.

Today, with more people owning farms than estates, farms are core drivers of the aesthetic map resurgence. ‘On the rural consultancy side, we are seeing more and more people looking for “real-artist” produced plans of their ownership, in particular the owner-occupier farm owner rather than the larger estates,’ confirms Jamie Evans-Freke, who heads the rural asset management team at Knight Frank’s Horsham office in West Sussex.

Capturing the essence of a place is a significant undertaking and, when the artist Aengus Dewar was asked to draw an estate in the north of England, he did detailed research into its history. Uncovering that a Second World War US B17 bomber returning from the infamous Schweinfurt Raid had crashed on the borders of the estate — unknown to the owners — he recorded the event by depicting the plane in the spot where it landed. ‘We live in uncertain times,’ he says. ‘The desire to connect with history and imprint yourself on the landscape, which is enduring, is very natural.’

These maps were reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection and the County Archivist, West Sussex Record Office; Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It is remarkable to reflect on the cultural stories that attach to our only native breeding goose, the greylag. In classical times, it was a bird sacred to Aphrodite (or Venus). For millennia, it served as an erotic symbol and a faint vestige of this is apparent in the nursery rhyme Goosey Goosey Gander, wherein a male bird is up to mischief in my lady’s chamber.

You could also argue that greylag geese changed the course of Western history. A flock of the goddess Juno’s sacred wildfowl was kept on the Capitoline Hill in Rome and it famously gave the alarm that thwarted the attacking Gauls in 390BC. Less well known is the fact that the species was first domesticated by ancient Egyptians, from whom the practice slowly spread worldwide.

Alas, none of these reflections has much impact on modern British attitudes to greylags. They are possibly the least loved of our native birds and I must declare my own bias: I cherish the music generated by our avifauna, but not the calls of this species. It may have saved ancient Rome, yet there is a nails-on-blackboard quality to that braying cacophony of a greylag goose flock in full chorus.

It was once a rare sound in Britain. Greylags had been resident across the country until they were largely exterminated by the mid 19th century, primarily by wetland drainage. The only indigenous breeding population survived in northern and westernmost parts of Scotland, although these islands have always been a location for wintering flocks coming largely from Iceland. All this was turned around in the 20th century, when greylags were reintroduced, especially in East Anglia, Kent, southern Scotland and the Lake District.

Wildfowlers seeking to re-establish a valued sporting bird were party to those efforts and they, in turn, were aided by the widespread construction of new reservoirs or the development of gravel pits. A bird that weighs 7lb has few natural predators and, as the Gauls learnt to their cost, it is a hyper-vigilant creature. Greylags soon started to nest successfully at the suite of new wetlands and the sight of fluffy yellow-green goslings pootling in the wake of their parents became commonplace. However, what lay behind that cute tableau was already rather alarming.

Introduced greylag numbers were thought to be increasing at 10% a year: small wonder, perhaps, that the bird was an ancient fertility symbol. By the 1990s, there was a nominally two-part population, with reintroduced feral birds reaching 14,000 pairs and the older native Scottish stock at about 4,000. This century, any sense of separation between the two vanished as the species completed an expansion calculated at 700%. The combined greylag total is 47,000 pairs and only south-west England, south-west Wales and north-eastern Scotland now lie outside its breeding range.

It is mainly in the north that the agricultural impact of grazing geese is contested. Crofters claim that they damage crops and have a disproportionately large impact on their often low-input, low-yield agricultural methods. As recently as spring 2026, the Scottish minister for agriculture announced £1 million would be spent to mitigate damage. Another archipelago adversely affected is Orkney, where there are said to be 24,000 resident birds, topped up in winter by large flocks of migrants.

Farmers complain of their depredations, with one lamenting that his 100 scarecrows were barely deterring them. Another concern — not only in Orkney — is the vast quantity of droppings they deposit. These have been linked to the spread of campylobacter, a contagious pathogen that causes the death of calves or young cattle, but can also infect humans.

One ‘solution’ pursued in Orkney has been ‘hunting holidays’, where excess birds are taken for sport. This has become a source of further discord for those who insist Orkney should be a refuge for birds.

The only point we can conclude about these disputes is a constant refrain about all the species in the Unloved Birds’ Club: an issue presumed to arise in human-bird relations is quickly lost beneath the loud greylag-goose-like clamour between ourselves.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It was the summer of a new Labour Prime Minister (James Callaghan), the birth of punk rock and the film Carry on England; Terry Pratchett released his first novel, appropriately titled The Dark Side of the Sun, and Agatha Christie’s last (Sleeping Murder) was published a few months after her death.

In sport, Sue Barker won the French Open; the West Indies, spearheaded by the incomparable Viv Richards, won the Test Match series, which came as a shock to English spectators; the swimmer David Wilkie won gold at the Montreal Olympics. Extraordinarily, a British band (Brotherhood of Man) triumphed in the Eurovision Song Contest. The Ford Fiesta was launched, creating 3,000 new jobs in Dagenham, Essex. Big Ben’s clock broke down. There was a plague of ladybirds.

The famous heatwave (temperatures peaked at 35.9˚C in Cheltenham, Gloucester-shire) and drought of exactly 50 years ago saw not only hosepipe bans, but queues at standpipes and the unfortunate residents of South Wales had their water supply cut off every night. The problem was compounded by the fact that the drought was preceded by a winter of lower than average rainfall and reservoir levels were dangerously down.

Despite the fact it was widely considered to be a one off, Callaghan appointed a drought minister, Denis Howell, and, hey presto, it began to rain a few days later, over the August bank holiday. However, the population was 20% smaller then and there were no water-sapping data centres. There were fewer arguments about land management, but also fewer wildfires. It was, wrote Herefordshire farmer and author Evelyn Cox, ‘a shared experience unlike any other in Britain since the Blitz’. What has the country learned since?

Not enough, it seems, despite more sophisticated weather forecasting and greater awareness of a changing climate. As we reported last month, there have been no new reservoirs built for 34 years and those in the pipeline are years off completion. Some water companies remain complacent and have done lamentably little to stem leakage. Fish are gasping (the Environment Agency carried out 38 fish rescues on two West Midlands rivers alone) and many city dwellers are blissfully unaware that food shortages could loom as cattle run short of grass and crops wither.

However, as Defra made clear last week, at least the drought is galvanising action: greater investment in infrastructure by water companies, research into desalination and less red tape for farmers and landowners, not to mention a bit of common sense on the part of the public. It even prompted the Prime Minister to send the an emergency alert linked to the wildfires.

Even Natural England is beginning to consider fuel management to combat wildfires. We’re all in it together, just as we were half a century ago.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It's a sunny June afternoon in the Cheshire village of Willaston and something strange is afoot. Or, rather, underfoot. The community primary school’s playing field is a hotbed of activity. Children and adults traipse the grassy expanse — painted with three-metre-square plots and bounded by cake tables and craft stalls — all carting strange equipment, from garden forks and foam cudgels to ukuleles and power drills. These are tools for a peculiar, soil-flecked competition, for which Willaston is ground zero. Welcome to the World Worm Charming Championships.

Worm charming is the act of vibrating a patch of soil, causing earthworms to squirm up through the turf to be collected. In 1881’s bestselling The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, pre-eminent worm hype-man Charles Darwin hypothesised that the worms believe that ‘they are pursued by a mole’.

In the US, it’s known as ‘worm grunting’ and most associated with the Florida Panhandle, where it’s long been employed to source fishing bait. There, its practitioners bow a short wooden stake (called a ‘stob’) with a ‘rooping iron’, sending low-frequency drones into the earth to flush out the slippery invertebrates.

Cheshire’s version is less mercenary: a jolly bash in which no worms are harmed. It was founded in 1980 for the school summer fête by then-deputy headmaster John Bailey, who drew 100 three-yard-square plots on the playing field with an old tennis-court marker.

The inaugural winner was farmer’s son Tom Shufflebottom, who enticed a cracking 511 worms — an auspicious start. Bailey soon ceded control to Gordon Farr — a former headmaster, now long-time organiser and founder of the International Federation of Charming Worms and Allied Pastimes (or IFCWAP) — and village policeman Mike Forster.

A few years later, the pair got wind of a rival contest in Blackawton, Devon, also calling itself the World Championship. The Willaston boys took them to task. ‘We realised we had to take on the responsibility of the worm-charming fraternity,’ says Forster. They founded IFCWAP (of which they’re the only members) and set out their official rules of worm charming, one of which is a ban on using liquid to soak the soil — a technique still permitted at the Devon event, now known as the International Festival of Wormcharming. Its organisers declined to comment.

Little has changed in the years since, save for a shift from imperial to metric measurements (‘to bring us in line with Europe,’ confirms Farr). It’s now a competition of such prestige that Guinness ratified a world record here in 2009 — 10-year-old Sophie Smith coaxing up 567 worms — and it has gained international traction, the rules translated into multiple languages (Fijian, Korean and Icelandic among them) in case any foreign delegations fancy a pop. Russian, Farr adds, was tricky, as the language lacks a word for ‘charm’.

As well as the liquids ban, IFCWAP maintains a staunch ‘no digging’ rule. ‘It doesn’t matter how old the competitor is, it’s a red card,’ sighs Forster. He also raises the pervasive issue of ‘premature worm grasping… when people go for the worm too soon and he either goes back in or you get a tug of war.’ (The RSPCA, it should be noted, has commended the event’s high worm welfare.)

Almost anything else is fair game and, inevitably, Farr and Forster have seen some bizarre things — not least the participation of a horse named Flicker, trained to hoof the earth. ‘He had to have a corner plot,’ remembers Farr, ‘because any excrement had to fall outside the charming area.’

They’ve had to stamp down on some flagrant cheating, too. ‘One year, a guy arrived on a bike,’ says Forster. ‘During the charming, he was doing a rain dance, unclipped his bicycle trouser clips and worms began cascading down! That was banned straight away. Shocking.’

Back to the field. At 2pm, a bell rings and a 30-minute charming window commences. A cacophony of psychedelic earth-thumping rises and, soon, gleeful squealing as the worms begin to emanate from the grass. Many participants are using garden forks — stuck in the ground and their tines or handles bashed to judder the soil beneath in a method known around here as ‘twanging’.

Some of the gathered masses are more creative. As veteran Matt Sefton rhythmically smacks his fork prongs with two sticks in the classic style, his son William, 13, blasts a rousing and mellifluous rendition of the Indiana Jones theme at the grass with a trumpet. Erik Satie’s lilting piano vignette Gymnopédie No 3 is also on the sheet, but, Sefton explains, it lacks the tumult to startle the worms into action. ‘We wanted maximum aggression.’

Three plots away, university student Millie Searing is also on a twanging bent, albeit aided by some doofing drum ’n’ bass from a portable speaker. Nearby, a slight man with an overhanging mop of hair prostrates himself on the ground, surrounded by wind-up bath toys. A few feet across, a woman lays down a small wooden board and elegantly tap dances atop.

Finally, I locate Forster’s son, Tom, and his grandsons, Ted and Sam. The centrepiece of their square is a wooden box, raised on four legs with a disembodied, Monty Python-style mannequin’s foot protruding beneath, the stamping motion of which is controlled with a pulley.

The bell rings; the contest is over. Was it a vintage year? ‘I’m not sure we’ve a winning number, but it’s a lot — more than 100,’ notes Tom, sweat-flecked and visibly pooped. How did the Python foot fare? ‘Oh, it broke, but we got two worms with it,’ Ted, 13, adds stoically.

After all the charming brouhaha, the counting table is more hushed. A whiteboard of plots is being filled in as cups of soil and worms are tipped onto plates and carefully picked at, the worms then gently popped into a nearby trench for safekeeping until the birds have gone to bed, thus avoiding any massacres. There are many zeros, but the majority of the almost-complete board is in double digits.

One strip — in the south-western part of the field — is all that’s left. ‘It was a wet corner,’ someone in the crowd says; this is where they’re expecting the big numbers. Some fevered muttering implies it could be tight — there’s even talk of a five-minute ‘worm-off’, if it’s too close to call.

When all but three squares are filled, it’s time for the big reveal. The prospect of a tie is ill-founded: Archie, 10, and Sienna, 11, have prevailed with a nifty 164 worms, much to their friends’ euphoria. Their technique? ‘We just banged the grass!’ they say in unison, grasping a gleaming trophy. They’re not giving any more away; understandable reticence in victory, their secrets preserved for next summer’s title defence.

As proceedings wrap up, Forster mulls over worm-charming’s evergreen appeal. Community spirit aside, it’s the raw spectacle that he finds astounding, year on year. ‘There’s a few minutes where everything has to wake up. Then it’s almost magical — as if they’re coming out of a sponge.’ As well as Blackawton, the UK has a third contest.

Founded in 2021 by Georgia Gendall, the Falmouth Worm Charming Championships operates with a comparable ‘Charm, don’t harm!’ credo, but is an even more outré undertaking than Willaston’s, with elaborate fancy dress folded into the mix. As an artist whose work ‘celebrates, challenges and disrupts interspecies dependencies’, Gendall’s take on the calling is more holistic than the joyfully irreverent philosophy espoused in Willaston.

‘Worm charming creates a kind of shared attention on something usually overlooked: earthworms, which are essential to healthy soil and ecosystems — celebrating the hidden labour of the natural world,’ she explains. ‘[It’s about] participating in a slightly absurd, very human ritual that reconnects you to your body, to other people and to the ground beneath your feet.’ What could be more charming than that?

The article originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I am guessing that any reader, who, like me, spends much of their spare time out amid nature, has come up short on one specific set of observations: the moments that a bird of prey captures its food. Even observing a kestrel as it drops onto a vole after hovering over the field is rare.

In 50 years of looking, I have never once glimpsed a sparrowhawk take a bird. I’ve regularly seen the moments immediately afterwards, when the deed is done and the hawk, with wings spread and cowling some poor casualty, has its claws embedded in vital parts. However, the precise second of first contact is unknown to me.

Readers who have witnessed it will probably have done so when they chanced to be seated by a window as a sparrowhawk visited their bird feeders. It brings the visceral moment to the breakfast table and it can be both shocking event and raw spectacle all at once. What such garden assassinations also bring to the fore is the entire hunting ecology of this raptor.

Sparrowhawks are relatively small birds of prey, lighter in weight than a merlin; the male sparrowhawk is lesser in size and wingspan even than a kestrel. What they lack in dimensions, however, they more than make up for in speed and the element of surprise.

Sparrowhawks are originally from wooded habitats, where they can swerve and jink unseen among the trees, often low to the ground when you glimpse them as little more than a grey blur fizzing past. They are now brilliantly adapted to suburban environments. I suspect they use hedges, fences and even our own buildings to blindside possible prey.

I recall vividly a friend describing how a sparrowhawk once flew in like a bullet, ran up the garage roof and then peered over its apex for any possible victim on the other side. These urban innovations in sparrowhawk behaviour have possibly been in play over the past 50 years.

It was in the 1970s that the species began a steady recovery in Britain from the dark days of DDT and other agrochemicals that had proved poisonous to several bird-eating raptors. At that time, there were about 17,500 pairs, but there are an estimated 31,000 today, with an inexplicable shallow decline in recent years. Some have observed the rise in the species and linked it to declines in a number of our songbirds, presuming a causal connection between them. For these reasons, they dislike the sparrowhawk and advocate for its control.

There are several simultaneous shifts in bird populations that counter any sweeping condemnation of the sparrowhawk. One concerns our blue and great tits, which, like the raptor, are woodland birds. In fact, the breeding cycles of all three are closely integrated, because at the very moment our woods are full of young, naïve tit fledglings, the sparrowhawk is feeding them to its own brood.

Yet, as the hawk population has increased, so, too, have both great tit and blue tit numbers (by 76% and 23% respectively), although the latter has experienced a shallow decline since 2008. What offers support for the idea that sparrowhawks may be influencing some of the birds visiting our gardens arises from long-term population studies conducted by the British Trust for Ornithology.

The organisation’s research suggests that there is a negative consequence of the raptor’s presence upon three routine attendees at bird feeders: the starling, house sparrow and blue tit. The first two are so reduced that they are now red-listed species. What the evidence seems to show is that gardens where sparrowhawks are present have smaller numbers of those three songbirds.

It may be direct predation, but it could equally be that those species are now coming less frequently to such places. It doesn’t as yet show any link at the wider level of national populations.

What is indisputable, however, is that both sparrow and starling declines have multiple antecedents, even if the intensification of our agriculture is the single most important underlying factor in a complex picture. What seems equally incontrovertible is a partial inversion in our expectations, whereby the open country is an impoverished place for wildlife, whereas our towns and cities operate as refuges alike for blue tits and sparrowhawks.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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Farmers are being encouraged by British Wool to cash in on this year’s sheep clip by selling through the organisation, which is the UK’s last agricultural commodity board.

British Wool collects farmers’ wool to auction across the year and promotes it at home and abroad. It says that international interest in British wool is at its strongest for years, and it needs at least another 1,000 tons this shearing.

‘The price we can pay to farmers is at a 10-year high and it has increased 70% since last year,’ Gareth Jones of British Wool told Country Life. ‘However, our biggest challenge is volume. The national flock [the number of sheep] has been shrinking and there has been a trend for farmers to use their wool on farm as the price we could offer them didn’t cover the price of shearing. Now, however, there is strong demand and we want to encourage farmers to let us sell their wool for them again.’

Sheep numbers aren’t only falling in Britain, but globally, not least in New Zealand, another factor that has fuelled demand for British wool. A further element is the rise of shedding breeds — such as Dorpers, Easy Cares and Dorset and Wiltshire Horns — as the National Sheep Association estimates that there are at least 500,000 of these hair-coated sheep in the UK that produce no wool for the market.

Although some farmers were driven to burn fleeces during the years of rock-bottom prices, others became entrepreneurial and are unlikely to return to British Wool. Katy Allanby falls into this category. She keeps a small mixed flock near Pickering, North Yorkshire, selling the bulk of her wool privately to crafters by advertising online. ‘I get a better return,’ she explains.

Julie Robertson, who farms 160 ewes near Stonehaven, Aberdeen, produces about 500 kilograms of wool each year, getting the best spun at a local mill to sell and making more than she could hope to from British Wool. ‘[British Wool] is going to struggle to get people back on board,’ she believes. ‘The price for my best wool would now be about 97p a kilo, which is much better than it was. We used to get about 7p.’ However, now, she says, she ‘can sell a raw fleece, weighing about 3½ kilograms, to a spinner for about £10’.

Interest in wool as a ‘green’ alternative to petroleum-derived materials keeps increasing. It is used as housing insulation, packaging for parcels and in high-end upholstery. Small businesses such as Fliss Lewis’s Woolshred are using it in products for gardeners, with Lewis buying several tons of black Hebridean fleeces from British Wool over the past five years to clean up and sell as garden mulch, wool twine and garden felt. ‘Wool is good as a natural slug and snail deterrent, for keeping moisture in pots and as a weed suppressant,’ she says.

Wool bedding has also increased in popularity. Research from Bangor University earlier this year showed that wool outperforms feather, synthetic and down-filled bedding, being warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Bangor’s product design faculty is currently exploring the effectiveness of wool’s lanolin as an industrial lubricant.

‘The demand for wool keeps increasing — it is an incredibly versatile product,’ says Jones.

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Last week, Athena revisited Portchester Castle, Hampshire, on the edge of Portsmouth Harbour. The site is still physically defined by the walls and towers of a Roman shore fort constructed in the late third century AD. It is the most complete survival of its kind anywhere in Europe.

Over time, the vast enclosure created by the Roman fortifications has been turned to many different purposes. The castle aside, the walls have served as protection for an Anglo-Saxon burgh in 904, a short-lived Augustinian monastery in the 12th century, as well as a large prisoner-of-war camp during the Napoleonic Wars, to name a few.

Some of these functions have left a clear physical mark. The monastic church, for example, survives in parish use and the position of the long-demolished claustral buildings is represented by a line of latrine chutes cut through the Roman wall.

Others have disappeared without obvious trace. During this summer of heat and drought, however, more of the history of the site is on show than usual. Climb to the top of the castle keep and there is not only a spectacular view of the harbour, Gosport and Portsmouth, but some additional archaeology in the form of crop marks visible in the usually featureless surrounding expanse of lawn.

Differences in the depth and character of the soil mean that in this extreme weather the grass has grown or burnt away to different degrees, revealing invisible foundations and trenches beneath the surface. Suddenly, the ordinary visitor can enjoy a sharpened understanding of the bewildering complexity of the site's history.

But this isn't the first time this has happened. At Longleat, in 2022, warm weather revealed some similar long-lost secrets.

Similar revelations are apparent all over the country. At Chatsworth, Derbyshire, for example, the ghostly outlines of the Great Parterre have appeared beneath the south front of the house. This was only one compartment of the vast formal garden laid out for the 1st Duke of Devonshire in 1699, which was largely swept away two generations later. The volutes and patterns of the beds have been seen on hot summers before, but they are not on show most years and they make apparent the staggering scale of this lost garden.

The prolonged spell of hot, dry weather has also revealed the hidden outline of Blenheim Palace’s historic 300-year-old parterre, offering a rare glimpse of the formal garden that once graced the grounds.

In Wales, meanwhile, which has received only 5% of its average July rainfall, an exceptional quantity and diversity of historic sites has been revealed. Among those identified by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales are a prehistoric long barrow at Welshpool, Powys, and training trenches dug during the First World War on what is now a golf course at Deganwy, Conwy. There have been some new discoveries as well, including a previously unknown Iron Age or Romano-British farmstead enclosed by a double ditch near Llandysul, south Ceredigion.

If, for the future, we are going to have to live with more summers such as this, one positive thing is that we may discover much more about our own history and the palimpsest of our landscape.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Cumulus; cirrus; stratus; nimbostratus; altocumulus… there is a rolling, tongue-pleasing poetry in the scientific labels for cloud types, although their ancient folk-naming has its descriptive merit. Cirrus uncinus, in old language, is ‘mare’s-tail cloud’ and altocumulus is the ‘mackerel sky’ of neatly arranged small clouds, fish-scale like.

Clouds, those ever-passing ethereal entities above our heads, receive their own dedicated branch of meteorology, which is nephology (from the Greek nephos, meaning ‘cloud’). Rightly so — the airy formations are a scientifically reducible phenomenon. A cloud forms when invisible water vapour turns into visible water drops.

There are three basic sorts, beginning with cumulus or heap cloud, which is lumpy, bumpy and brilliant white when lit by the sun. Cumulus cloud evolves constantly. The top may rise and freeze into tiny ice crystals and conjure its forbidding offspring, cumulonimbus, the thunder cloud containing its 50,000 tons of water, destined to fall from the skies as heavy rain — or hail.

Elsewhere, other times: air masses rise slowly and cool gently to form the second basic type of cloud — the low-dwelling stratus, or sheet cloud, memorably described by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as: ‘When o’er the silent bosom of the sea/The cold mist hangs like a stretch’d canopy.’ Light rain may well descend from the thicker parts of stratus and, in winter, the cloud can descend from the heavens to Earth as fog. Then comes the last of the prime trio: the wispy cirrus cloud family is a high flyer, at about three to eight miles overhead. From these three families come the various cloud sub-taxonomies and combinations.

Due to its temperate climate, Britain tends to avoid exotic and extreme clouds, although not entirely, which is luck, bad or good depending. Nacreous or ‘rainbow clouds’, usually habituees of polar regions, illuminated our northern skies with their mother-of-pearl iridescence in the winter of 2023. They journey the stratosphere as nacreous clouds, three times higher than the cruising of jet planes, and only form when the air temperature is -78˚C.

Noctilucent clouds venture higher still to become the highest clouds of all, skirting the very edge of space to shine in the summer months with vaporous electric blue, a dissipating sky-jolt from some Frankenstein laboratory. Noctilucent iterations were rarely recorded in these isles before 1885, but are increasingly noted by cloud-spotters. Some suggest the augmentation in the number of entrancing noctilucent clouds is due to anthropogenic climate change. Every cloud has, as it were, a silvery-blue lining.

Clouds, whether tall nimbostratus towering up into the sky or the delicate hazy, lazy milk-water cirrostratus, move. They are Nature’s shield from the sun and Nature’s water dispersion system, this usually from the ocean to drier regions, although capriciously so. As Percy Bysshe Shelley expressed it some 200 years ago in The Cloud, we hope for gentle cumulus clouds to ‘bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,/From the seas and the streams’ for the garden, rather than a thunder-faced cumulonimbus to rain on a parade or the Macmillan tea party at the vicarage. Cumulonimbus is the dark prince of clouds, frequently spreading its top out to resemble a blacksmith’s anvil, from which rain hammers down.

Sometimes, however, such as in a sizzling 1976-style summer, we want black rain-bearing nimbostratus clouds. Humans have forever tried to inspire precipitation in parched places, whether with the Navajo rain dances, Mapuche rain-sticks or by the oddest means of all, a ‘cloudbuster’. This, designed by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897– 1957), sought to produce rain by manipulating the ‘orgone’ energy in the atmosphere via copper tubes aimed at the sky. There is, alas, no proof it ever worked.

Clouds are their own advance information system, their shape and sailing height signals to their likely behaviour. We read clouds for the weather they carry pregnant in their ectoplasmic bodies and for the weather front they portend. There is truth in folk weather lore because it was founded by sky-gazing eyes across the ages: ‘Mackerel sky, mackerel sky — never long wet, never long dry’ runs the venerable adage, accurately so and passed down generations of country people like a small precious gem.

Our fate is not written in the stars, but in the clouds. Over the millennia we have, accordingly, ascribed them mythical and theological purpose. The epithets of the Greek deity Zeus are ‘Gatherer of Clouds’ and ‘Storm-God’, as he is able to wield the weather to influence human affairs. The Christian God, meanwhile, guided the Israelites through the daylight desert with a ‘pillar of cloud’ (Exodus 13:21) and His son is destined to return ‘in clouds with great power and glory’ (Mark 13:26).

To explain our brain-state, we have sought the state of the clouds for an applicable metaphor: ‘under a cloud’ suggests suspicion of guilt, ‘cloudy thinking’ is brain-fog and ‘on cloud nine’ is euphoria. Wordsworth went full anthropomorphic — and he is not the only one — in his famous verse line ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, superimposing his own solitariness on the travelling body of vapour in the sky above him in the 19th-century Lake District. He had a point: unmoored by earthly cares, a cloud ‘That floats on high o’er vales and hills’ is patently also an emblem of freedom.

There is liberation in cloud-watching. The Ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, who knew a thing or two about clouds, hence his play The Clouds, considered them ‘the patron goddesses of the layabout’. This is hardly a slur, as idling allows us to cloud-gaze. Go out, go out and regard the clouds; they come, menacing fast, in fleets of masted galleons. They approach, stately, in a passeggiata of ice-castles in the air or they erupt in turbulent brew-smoke from a moorland witch’s cauldron. They arrive, too, as breathy kisses, their only apparent purpose to point to the perfect blue of the sky with their cute white exhalation. Yet sometimes the cloud slides in, surreptitious, and puts a lid over the known world, suppressing, depressing. Clouds? Always shape-shifting in their form and mood.

Clouds are physical process and phenomena, yet they make us look beyond humdrum ratiocination. They are physics, they are metaphysics and the link between. Examine the paintings of John Constable, who made 100 studies of clouds between 1821 and 1822 alone. In his most famous work, The Hay Wain (1821), the clouds frame and still the scene, necessarily. Clouds make our British landscape whole. Their unlikely absence causes the unlikely exclamation: ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky!’

There is liberation in cloud-watching. The Ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, who knew a thing or two about clouds, hence his play The Clouds, considered them ‘the patron goddesses of the layabout’. This is hardly a slur, as idling allows us to cloud-gaze. Go out, go out and regard the clouds; they come, menacing fast, in fleets of masted galleons. They approach, stately, in a passeggiata of ice-castles in the air or they erupt in turbulent brew-smoke from a moorland witch’s cauldron. They arrive, too, as breathy kisses, their only apparent purpose to point to the perfect blue of the sky with their cute white exhalation. Yet sometimes the cloud slides in, surreptitious, and puts a lid over the known world, suppressing, depressing. Clouds? Always shape-shifting in their form and mood.

Clouds are physical process and phenomena, yet they make us look beyond humdrum ratiocination. They are physics, they are metaphysics and the link between. Examine the paintings of John Constable, who made 100 studies of clouds between 1821 and 1822 alone. In his most famous work, The Hay Wain (1821), the clouds frame and still the scene, necessarily. Clouds make our British landscape whole. Their unlikely absence causes the unlikely exclamation: ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky!’

If Constable was a cloud apostle, there was one greater. The understanding of clouds as science-art antimony had its crucial evangelist in Goethe, 19th-century Europe’s intellectual superstar, who wrote: ‘To find yourself in the infinite,/You must distinguish and then combine;/Therefore my winged song thanks/The man who distinguished cloud from cloud.’

The man who ‘distinguished cloud from cloud’ was young British Quaker and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, author of the 1803 pamphlet Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. The pidgin Latin Howard used for his pioneering cloud categorisations received both snobby academic disdain and populist ire (was plain, brown-smock English not good enough?). However, Goethe came to Howard’s defence and the matter was settled by the sheer immovable weight of Goethe’s cultural standing. Goethe even referred to Howard as ‘Master’. Howard’s Latinised terms henceforth became the names by which we call the cloud types.

Smitten with Howard’s ‘modifications’, Goethe even adapted them into short musical poems in a collection titled Howard’s Ehrengedächtnis (In Honour of Howard). Ever the synthesis of Romantic and Rational, Goethe had recognised a kindred spirit: the classification system is equal parts practical and poetic. Read again the cloud types with which we began. Cumulus; cirrus; stratus; nimbostratus; altocumulus… all Howard’s creation. They are precise scientific categories, yet they might be heroes and heroines wandering the Roman legend of The Aeneid.

Like the clouds themselves, Howard’s naming of clouds has both utility and beauty

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

If we judged magpies purely on looks, they would surely rank among the most visually arresting birds in Britain. It is not only the boldness of their black-and-white design. It is the subtle touches, such as the uppermost wing feathers (technically called tertials), which flash a brilliant azure or turquoise depending on the light.

When magpies fly, they reveal that lovely long, shimmering tail, as well as delicate dark tips to nine white outer-wing feathers. Alas for the species, the voice is similarly arresting, albeit for the wrong reasons. The machine-gun rattle is distinctive, yet supremely unmusical. It is invariably described as chattering and one nice detail is that the sound gave the bird its Italian name — gazza — which, in turn, was believed by some to be the source for our word gazette, the gossipy broadsheet for the chattering classes.

It is not only that grating racket that leads some to dislike magpies, but the same issue that condemns many of the others in our Unloved Birds’ Club: their robust prosperity in modern suburban Britain.

Magpies have had a great half century and more than doubled their numbers since the 1960s, with the national total put at 610,000 pairs. It should be said that the increases followed centuries of persecution and it is from an old suppressed place that the species has rebounded.

The recovery was also underway from the early 20th century. However, that increase has closely mirrored declines in many of our most wonderful song-birds: house martins, willow and marsh tits, nightingales, mistle and song thrushes, to name only a few. The tendency is to make this link causative — to assume that thrushes have gone because magpies have flourished.

It is indubitably the case that magpies are nest predators, taking the eggs and young of other songbirds. It is equally true that seeing magpies rip apart a nest and carry away helpless chicks is a visceral, often upsetting experience. Yet the powerful impact of the encounter doesn’t equate to a principle of ecology. No matter how offensive it might be, it is not proof that magpies are the key reason for declines in other species.

Firstly, we have to admit that the magpie doesn’t come to us with a clean moral sheet. Centuries of superstitions cast the bird as a villain or as an omen of ill fortune. The ‘one for sorrow’ rhyme once known to every school-child is only the tip of a folkloric iceberg.

Another common notion is that magpies are habitual thieves. These ancient ideas freight the species with negative associations and place it in the frame as a scapegoat. However, the main allowance we have to make for magpies derives not from an admission of our past superstitions, but from our acceptance of the facts. There have been several studies demonstrating how songbirds flourish in precisely the places where magpies have themselves done well.

One of those studies was completed at the GWCT’s research and demonstration farm at Loddington, Leicestershire. It looked at the effects of three predatory species and concluded that ‘there is no convincing evidence of an impact of these corvids on songbird breeding abundance. The evidence indicates that songbird populations are resilient to predation’.

In short, songbirds have many young, including several broods in a season and, although many might be lost, including some to magpies, the overall total is sustained. If such evidence doesn’t exonerate magpies in totality, it does indisputably illustrate a central principle that is so often a casualty in these bird disputes. Working out the ecology of British Nature, where thousands of species are interconnected, is enormously difficult. Following a single linear path through it and finding simple, sometimes simplistic, answers to enormously complex questions might be tempting. However, it is not the same as the truth.

When all this is said, it doesn’t mean those who dislike the corvid with the jaunty swagger and the rattling voice will find a way to love it. Equally, those who cherish magpies for their beauty and resilience won’t condemn the bird for eating thrushes occasionally. This, after all, is life. It is we, ultimately, who have to learn to live with one another, just as, in Nature, magpies live alongside garden thrushes.

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

Has anyone else noticed mozzies coming out earlier in the afternoon? In defiance of conventional wisdom (mosquitoes, it is said, come out either at dawn or dusk to avoid wilting in the heat), the pesky things are proving hardier than ever.

Those in my garden enjoy a feeding frenzy every time I choose to work from home and eat alfresco. Perhaps these ones are a mutant species engineered by City bosses to return us to the office all week. Then again, perhaps not.

Our summer, as well as being hot, has been unusually humid. The moisture in the air is catnip to the mosquito and the heat itself appears to have upset traditional patterns — drawing the insects out in the late morning and early afternoon as the temperature now peaks at about 6pm.

Last month was the driest July for England and Wales since records began 190 years ago, according to the Met Office. It was the second warmest July for the UK as a whole and also the sunniest on record.

So who else, apart from the mozzies, has been a heatwave winner this summer, and who have the biggest losers been? We, at Country Life, break it down for you.

The winners

Octopus

The hot weather, although detrimental to much marine life, has been encouraging greater numbers of warm-water creatures, including the octopus.

Our eight-armed friend has also begun to migrate because of this. More and more octopuses are being found near Welsh, English and Scottish shores.

This is a nuisance to some of our swimmers; and, to fishermen, a concern. However, to chefs and calamari lovers in the UK this is a huge win — as well as for the creature itself, which is multiplying in droves.

Butterflies

Warm temperatures and sunny days speed up the life cycles of these beautiful animals and encourage them to fly out in high numbers to feed and mate.

Professor Richard Fox, head of science at the UK charity Butterfly Conversation told the BBC last month that we could be in for a 'bumper summer of butterflies'.

'They are cold-blooded creatures and rely on the warm from the sun,' he added. 'On these hot, dry days, they can get on with their lives, particularly finding a mate and the females laying eggs to create the new generation of butterflies later in the year.'

If only the warm weather had made mating as seamless for human beings. Alas, single friends have bemoaned that sweating buckets on the London underground is a sure fire way to put off the opposite sex.

English winemakers

In Haywards Heath at Bee Tree Vineyard last month, wine was flowing. Sugrue South Downs is just one of the British vineyards massively profiting as the sun continues to shine.

Dr Alistair Nesbitt, director at vine management service Vinescapes, told Metro last month: 'We have seen a really rapid rise in temperatures during the growing season over the last 30 years.

‘Regions that were previously unsuitable are now suitable. That has really enabled these vineyards and varieties to expand and grow.’

With weather here becoming the same as Champagne's in its glory days, the only way is up for English vineyards. With wine now being made as far as Scotland, it really seems that the sky's the limit — as long as the weather doesn't get much hotter than it is now this really could be English wine's Belle Époque.

Tomatoes

It is my first year of growing any vegetables at all, and despite my experienced neighbour's many warnings about the perils of growing tomatoes from seed (the word 'heartbreak', I believe, was uttered) they have turned out amazingly.

In southern France, where UK supermarkets important many of our tomatoes from, the industry is reporting a 50% decline in production due to the heat, according to Simon Conway, the chair of the British Tomato Growers Association and the Cucumber and Peppers Association. However, the amount of sunshine over here has lead to 'brilliant yields' for British growers.

My garden for one has provided a bountiful haul that keeps on giving, made sweeter by the warm weather. British tomatoes, I have concluded, are a heatwave winner. Growing more locally can only be a good thing for this country.

Lidos

Normally the paddling-ground of the wetsuit-clad or incredibly brave, the warmer weather has been excellent news for our country's lidos. My local Brockwell Lido, which in February is an unfathomably cold icy pit, has become in recently months a literal South London hotspot. Long may it remain in vogue (although their recent decision to charge £5 to rent a deck chair due to its increased attendee numbers is a bit of a step too far, in my opinion).

The tide of popularity even saw a group of 20 MPs and the Fabian Society call for water companies to fund the reopening of the country’s lost lidos last month. I'm sure that this would be a pleasant relief to all.

The losers

Hedgehogs

It's a sad time for poor little hedgehogs, who don't have enough water to make sufficient milk for their hoglets —so are pushing them out of their nests before they're old enough to survive.

Yvonne Cox, the co-founder of Hedgehog Rescue in Yate near Bristol, told the BBC last month that the animals have been 'coming in thick and fast'. You can help by leaving shallow dishes of water out in your garden with stones in (for them to perch on).

Farmers

If watching the new series of Clarkson's Farm has taught me anything it is that it has been a tricky time for farmers as of late. And this has only been worsened by the heatwaves. The CLA's president Gavin Lane said: 'Farmers are telling us this is the worst harvest in years. A sodden winter followed by drought has left wheat at half its usual height and some crops not worth harvesting.

'This is the third drought in five years. What was once extraordinary is becoming part of farming in Britain, and government must start planning for it. We know that proper government investment in resilient farming systems, from reservoirs to wildfire prevention, could help farmers cope with these new extremes.'

Bees

Data from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust's national monitoring scheme shows that British bumblebees could suffer sharp falls in their numbers as heatwaves become more frequent.

UK species have fat, furry bodies that have historically helped them survive in our cooler climate. Dr Richard Comont, the Trust's science manager, told the BBC that once air temperatures reach around 28ºC to 32ºC, UK bumblebees can begin to struggle. 'They actually cook themselves from the inside out,' he said. You can help by creating a more flower-rich habitat in your own garden as well as adding a pond and more shade.

Rivers

Rivers and streams have been another heatwave victim, with rising temperatures putting them in danger. People have been asked not to canoe on the River Wye because the water is so hot that salmon and trout have moved into the shallow, oxygenated water in order to survive. If a canoe appears they will move to deeper water and die. So it's bad news for not only rivers, but the marine life that live in them too.

A version of this feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

With chaos at EU ports and airports, horrific wildfires in Spain and France and a continuing heatwave here, it is not surprising that there is a significant growth in holidaying at home.

At the same time, 2026 will see an all-time high in numbers of foreign visitors to the UK. This will all be a welcome relief for the hard-pressed hospitality industry and it is particularly important in the countryside, where tourism provides many of the jobs that have been lost in agriculture.

The Prime Minister’s welcome announcement of some rate relief for pubs won’t compensate for the huge increase in employment taxes, but it does suggest that the Government is beginning to understand better the importance of hospitality to well- being. Tourism now contributes £147 billion to the economy and provides one in 15 jobs. Its growth up to 2030 is likely to outpace the wider economy and international visitors will spend an additional £9.4 billion compared with 2024.

However, there are drawbacks, as protests against tourist growth in Spain and other traditional holiday destinations show. One way to avoid this is to encourage a wider range of destinations, otherwise the crush in Cambridge, York, Westminster, Edinburgh and the other front runners will become unbearable. It is only by taking tourism more seriously as a key industry that the benefits can be spread and the inevitable pressures reduced.

The countryside — its villages and market towns as well as its great houses and monuments — could play a more important part in this. There is so much more to rural England than the Lake District and the Cotswolds, beautiful as they are. We need to be better at telling a wider rural story, not only to those who come from abroad, but to our own people, holidaying at home.

What will be much more difficult are the more personal issues that need to be raised. It does seem wrong that so many who search out the prettiest of villages spoil the view for others by presenting themselves at their ugliest. The Bermuda short is suitable only for the youngest and slimmest of profiles, not broad-bottomed, overweight middle-aged men. Broadway in Worcestershire and Lavenham in Suffolk, Cornwall and the Yorkshire Dales are not enhanced by topless visitors in garish shorts and flip-flops.

Of course, no one is looking for out-of-date formality — few but the conservative London clubs would insist on ties or prohibit trainers — it is simply that places that draw us to visit because of their beauty deserve our courtesy in presenting ourselves as attractively as possible.

Ancient market towns and beguiling villages should engender respect from visitors, not what is too often something akin to invasion. Large groups march through, following someone holding aloft an umbrella, often without thought for other pedestrians and rarely making way for those walking in the opposite direction. There is much that tour organisers can do to make their groups more easily absorbed into the life of the places they have chosen to come to view, such as using microphones and earpieces instead of shouting.

Then there’s the backpack. It has become the universal means of carriage, yet its users seem unaware of the effect a laden one can have as they swing around, thumping their neighbours with abandon. Books of etiquette may be out of fashion, but as tourism grows ever more prevalent, those involved in the UK hospitality industry need to seek the simple politenesses which will help avoid the backlash that is increasingly widespread elsewhere.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Not everyone likes insects and we tend to have little awareness of them, save for those that drink nectar or blood. Some are delicately beautiful, some frighteningly hideous. More than a million species are known (25,000 in Britain) and perhaps five million more may exist unknown.

They first appeared more than 300 million years ago and their biomass vastly exceeds that of humans: about three quarters of all animals are insects, although the total population in Britain has been falling alarmingly.

They are astonishing masterpieces of miniaturised creation, their tiny, six-legged, three-part bodies capable of feats of survival, strength, flight, orientation, organisation, fecundity and quite possibly sentience that are hard to appreciate, let alone understand.

Most insects hatch from eggs into larvae of often unappealing kinds and so they may remain for years, periodically moulting into larger exoskeletons called cuticles. They emerge, transformed, from their final moult into wondrously intricate creatures, usually four-winged and compound-eyed, able, according to type, to fly, dig, swim, build, hunt, navigate or fight and desperately keen to mate and create successors.

Insects have no internal bones, lungs or active blood circulation, relying on passive oxygen transfer through hair-lined openings and various tubes within their haemolymph-filled bodies. Some make sounds. Their brains are partly in their heads — processing brilliant vision, antennae input and eating — and partly in decentralised ganglia elsewhere, which means that a beheaded insect may survive for a day or two until it starves.

More than half are vegetarian, most are potential food for other animals and many eat each other. Insects cannot grow bigger than they do because of their inability to absorb more oxygen. Millions of years ago, there was more oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere — 35% compared with 21% now — which enabled them to be larger. The shedding and regrowth of their carapaces also renders them periodically unstructured and helpless.

Their tiny size and light framework means they are proportionately much stronger than large animals, most of whose strength is needed to carry their substantial bodies. The biological physics of this, the square-cube law — a cross-section of insect muscle is relatively large compared with the mass it supports — is well understood by experts.

Insect wings, wafer-thin membranes of tissue powered by muscles working at the edge of biological possibility, beat in some cases at 1,000 times a second, faster than nervous systems can operate.

‘It is quite impossible to overlook the importance of insects,’ emphasises George McGavin, former curator at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, one of Britain’s leading entomologists and an infectiously enthusiastic guide to the subject, who warns without hyperbole that ‘they are essential for the welfare of our planet’ to keep the ecosystem functioning.

He also observes that research indicates they probably feel pain, although not quite as fish, birds or mammals do. As the examples that follow demonstrate, we might consider ourselves much more accomplished than insects, but this could be a misconception. What is clear, however, is that, although we need insects, they do not need us.

'Only 2in long and lighter than a silk handkerchief'

After hatching, dragonflies spend up to five years underwater as carnivorous larvae, moulting a dozen times and eating prey such as tadpoles. Eventually, they climb a reed, unzip their larval skin and, perhaps with a frisson of joy, open two pairs of folded wings and transform into elegant, swift, airborne hunters with 360-degree vision, capable of reaching speeds of 40mph, hovering, moving sideways, backwards or vertically.

They occasionally catch hummingbirds in the US. Males often mate when flying in tandem with a captured female; if they land, he will fastidiously endeavour to empty her of any sperm she may already have acquired before supplying his own.

Dragonflies have quite astonishing range: globe skimmers (rare in Britain) are only 2in long, lighter than a silk handkerchief and can fly 3,700 miles at altitudes of up to 18,000ft.

'Strength wise, it's the equivalent of a carthorse carrying a whale'

Beetles, in more than 350,000 varieties — 4,000 in Britain alone — constitute 40% of all insects. The sturdy dung beetle, invaluable for tidying up the planet, can manoeuvre 1,000 times its own weight, the equivalent of a carthorse carrying a whale.

Their front wings form hard protective shields (elytra) for the back ones, which fold neatly below, enabling what Sir David Attenborough calls ‘rough tasks’, including digging into earth or wood. Elytra also enclose and retain enough air for some beetles to scuba dive. The metallic-green tiger beetle runs so fast that it outpaces its vision, having to pause to check where its prey is.

Stag beetles, Britain’s largest, are specialised for wrestling rivals with huge mandible ‘horns’. Fireflies and glow worms (both beetles) are bioluminescent to attract mates, the former producing flashing signals when aloft, the latter, flightless, a steady Earth-bound glow.

'A human athlete matching this could leap across Park Lane'

Grasshoppers can long-jump 20 times their own length — a human athlete matching this could leap across Park Lane. They possess powerful leg muscles and weigh very little, which helps, but also have an ability to wind part of their legs into tension, like a crossbow, which they release to supercharge their remarkable spring. (Fleas, without wings, have some elastic tissue that similarly assists their tremendous jumps: 40 times their body length).

Grasshoppers make sound by stridulation, rubbing their forewings against their hind legs. This insect violin-playing produces different chirping ‘songs’ according to species. It is, if you like that sort of thing, a kind of music, akin to the beguiling summer background of the cicada, a creature that spends up to 17 years as underground larva before emerging in synchronised profusion with millions of others to overwhelm the awaiting hungry birds.

Cicadas possess tymbals — vibrating membranes, natural tambourines — in their abdomens (some moths have these, too). Grasshoppers’ ears are in their abdomens, whereas crickets, their relatives, have theirs set conveniently on their forelegs.

'They can make bridges, rafts, acid and clones of themselves'

Ants are the world’s leading carnivores and constitute 20% of total land-animal biomass. They are essential to the ecosystem and Britain has more than 50 species, although not the fiercest.

Darwin called their brains ‘marvellous atoms of matter’. They possess an endogenous pedometer to record distance and a sort of internal sextant, to take mental bearings of the sun as they move about. Remembering these, they adjust for directional changes made when travelling and can march directly back to their nests. They rarely get lost.

It is difficult to comprehend how such minute mass-produced brains can achieve this— ours certainly can’t. There is prolific evidence about what ants actually do, but less certainty about how these activities are governed. Explanations such as collective intelligence, pheromone secretion, smell, neuron stimulus, genes, imitation or evolution raise as many questions as they answer.

Some ants keep slaves, some garden. Some farm aphids and enjoy drinking the honeydew secreted from their backsides. They can make bridges, rafts, acid and, in some cases, clones of themselves, as well as being able to carry many times their own bodyweight.

'They may recognise a human face and can learn by watching'

After roving in search of nectar to drink, later to be regurgitated as honey, bees inform their fellows where to find a discovered nectar source by ‘waggle dancing’ with varying degrees of pattern or intensity inside the hive. This exercise apparently tells the next patrol where to go.

How do they know how to dance or, indeed, how to interpret such dancing, should they encounter it? Bees have been observed using improvised tools, as chimpanzees do, they may recognise a human face, can learn by watching and probably feel pain —especially when attacked by wasps, from which they evolved.

'May travel 100 miles in its three-week lifetime'

With their nocturnal relatives moths, butterflies are renowned for the colours, patterns and textures of their captivating, seemingly fragile, minutely scaled wings. (The scales are flattened hairs.) However, they can be remarkably energetic. The humble cabbage white, weighing only 0.05oz and with a wingspan of 1½in, may travel 100 miles in its three-week lifetime.

More impressive are painted ladies, weighing less than a gram, millions of which fly at 1,500ft and 30mph to England from North Africa and back, surviving wind, rain and storm, guided by the sun. Richard Fox of Butterfly Conservation calls them ‘sophisticated travellers with a brain the size of a pinhead’.

Moth caterpillars, meanwhile, wrap themselves in silk. This, although ‘little more than insect spittle,’ notes Dr McGavin, is a wondrous substance, both in strength and texture, first exploited in neolithic China. Strands of silk, extraordinarily thin, are as strong as steel of similar gauge, smooth and elastic, too. Ballgowns and fine underwear are gifts from the chrysalis. Britain’s only indigenous silk moth is the emperor. Tiger moths can thwart bats’ hunting radar.

'They construct huge mounds, some resembling Gaudí’s cathedrals'

In Australia and elsewhere, termite communities of hundreds of thousands, focused on a distended queen (who may live to 40, kept productive by a tiny, energetic consort), construct huge mounds, some resembling Gaudí’s cathedrals, others large gravestones. These may be 20ft high, with much deeper basements, and are air-conditioned with chimneys, vaults, passages and nurseries. How this is achieved, in the dark, by minute, deaf workers, remains unknown.

'May live without their heads for several days'

The unpopular cockroach can tolerate extremes of temperature and may live without food for several weeks, air for 45 minutes or their heads for several days. They have high radiation resistance and would probably survive atomic war.

'Champions of fecundity'

Fruit flies are champions of fecundity, producing up to 26 generations in a year, and are invaluable for medical research because 70% of our genes have fruit-fly equivalents.

Aphids, meanwhile, reproduce parthenogenetically (no sex required), some-times supplying overwhelming quantities of themselves — only to be consumed by ladybird beetles, which will eat their own offspring when they finish the aphids.

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

There are two key moments in the year when wood pigeons can be enjoyed to their best advantage. In the breeding season, our largest and heaviest pigeon performs an impressive aerial display. The bird’s flight is strong and direct, but on these occasions an individual surges forward high above the trees, then rises dramatically with more exaggerated beats, so that the upper wings often come together above the back in a loud, feathery clap. This achieved, it then sails down in an open-winged glide to repeat the manoeuvre, sometimes over and over.

The second moment is as much a signifier of season, although it comes earlier, at a point of transition from winter to spring. It is when the ivy berries finally ripen into thick black clusters amid the evergreen foliage. Wood pigeons love these life-saving fruits, which appear at a time of food scarcity sometimes called ‘the hungry gap’. If the ivy crop is good, the birds return to feast on them for days. They get so engrossed that they can lose any wariness and to reach particularly lustrous bunches they will clamber almost upside down, with white-barred wings outspread for balance.

In these contorted postures, the pigeon’s colours are vivid against the neutral background: the vinous breast, the deep almost bluish slate of the back and the iridescent lozenge at its neck, shining green.

Wood pigeons may be embedded in our sense of the British countryside, yet they join the Unloved Birds’ Club for much the same reason that consigns nine other species to the list. Quite simply, it is a matter of success. Wood pigeons have flourished in the 21st century, with their numbers hugely increasing from some three million pairs to an estimated 5.2 million today. There is barely a 10km census square in these islands, even in the treeless north of Scotland, where the birds don’t now breed.

They are almost entirely vegetarian and seldom aggressive. On the contrary, they routinely fall victim themselves and are a food source for predators, particularly sparrowhawks, goshawks and peregrines. They can even be taken by carrion crows.

Wood pigeon success isn’t founded on belligerence, but on adaptability. A wood-dwelling species, it will — if necessary — lay its eggs on open ground. Wood pigeons capitalise where natural foods are abundant. On moorlands, for instance, they feast on bilberries, then on the orange fruits of rowan trees. They survive equally in inner cities, where they regularly attend bird tables.

The bird’s capacious crop allows it to clean up in double quick time and, for these reasons, it can be an unwelcome — and expensive — garden visitor. Yet wood pigeons are seen at their deepest disadvantage, at least in the eyes of farmers and arable growers of all kinds, when their numbers are at a maximum after the breeding season.

In peak periods, there may be as many as 15 million wood pigeons in Britain, which equates to something like 8,000 tons of roving, flexible, hungry birds in search of grain, fruit or agricultural greens. They can be a scourge on allotments, raiding brassicas and beans even in peoples’ gardens. Farmers can suffer significant losses to their crops, ranging from oil-seed rape and peas to fruits of almost any kind. The bird can be shot on licence and the national bag is estimated at 3.6 million, many of which are eaten.

The wood pigeon may have an undisputed place in the Unloved Birds’ Club, but that it also feeds us is surely a mitigating factor. Pigeon breasts produce dark, rather livery meat that many judge delicious. They are widely sold and are occasionally prized on restaurant menus. This source of food is now unique among our gamebirds in one specific sense: the wood pigeon population flourishes without the slightest planned assistance from us.

There is one last element that might influence our final judgement on the species. Wood pigeons have a lovely, soft, crooning seven-note song, which continues as a drowsy chorus late into August and long after all other birds have ceased to sound. It is, therefore, a creature that appeals to our senses of hearing, taste, and sight — perhaps we can learn to forgive them a few pilfered greens.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In the past few years, 110 UK councils have declared ‘a Nature emergency’. If those worthy declarations could be backed by one meaningful change, then rethinking our relationship with insects would probably deliver the single biggest uplift in our environment.

Insects represent at least a quarter of all wild species in these islands. Almost all of the flowering plants in Britain — in fact, most of the 340,000 species known worldwide —are dependent upon insects to complete their reproduction. This has been true for 100 million years and it means the very greenness of the planet is a byproduct of insects.

The fertilising services of these creatures are also of huge economic value for humankind. It is calculated that insect pollination accounts for every third forkful of food we put in our mouths, from apricots to courgettes and the coffee in our cups to the apple in our pie. In total, that specific function has an estimated value of $400 billion a year worldwide.

We should note, however, that this is probably as nothing compared with insects’ additional roles as the recyclers of nutrients and of biodegradable refuse. We need pollinating insects and not only the much-loved, if over-emphasised, honey-bee.

Pollination is performed by an enormous variety of insect types, including moths and beetles. Chocolate is produced courtesy of flies and we owe our tomatoes to bumblebees. All of that vital, life-giving work is free of charge, too.

Insects are so much more than their utilitarian ‘assets’, however. Butterflies, such as the blue morpho, are among the most dazzlingly beautiful creatures that have ever existed. Their diversity is breathtaking. There is a stick insect in China that can grow to the length of an adult’s arm and yet fairy bees are so small that five could line up end to end on a finger nail.

Named insects represent half of all documented life forms and their numbers are mind boggling. For every human, there may be as many as 2.5 million ants. By biomass alone, ants can represent four times more than all the mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians in an area of rainforest.

No one has been more eloquent about our indebtedness to insects than the late American entomologist E. O. Wilson. His best corrective to our sense of hubris is his observation that: ‘If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.’

More succinct, however, was his summary of their centrality to life on Earth. Insects are, he wrote, ‘the little things that run the world’.

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

Even at 3am in high summer, it is not dark and, in the stillness out over the saltings, I can see gulls flying. They drift inland in threes and fours and the tide runs in beneath them. When daylight seeps into the sky at 4am, I find myself standing among thousands of empty crab shells. Somewhere down on the sea bed, out beyond the estuary, the ragged-clawed creatures have shed their exoskeletons to grow. Their old shells are ghosts among the spartina grass.

Cley next the Sea in north Norfolk, at the mouth of the River Glaven — named for the village of Glandford, once Gleamford, or ‘merry ford’ in Old English — looks to the North Sea. If you rain a straight line north from Cley, there would be nothing but ocean. That line would run clean between Svalbard and Greenland. Two thousand miles further, it hits the pack ice of the North Pole.

Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Cley was one of the busiest ports in Europe. The Glaven estuary ran deep then and could accommodate large merchant ships; Cley thrived on sending East Anglian wool to Europe. Now, the river is a narrow winding channel and its medieval might is difficult to imagine. From 1522, the estuary was drained to create grazing for cattle, a process that gradually led to the river silting up; it would be unrecognisable now to the merchants and Cley pirates who made their fortunes here.

Morning, as early birds catch worms

Shortly after 6am, three figures are sitting on upturned buckets on the sweeping shingle beach. As I draw closer, I see they are fishing. Each has a couple of rods set up with lines running into the waves. Roy, who tells me he has lived next to the sea all his life, has already caught three bass: ‘I’ve always liked fishing, it’s the air and looking to sea.’ He reels in his line, attaches a new worm onto the hook and casts again. The fishing has changed, he says: ‘We used to get codling all the time, but never bass. Now we do get bass, you see, and flounders if we’re lucky, perhaps a sole.’

Two shelduck fly past, low over the water. Now that Roy is getting older and his back starting to go, he relies on his brother to dig bait. ‘Where does he do that?’ I ask. Roy laughs. ‘You can’t be asking people where they dig their bait. We keep that a secret. It’s dug somewhere out on the mud.’ He nods in the direction of Blakeney and goes back to fishing.

Some 600 years ago, Blakeney and Cley were the same estuary with different channels, but whereas Cley was drained, Blakeney, to the west, has largely endured.

At 10.30am, four little children stand shrieking on the harbour wall there. They hold orange crabbing lines and croissants from the nearby bakery. One boy drops his croissant into the water and a herring gull swoops for it from a pile mooring.

Down on the mud, where water meets land, Trevor, a man in shorts and Wellington boots, is tending to his boat. He has a tub of white paint and is standing back to assess his work. Rosie, his little wooden dingy, ‘got a crack in it. I just put some white on there you see, after a bit of wood skin varnish, and then I’ll properly see to it this winter’. He usually only sails out to Blakeney Point. ‘I used to go to see the seals, but they’ve moved further on now.’ The seals, Trevor explains, were ‘on that gravel spit’ — he points to the horizon with his paint brush — ‘but then there was a big storm in the winter and it cut right through’. The whole estuary has changed and is always changing: ‘Up at the churchyard, there’s a wall that looks down over the Glaven and you can see big metal rings where the boats used to tie up. It’s nowhere near the sea now.’

Further out on the mud, an egret probes for crabs and, some 40 yards away, Will, a bait digger, is working away with his fork. The sand comes up black where he turns it over. He identifies the worm casts: ‘That tells you where the lugworms are.’ It isn’t a game of chance — he works the sand methodically, looking fixedly at the mud. When the worm comes up, he catches it between forefinger and thumb before it can disappear. Nodding into the distance in no particular direction, he points out that his work isn’t simply a means to an end: ‘When you’re out there digging, it’s just you.’

Midday, in the heat of the sun

At 1pm, I have lunch with David Diggens, who formerly ran the Norfolk Rivers Trust. We sit by a rusted house boat to eat crab and drink local wine. A wildfowler, fisherman and river conservationist, he knows the estuary as well as anybody: ‘The only reliable thing in life is constant change, and that is exactly what’s happening at Blakeney all the time.’

There is no wind and the temperature is approaching 30ºC. Small children in bad moods trudge by and passing dogs pant in the heat. ‘In terms of nature, the biggest changes here are the terns declining and the seals arriving,’ David observes. ‘The bass are now coming earlier and in greater numbers because of the change in sea temperature.’ The first grey seal pup birth was seen at Blakeney in 1988 and the population has been expanding ever since.

One of the great challenges, he explains, is the influx of tourists in the summer. Blakeney village runs largely on septic tanks — more people means more sewage. According to Bernard Bishop, wildlife warden at Cley for 40 years and still living in the house where he was born, there was once a famous mussel fishery here, but there are no edible mussels now.

After lunch, we walk out onto the mud and David picks samphire, which is just coming into season. He is an optimist and hopeful for wildlife in Norfolk. All it takes is for more people to care, but quite how you persuade them of the importance of biodiversity in all its forms is tricky, we agree. He hands me a small bunch of what is also known as St Peter’s herb, Peter being the patron saint of fishermen. ‘Only ever take as much samphire as you plan to eat that night for supper,’ he advises, a sentiment that goes for many things in life.

Late afternoon, in the cool of the church

The large wooden door of the Church of St Margaret’s, Cley, is open at 4pm, so I slip in and wander up the red pamment aisle. All around on the walls, but grown faint down the centuries, are medieval carvings of boats. It is thought they were etched by sailors as offerings before they set out on potentially dangerous voyages.

I sit in the back pew for a while listening to the wood pigeons cooing among the roof timbers — probably ships’ timbers originally — and then for an hour or so I sleep. When I wake, it is 5pm and I head out into the graveyard. The heat has passed and I wander among the headstones. There are local names, some I recognise, and at least three or four inscribed memorials for men lost at sea. Probably many more exist, but rain and time have eaten away at the stones.

I clamber sleepily over the back wall of the churchyard. The drop on the other side is lower than I anticipated and, when I pick myself up, I find I’m looking down over the Glaven, where the surrounding meadows are full of freshly cut hay. In spite of feeling that I’ve explored every inch of the church wall, I still can’t find Trevor’s ‘big metal rings where boats used to tie up’.

Eventide, as the long day closes

In the George & Dragon on the High Street in Cley, I order a pint, and then I order another, studying the black-and-white photographs of Cley past that hang on the pub walls. One, which must have been taken from a small plane in the early 20th century, shows the vast mud flats then in front of the village. In another, older still, there is a shooting party in a small boat, heading out from the famous Cley Windmill. It is 1886, the river is wide and the ladies are wearing hats.

At the bar, a semi-inebriated argument about how to pronounce Cley is taking place. ‘It is “clay”,’ says one of the old boys. ‘The tourists are right. You ought to say it like clay. That’s how they used to say it.’ Everyone laughs and I have no idea if he’s serious or otherwise (nowadays, it’s generally ‘cly’, to rhyme with ‘rye’).

By 10pm, it is getting dark and the town seems deserted when I wander down to the windmill. Bernard told me that the sails on the fantail used to clang in the breeze, keeping the whole village awake at night; now, they are chained up and there is silence. The Glaven, which runs beneath the windmill so slowly that you can hardly discern it is flowing at all, is little more than a trickle; it is possible almost to jump across it to the mud where the Randall family still cuts reed for local thatchers.

A warm wind rises and I listen to see if I can hear a bittern boom. The sky to the west is electric pink and a barn owl passes, hunting low in the half light.

This feature originally appeared in the July 15 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Far from being mere exercises in nostalgia, the regeneration of lidos, piers and other historic coastal properties can be a powerful contemporary force for good — but only if those embarking on such projects think strategically.

That was the message of the Valuing Seaside Heritage Symposium, organised by Historic Buildings & Places, which convened at Saltdean Lido in East Sussex last month. Representatives from national and local conservation bodies ranging from the Seaside Heritage Network to Historic England gathered to share lessons learned from half a century of work and reflect on ways forward.

Now that the mass domestic tourism that built Britain’s seaside resorts is a thing of the past, how can their futures be safeguarded? Securing the investment required to revitalise them and help them flourish once again is far from straightforward. Council-owned assets around the country have closed in droves over the past three decades due to prohibitive maintenance costs, with seafront buildings particularly vulnerable to the elements.

The current Government’s Levelling Up initiative was not focused on the coast and, although in March 2024 a dedicated Government fund to ‘support enhancements to our seaside heritage’ was announced, at the time of writing the proposed funding stream has not yet been developed.

The National Lottery Fund has awarded more than £200 million to seaside regeneration projects, including Hastings Pier and Margate’s Dreamland, but grants are competitive and the bid-writing process complex.

Despite these challenges, the symposium identified grounds for optimism. The creative industries — the fastest-growing section of Britain’s economy — have proved time and again that they can deliver a transformative shot in the arm to coastal communities. Attendees heard testimonials from Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, where grassroots cultural projects are bringing the town’s theatrical heritage into the present day, and Folkestone in Kent, where the Old High Street has become the heart of an attractive and vibrant creative quarter.

‘People said it was an overnight success, but actually when it came alive, we were 14 years into the [regeneration] project,’ said Alastair Upton of Creative Folkestone, the Arts charity that has spearheaded the town’s transformation. Speakers highlighted the importance of thinking long-term. Although one-off injections of cash are welcome, developers and charities alike must never lose sight of long-term viability.

Key to this is carefully staging restoration projects, said Matthew Mckeague of the Architectural Heritage Fund. He pointed to Grange Lido in Cumbria and Tarlair’s sea-cliff pool in Aberdeenshire, both of which have seen buildings refurbished so that they can become revenue-generating once again as a first step before costly work restoring the pools gets under way. This sort of phasing allows those in charge to ‘build a business model over time and learn who the market is,’ he said.

Projects with community involvement from the get-go stand a much higher chance of succeeding, not least because they are more likely to become financially self-sustaining all year round rather than only during the warmer months. A case in point is Saltdean Lido itself, considered the pinnacle of lido architecture and rescued from a long decline in 2022: it is now home to a gym with 600 local members, a popular community library and cafés and event facilities, as well as the restored pool.

Clevedon Pier in Somerset, dubbed England’s most beautiful by Sir John Betjeman and the country’s only Grade I-listed example, has weathered numerous storms under the care of the community-focused Clevedon Pier & Heritage Trust. Another success story is Penzance’s Jubilee Pool in Cornwall, the country’s most famous saltwater tidal lido: a significant proportion of the £1.8 million initial refurbishment investment was community shares, which made the people of Penzance part-owners.

‘You can see the regeneration it has spurred around the town,’ said Mckeague. However, he stressed the importance of drawing up business plans that are weatherproof, both literally and figuratively. ‘Community ownership isn’t a panacea. You still have to do all of the thinking.’

Seaside conservation groups are keeping a close eye on the Government’s new ‘Pride in Place’ scheme, which will see up to £5 billion given to some 250 areas across the UK with a focus on long-term improvements. With the UK now a member of UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, they are also hoping that the seaside holiday might be recognised as an example of living heritage, with all the attendant protections.

Meanwhile, although the days of the default bucket-and-spade holiday are long gone, a growing social-media-driven appetite for outdoor swimming and increasingly hot summers are making trips to the coast ever more tempting — and momentum is building behind seaside heritage projects as a result. One such is Ramsgate’s Marina Bathing Pool in Kent, which was closed in 1975 to make way for an unloved car park. The Ramsgate Heritage Lab is in discussions with Thanet District Council and a developer to revive it, and believes bringing the lido back to life could set a new and more sustainable course for the town’s future.

‘It is our responsibility not only to value seaside heritage because it tells us where we’ve come from, but because it can tell us where we’re going,’ said Rob Kenyon, its CEO.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I recall vividly sitting once with the acclaimed plein-air artist Kurt Jackson in his adopted Cornwall. As he worked, he kept looking intently back at the sunless Atlantic horizon. ‘Grey,’ he suddenly burst forth, ‘it’s such a beautiful colour!’ I can already hear readers asking: grey? For those who need convincing of its extraordinary aesthetic impacts, I recommend the sight of herring gulls flying over snow-covered fields.

The birds seem to gather the light in their underwings — ‘like candles in the night’ was how Henry David Thoreau described the effect. Yet the grey on their upper wings acquires an almost ethereal quality and it glistens and sparkles more intensely than the snow itself. Our ancestors knew this aspect, because when they named the herring gull they made it Larus argentatus, which means ‘ornamented with silver’.

In some ways, the beauty of herring gulls is at its most impressive when the birds gather in flocks above the city refuse dump. Back and forth goes the enormous bulldozer blade, driving the great multi-coloured tides of rubbish, and over everything the silver-winged gulls hover and rise and fall, feasting on our abundant waste. The birds thus reclaim our excess as a thing of natural beauty. Ironically, it is these adaptations made by a seabird to a world dominated by our species that has brought it into disrepute.

A good example is the herring gull’s change of nesting habits. It once bred almost exclusively on coastal cliffs, but in the early part of the 20th century it made a double shift from seashore to inland localities and from rock-face to rooftop.

The pioneers of the new habits began in towns such as Dover in Kent and quickly adopted a suite of settings amid factory tops, churches, chimneystacks, aircraft hangars and hotels, but also domestic houses. The behaviour then passed from town to town and long since travelled inland to major cities, including London.

One of the problems arising is that herring gulls make noisy neighbours. The birds are famous for an extraordinary vocalisation called the ‘long call’ when an adult begins with head facing downwards. The sound is one part hysterical wail, one part manic laughter, but, as it reaches the emotional climax and maximum volume, the bird throws its head high over its back. It is magnificent to see and to hear, albeit not perhaps at 4am.

Add to this the copious guano from the adults and chicks, then the stale food and huge stick-and-seaweed nest choking your gutter with debris, and it’s understandable why rooftop herring gulls are not always welcome. The birds can then literally add injuries to insult, because people passing below are viewed as possible threats to their offspring. Like all good parents, the adult gulls will defend their genes, sometimes swooping on the humans unawares.

Rooftop nesting by gulls has been a cause célèbre for some cities such as Gloucester, where the colony is more than 2,000 pairs, although the number comprises mainly lesser black-backed gulls. Alas, the choice of nest site is only one in a string of complaints. Gulls have been accused of killing small dogs, of brazenly walking into seaside shops and helping themselves to snacks, of routinely scattering the contents of rubbish bins across the streets and — heartlessly — snatching ice cream from the hands of small children.

MPs have made speeches in the House of Commons, warning of ‘gull wars on our high streets’. In Berwick-on-Tweed, vigilantes were reported to have taken matters into their own hands and shot gulls. Reminding people that herring gulls make grey beautiful may not cut it as a counter argument.

However, what about the fact they are now red-listed in Britain, having suffered massive declines? Despite wide perception that the birds have prospered by coming into our towns and cities, the switch in lifestyle is starting to look like necessity. Gulls are essentially sea-going birds.

Yet the 1960s coastal population has fallen from 286,000 pairs to 130,000 today. It has probably remained constant for several decades, although this apparent stability disguises the extent to which the species is now dependent upon roof nesting. We may yet have to learn to live with the herring gulls among us.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 15, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The river keeper

Getting soaked by freezing Upper Test water has happened more than a few times, as I have been known to believe I’m taller than I am, especially in waders,’ laughs Michael Taplin, river keeper at Wherwell Priory in Hampshire. ‘It also means I am on my third mobile phone and counting, having lost the previous ones to the river.’

His career path was an obvious one: he grew up a stone’s throw from the River Test and next to the boundary between the Houghton Fishing Club and the Leckford estate. He fished with his father and grandfather, messed around on the river after school and spent time with family friends who worked as river keepers. His employment is, he says: ‘My job, life and passion. Like any keepering role, it cannot be viewed as work, but more of a vocation.’

During winter, when the banks are empty of fishermen, major projects are carried out: constructing bridges, re-building banks, tree work, moving whole river channels, creating large wetland areas and digging new lakes. The summer is predominantly about managing the river and banks, with mowing, strimming and weed cutting. As well as maintenance, the role includes guiding experienced fishermen or teaching newcomers about chalk-stream fishing.

The appeal is that the environment is constantly changing: ‘No two seasons are the same and it fascinates me how altering one thing affects everything else down the line, whether that be weed growth, gravels, fly life or where the fish hold in a particular stretch of water.’ Taplin explains: ‘In my opinion, the basis of everything is weed. Ranunculus is the most important for us here. With ranunculus comes cleaner water, a sustained level, more fly life and happier trout. It needs flow and light to grow, so, generally, with a good winter of rainfall, a decent flow of water and some spring sunshine, it thrives. Then we can cut and shape the weed in order to maintain a healthy fishery. Observing these changes and drawing patterns is what helps me to continually improve the health of the river and, with that, improve the quality of fishing and the experience of being alongside it.’ Mary Skipwith

The open-water swimmer

Belle Kennedy found her appreciation of water changed dramatically when she went to university in the maritime city of Plymouth, where she is studying ocean science and marine conservation.

‘I used to be a competitive swimmer when young, but it left me with a difficult relationship both with water and swimming,’ she says. ‘Since coming to Plymouth, I have got massively into swimming in open water, which has changed how I view the coast and made me want to protect it. Tinside beach is especially popular here — as soon as the sun comes out, everyone is paddling and swimming — but, unfortunately, it is also popular with sewage. It has been a shock to discover how dirty the sea can be. You can’t see it physically — the water isn’t brown — which is why sewage alerts are really important. In 2025, it was the most polluted beach in England and Wales.’

Kennedy volunteers for the Rock Pool Project, a community movement collecting data on marine species, and for Surfers Against Sewage, a campaign group involving anyone using the sea. ‘The more volunteering I do, the more conscious I have become as to how fragile these ecosystems are. The pollution isn’t only affecting people, but wildlife, too. The Rock Pool Project is a great way to collect data, you get to connect with local people and it’s fun.’

She joined Surfers Against Sewage as a regional rep this year and answered a call-out to organise a nationwide paddle-out to raise awareness of pollution; more than 50 coastal locations joined in, making it one of the biggest turn-outs for years. ‘I’d seen it on social media before and I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity,’ Kennedy explains. ‘It was such a wonderful event, with a sense of collective care. It felt deeply humbling and was also a reality check, that the problem doesn’t only weigh on me, it weighs on others.’

The main aim of the event is to lobby water companies, calling on them to be accountable and to organise long-term fixes. ‘It is inevitable that it becomes political, but it is annoying,’ Kennedy comments. ‘Clean water should be a basic expectation. I think public awareness has shifted significantly. These conversations once felt confined to government circles, but now people are aware of the wider failures of water companies and the dangers of getting into dirty water. There is a strong sense that public pressure does matter.’ Kate Green

The wetlands scientist

Lizzie Grayshon, an ecologist at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) charity for 11 years, works mainly on wetland conservation in the Avon valley, which links Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire. This involves monitoring water quality, restoring wader bird numbers, releasing water voles and working with the local Farmer Cluster, part of a 100-plus-strong initiative in which groups of farmers work together to revive biodiversity relevant to their area.

Here, that is principally providing habitat for wader chick rearing and improving water quality. ‘Everyone is connected by the river and the flood plain,’ she explains. ‘It’s a beautiful place. There are not only waders, but meadow specialists — reed warblers, meadow pipits, cirl buntings and marsh harriers. We’ve had a huge gaggle of geese this year and loads of cattle egrets. As much as the marsh harriers cause problems for the waders, their presence is a good [biodiversity] indicator, although yesterday I saw one take a lapwing chick — you do have mixed feelings.

‘It is a protected area, but it is farmed and managed with grazing [mostly by cattle] and hay cutting, so has a nice mosaic of habitats. We advocate best-practice lethal and non-lethal control of predator species, which here include protected ones, such as buzzards, red kites and goshawks. Climate change plays a part; we are a relatively natural flood plain — one minute it’s under water, the next, it’s bone dry.’

The much-loved water vole is another helpful indicator of wetland health, a once-abundant native species that has declined through habitat loss and predation. Grayshon has been involved in an eight-year focus to identify and remove its chief enemy, the mink: ‘They really limit water voles’ recovery and success. We have been encouraging landowners to use their mink rafts [which float and detect the mustelids through their footprints], plus we supply traps and camera alarms.’

Wetlands provide a great natural cleaning service: they take in phosphates and absorb pollution, plus they are useful indicators of water quality and pollution sources. ‘Farming tends to take the rap, but is by no means responsible for all of it — there are a lot of people and villages and towns,’ says Grayshon. ‘We are under pressure here because the river meadows are SSSI-protected and there’s a designated inland bathing area at Fordingbridge, so testing has increased. There’s definitely a shift in public perception and councils, water companies and farmers are under more obligation to improve water health.’ KG

The river restorer

Phil Wright had been in the military for nearly 21 years when he was medically discharged with conflict PTSD in December 2021. It followed a couple of harrowing tours in Afghanistan when he had been seconded to an army special investigation branch and was ‘basically, dealing with death’.

He was directed to the charity Supporting Wounded Veterans and, through its mentoring programme, joined the Rivers’ Forum, its initiative to tackle pollution and simultaneously develop career opportunities for veterans. His first job was a pilot testing project on the River Dart in Devon using various methodologies and equipment including auto- and satellite testers. ‘I was on the upper Dart, which is remote and right up on the moor. It’s a spectacular river and one I knew well from Totnes down from Dartmouth from my time in the Navy,’ Wright explains. ‘I have had some mental-health struggles, but water is a very calming environment and being around it doesn’t really feel like work.’

Wright, an angler (mainly carp) and a canoeist (he was off to paddle the Great Glen in Scotland last month), also works for the Western Sussex Rivers Trust, which looks after the Lavant and Rother. ‘That job is currently less “rivery”,’ he explains. ‘I am on a temporary contract doing admin and finance, plus some geo-spatial mapping work, but I will be getting into river restoration work. Since I started, I have been massively surprised by how unclean some rivers are, despite appearances, with pollution and loss of biodiversity. A lot of work is needed. It’s completely new stuff for me to learn, really fascinating.

'Since being discharged, I have struggled to find a sense of purpose — quite a common experience for veterans — but this work has given it to me. Merely working for a wage is not good for the head.’ KG

The water campaigner

Katie Alcott, founder of international charity Frank Water, realised at first hand the problems caused by filthy water when she was 19 and working in a school in Kashmir in India. She took her customary two-litre bottle of water with her when out to supper with a local family, but, when it ran out during a hot curry, she drank their water: ‘Within half an hour, I was well acquainted with the bathroom.’

Those few swigs led to a three-year struggle with amoebic dysentery. ‘I knew nothing then — in the UK, we have the NHS, we turn on taps. You are unlikely to get unwell here from drinking tap water,’ she says. ‘A few weeks after getting ill, I noticed that beyond the junior part of the school, there were hardly any girls. The headmistress explained that it was water related — as soon as a girl can carry 10 litres of water, they are kept busy at home, plus they are off school when they are menstruating. This totally shocked me. I realised that families were living off water from an open well that was filthy — people had even fallen into it and died — and from a river where buffalos were pooping, not to mention humans. I realised how many opportunities women were missing out on through water.’

Much of Frank Water’s work is abroad, in places where water shortages are causing environmental migration and where huge quantities of water are being used to supply the western world, such as with rice-growing in India. ‘A lot of our work is about how water flows. Then there comes a greater respect and love for it. We work with nature, looking at geology and hydrology, where rock is porous and where it can charge to the aquifer successfully, ensuring that solutions are natural.’ Now, however, there can no longer be complacency about water in the UK — in the week of this interview, customers of South East Water had no supplies. ‘Our work is focused on seeing water as part of the whole system. Every drop counts,’ Alcott explains.

‘We have plentiful rain in the UK, but we have become disconnected from the water cycle. We have tarmacked miles of city centres, we are putting down fake turf and paving over front lawns to park cars. We are still building houses that flush lavatories with drinking-quality water — that’s bonkers. The rain has nowhere to go — it’s zooming down storm drains into rivers, taking rubbish with it. We’re sleepwalking into an ecological disaster.’

She adds: ‘It is more of a landscape issue in Britain. Farmers are under pressure to grow food for people and animals and the soil isn’t able to use water as it once would have done: it isn’t healthy enough to soak it up and let it re-percolate into the right places. We have seen water purely as a resource and have managed it to the nth degree instead of working with it. It’s not being held in the right places — or enough places — hence destructive floods.’

Alcott observes that if access to water is improved, people automatically use more of it. ‘With new housing stock, there should be a policy that they all have rainwater storage and use grey water to flush loos. Everyone should be self-sufficient in the hottest months.’ KG

The dowser

John Baker discovered he could divine water during a random post-Sunday-lunch game with friends some 30 years ago. ‘Someone had seen it in a magazine and thought it a good idea to have a dabble,’ he recalls. ‘A pair of L-shaped metal rods pointing outwards like six-guns were shoved in my hand and we were told to walk down a drive. It felt extremely silly. All of a sudden, the rods swung against me and my host explained that I was standing over the water pipe to the greenhouse. Then, after a few paces, the rod swung out, which was even more bizarre. That turned out to be because of an electrical current running to lights in the orchard. I was quite amazed.’

Baker, who then ran his own construction business, explains most dowsers discover their capability by accident. ‘You certainly can’t force it — you’re like a dummy waiting for something to happen. After a while, you realise you can tune your subconscious mind into looking for something specific, like tuning a radio. You learn to use your conscious and unconscious mind together — Nature’s answer to Google.’ Wanting to discover ‘if I was going mad or not’, he joined a local archaeological group where he was initially ‘treated with disdain as the weirdo with the rod. Then they twigged that I could save them a lot of digging. You can find anything under the ground if you can find water’.

His work now may involve searching for crypts under churches, looking for wells — ‘these can be dangerous if they collapse’ — and working with construction companies to investigate for leftover war ordnance or with landscape designers to check for springs. ‘This planet is covered with tens of millions of springs and building work can shift them around. Yesterday, I was with a friend who wanted to check if they really needed a new boiler. I don’t think they do — they’ve just got a leaky pipe. What I do is Marmite: you either accept it works or you pooh-pooh it. People think the computer is the great innovator, but we forget we have a brain that is a million times better than any computer and we’re not using it.’ KG

John Baker teaches dowsing and is the author of ‘One Man and his Rods’, available from the British Society of Dowsing

The campaigner for fish

'I had had a lifelong obsession with fish and rivers,’ admits Nick Measham, chief executive of WildFish. ‘My parents bought me a fishing rod when we were on holiday in Scotland when I was 10, which fuelled the passion. I’ve gone full circle to messing about with rivers again, although admittedly in a more serious way than playing Poohsticks.’

In 2014, Measham landed with WildFish, the only independent charity in the UK that campaigns for wild fish and their environment. It came about after a stint volunteering to help run the monitoring of phosphate pollution coming from cress farms into nearby rivers. ‘Our goal is healthy, sustainable populations of wild fish,’ he explains. ‘Fish are at the apex of the biodiversity crisis. We work on evidence and we use the law when needed to hold the Government and its regulators to account.’

Campaigns by WildFish focus on ‘what fish want’, which is healthy water and connected rivers. According to Measham, the UK’s rivers and coastal waters are in a poor state. More than 80% of rivers fail the Water Framework Directive’s standard of ‘good’, a minimum acceptable outcome. ‘Our rivers are special because they are unique habitats that are home to rare life — Atlantic salmon and freshwater pearl mussels, as well as plants and invertebrates — which are critical to maintaining biodiversity,’ he explains. ‘Protecting these endangered species is central; if we fix it for salmon, we fix it for everything that swims, including us. We do this by tackling the causes rather than mitigating the symptoms.’

This means reducing abstraction (extracting water from natural resources), stopping pollution from sewage and agriculture, removing barriers to migration and ending open-net salmon farming. ‘Wherever the salmon farming industry exists, it is the num- ber one threat to migratory fish, such as wild salmon and sea trout. It’s in our power to stop this if we have the desire, so one goal is to bring salmon farming to an end.’

Another of the charity’s projects is Smart-Rivers, in which volunteers monitor their local rivers and collect industry-grade data that can highlight any stressors. This crucial scientific data provides WildFish with the evidence needed to take action. ‘Anyone can participate because we help teach members of the public how to become citizen scientists. Amplifying our collective voice is crucial in this day and age to get politicians to listen.’ MS

The lifeboat crew member

Despite living near the Thames, Claire Price had never considered volunteering for the RNLI until a school mum who helms at Teddington Lifeboat Station in Richmond, asked if she might be interested. ‘From the first time I came to the station, I was hooked by the combination of being able to give back to the community, do something different, learn new skills and be part of an amazing group of people,’ she explains.

She has been volunteering for more than four years, starting as shore crew before working her way through the lifeboat crew levels. ‘People think that you need to have a maritime background, but most of our crew don’t — we have architects, lawyers and IT consultants,’ says Price, a management consultant. ‘It’s also great to challenge the misconception that lifeboat crews are made up purely of men — about 15% of RNLI operational crew are female.’

Teddington is one of four lifeboat stations on the Thames and one of the first to cover a river; the service was started in 2002 after the tragic Marchioness collision in 1989. The crew trains together weekly to ensure they can deal with whatever might be thrown at them. ‘We never know what awaits us until we are briefed by the launch authority. If my pager goes off when I am on call, I have to stop what I am doing and run to the station. Our target is to have the boat in the water six minutes after the pager sounds.’

Rivers and inland waters can be as unpredictable as coastal ones and they pose many challenges, as proven by the number of fatal incidents during the May heatwave. ‘Although it’s warm outside, the water temperature can be as low as 12˚C, which leads to a danger of cold-water shock and drowning,’ Price warns.

‘Two recent shouts I’ve been on involved local residents who had their own boats and ended up in the water without life jackets. They were incredibly lucky to have been rescued by members of the public before we arrived. Hearing them talk about their experiences was really emotional and a stark reminder about the danger the river poses even to people who are very familiar with it, but it was also a great reminder of the community that exists on and around the water.’ MS

A thousand years ago, English rivers were fed by hundreds and hundreds of tiny streams that ran in a pattern like the veins on a spreading leaf. This natural drainage flowed slowly and carried little silt. Then, as farming developed, it demanded more extensive and speedier drainage. Ditches were dug, peatlands harvested and even the heavy clay soil of East Anglia made productive. Efficient water management drained the natural rivulets into manmade channels that fed directly into rivers. It was the basis of the Agricultural Revolution and few considered the long-term effects of drying the peat or carrying the top soil out to sea.

After the Second World War, artificial fertilisers and chemical inputs were unquestionably seen as the way ahead. Productivity soared, supported by public subsidy, and the chemical residues were carried away along these improved drainage systems, further polluting rivers and damaging biodiversity. At the same time, piped water was extended to almost every village and, with it, more and more homes were connected to the sewage system. Millions of houses were built or improved and businesses expanded — all of which expected to be supplied. Water had never been more available nor more convenient; it was cheap, in town and country alike, and people expected it to be cheap — after all, it fell free from the sky.

Alas, the system had not been planned. It had grown in an entirely haphazard way and, by the 1970s, the strain was becoming all too obvious, so the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, pulled it together into a more logical structure of 10 regional water authorities. These new bodies inherited an aged, under-invested system funded by an outdated mechanism of water rates, which were largely unconnected with usage. Neither governments nor municipalities ever provided adequate investment because there were always more urgent demands for funds.

When Britain signed up to the European Community’s water regime, the awful truth had to be faced: we had the worst water standards in northern Europe. Beaches were filthy, sewage floated in the seas, hosepipe bans had become the norm and the fast-growing demand could not be met. Huge investment was required to make up for past failures, which is why Margaret Thatcher determined on privatisation as the only way to afford to do what was clearly necessary.

Looking back, it can be seen that neither public nor private ownership has been a success. At the heart of it is an unwillingness to pay the necessary price for water. Even after privatisation, successive governments used the regulators to keep the water bills down for electoral reasons. Companies were allowed to profit improperly and yet, at the same time, they were not allowed to undertake the necessary investment. The financial regulator, Ofwat, drove the system and the Environment Agency lacked the funds or the influence to play an effective role.

Now, following the extensive report by Sir Jonathan Cunliffe, which was highly critical of the lack of cohesion, the Government has put a new structure in place which seeks to correct the failures of privatisation without the huge cost and questionable value of a return to public ownership.

However, fundamental problems remain and are made more urgent by the changes in climate. Much of Britain’s water infrastructure is more than a century old and deteriorating fast. There is water in the North, but a real shortage in the South and East. The means of carrying water to the stressed areas are wholly inadequate and dependent upon canals and aqueducts built by the Victorians. The South of England is at the end of the water transfer system and, all the way down, water is taken by various regional undertakings, so that there is simply not enough left for Southern or South East Water. Of course, these poorly run businesses ought to have built reservoirs to conserve local rainfall, but, through a mixture of regulation failure, planning refusals and company neglect, they haven’t. Indeed, a new reservoir hasn’t been built in England for more than 30 years.

The Canal & River Trust (CRT) needs urgent investment to repair the ageing infrastructure bringing water from north to south. Dams, aqueducts and canals need upgrading if their failure is not to threaten whole communities and if they are to play their necessary role in flood prevention. Yet the Government is planning to reduce CRT’s budget. The cost of that cut may well be measured in lives, as well as in economic loss. It must not be allowed.

In the East of England, things are even more serious. Here, shortages are endemic. The Essex and Suffolk Water company has announced that it cannot provide water for any new or expanded business in its area until 2033. Yet, every year in winter, vast quantities of freshwater are pumped from the fields into the sea. Then, during summer, in this semi-arid region, farmers don’t have enough water for the irrigation upon which they depend. Urgent works to conserve this water supply are a priority for a Government that has properly recast the regulatory system, but still has no long-term integrated programme to address these issues.

Drier summers, wetter winters, more severe storms and torrential rain — this is today’s reality and we need a land-use policy to reflect it. Serious flooding is inevitable unless previous drainage methods are reversed, slowing the water flow by allowing more to be held in the land. Farmers should be enabled to plant trees and hedges appropriately and encouraged to dig and restore farm ponds. Farm reservoirs should become the norm and be part of agricultural permitted development, so they don’t require planning permission. New buildings should be designed to reduce wastage, save water and be drained in a sustainable way. White goods and water kit — from shower heads to taps — installed should meet higher water-saving standards. There must be no more paving over front gardens for car parking, but permeable surfaces instead, to allow the water to drain properly.

Our rivers need cleaning up. Water companies and agriculture have an equal role in this. For example, the cause of pollution in the Wye is a 50-50 split between sewage outflows and agriculture — the direct and indirect run-off from poultry farms is a major contributor. The food industry has a pivotal role in the clean up, but if we want clean rivers, farmers cannot be undercut by imported food produced without the environmental costs imposed on them here.

The reality is that there is no business as usual. Britain is not ready to cope with torrential rainfall or summer drought. Yet water is not only an essential for life, but a necessity for economic growth. The data centres that will drive the future economy use huge quantities of water. Food security depends on water for farmers. In much of the rest of the world, water is even more scarce than it is here and many producers we have relied on for imports will become too water-stressed to supply. In a world where already more than two billion people lack safe drinking water, climate change will exacerbate the problem.

Despite all that Britain has to do and the huge costs involved, we are truly fortunate. We can have the water we need, at a price we are able to afford, if only we have the determination to secure it.

Seventeen months after the River Ouse in Sussex notched up a historic first — becoming the first river in England to have its rights formally recognised by a local authority — other rivers now have charters in place to protect their integrity.

The dozen or so river charters drawn up since then include those for the Loddon, Medway, Dart, Itchen and Cam, plus the River Wye. Almost 50 local groups are now said to be exploring similar approaches in areas such as Northumberland (River Tyne), Somerset and Gloucestershire (River Avon), Cornwall (Helford River and River Fal) and Northern Ireland (Lough Neagh). ‘The charter itself didn’t grant the Ouse legal personhood. Farmers and landowners have not suddenly found themselves subject to new regulations, but it has changed the way rivers are discussed — not merely as resources to be managed, but as living systems that need to be cared for,’ said Cher Potter, a director of Emergence Trust, a charity supporting new thinking on Nature, culture and society.

A river’s charter — which draws on the old rural idea of stewardship, at the same time as putting emphasis on guardianship and long-term care and bringing more landowners into the conversation — is a set of shared principles intended to guide the many organisations whose decisions affect a river’s future. ‘The challenge now is turning those principles into practice,’ said Elena Blanco, associate professor of environmental law at Bristol Law School and a member of We Are Avon, a movement of river guardians working to regenerate the Avon catchment. ‘The argument is not that there are too few rules, but that responsibility is divided between councils, regulators, water companies and environmental bodies.’

The River Wye has become the movement’s ‘poster child’, with campaigners launching its declaration of rights at May’s Hay Festival in Powys. Last year, too, Herefordshire Council and the Wye Catchment Nutrient Management Board created a ‘Voice of the River Wye’ role and appointed ecologist Dr Louise Bodnar to represent the river’s interests in board decisions. ‘Now, instead of debating what is best for farmers, developers or local authorities, the starting point is what is best for the river itself,’ added Potter.

The raven has so many superlatives attached to its name that the bird is almost a creature apart. It is the largest member of the crow family worldwide. It is also among the heaviest songbirds on Earth. Of avian species in our hemisphere, it is the most widespread — from the icebound lands well within the Arctic Circle to 1,400ft below sea level at the Dead Sea.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is a bird more steeped in human story than most. With the chicken, dove and eagle, the raven is an archetype for our imaginations: to the indigenous peoples of America and Asia it was a kind of trickster god woven into their creation stories of the Sun, the Moon and of humanity itself. For all this exalted status between our ears, real-life ravens out in the British wilds have an altogether less certain place.

In the 19th century, the birds were reviled and persecuted until they had been exterminated in all but the mountains and upland moors of western Britain. No longer. From these old redoubts, the corvid with the pickaxe bill and deeply resonant ‘cronking’ call began a revival this century. Ravens have spread to lowland counties and a 2016 census suggested a national figure of 10,000 pairs, more than double the population in the 1990s and almost certainly now an underestimate.

The species had long survived on the rugged coastlines of Cornwall and Devon, but it made a steady advance through Sussex and Kent and into East Anglia. In all those areas, you can once more see them perform their extraordinary breeding displays, when an airborne bird rolls over momentarily on to its back to fly upside down.

Unthinkable in the 20th century is the appearance of ravens in London. When people mention ravens in the capital, we can no longer be sure that they mean the ceremonial bird that has long been on display at the Tower.

As I’ve claimed the bird as the ultimate source of story in Britain, I cannot omit a wonderful raven tale from Derbyshire. The species was extinguished in the 1850s and remained absent until the 1980s. Yet, when the birds returned to nest in the Peak District, they chose as their first site an old limestone crag that had always been known as Ravencliffe Cave.

Ravens had thus closed the circle and, more than 130 years after they had been lost, returned to a place named in their honour. With the raven’s remarkable recovery, how-ever, have come less welcome stories.

The bird has an intimate association with death and the old Welsh name cigfran means ‘butcher crow’. It denotes an ancient taste for carrion, although it is worth highlighting that ravens are omnivores. ‘From a worm to a whale’ is a famous summary of their diet. On occasions, this catholicity is known to include young lambs and even adult ewes and newborn calves.

Licences have been issued periodically to control ravens where the problem is intense, notably in Wales in 2015 and in Orkney the following year. The latter campaign, spread across several seasons, led to 124 ravens being killed. In 2025, nine different landowners on the islands sought to cull a further 30 birds. However, not all such planned operations gain approval.

A similar licence sought in Perthshire, partly to protect ground-nesting waders, including curlews and lapwings, from the perceived risks of ravens, was challenged and turned down.

The problem is that ravens aren’t a clear-cut threat to livestock. Studies in western Scotland, examining the impact of crows and ravens upon sheep, revealed that three-quarters of lamb carcasses taken by the birds were already dead or so weak at birth they were unlikely to survive. Even in an age of the species’ heavy persecution, Lt-Col Ryves, in his Bird Life in Cornwall (1948) suggested he had witnessed ravens feeding peacefully among sheep for decades and never seen a single attack.

What we do know is that issues can arise. Ravens can be problematic. The risks have increased with the recent resurrection in raven fortunes. Yet the bad old days of knee-jerk prejudice and systematic extermination will never return again.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Brits — and the Irish — have long enjoyed a love affair with cold-water and wild swimming (though we used to just call it ‘swimming’). Some of our greatest writers, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Keats, drew inspiration from their time spent in the water; The King and Queen reportedly swim in the sea most days when they stay at the Rothschild Estate on the island of Corfu, Greece.

In recent years, the health benefits and glamour of wild swimming have been splashed all over social media. The downside? Lots of annoying people talking about it on Instagram. The upside? More and more of us are getting stuck in to campaigning for better quality bathing spots.

In our July 15 issue, which is themed around, drum roll please, water, we meet campaigners including an army veteran, a surfer, an RNLI volunteer and a diviner to talk about their relationship with our most precious asset. Elsewhere, the former chair of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Deben, argues that Britain really does have enough water — if only we can learn to use it responsibly.

In May of this year, DEFRA announced 13 new bathing sites across England — taking the total to more than 460 — including the first on the River Thames. Official classification means that the sites will be regularly tested by the Environment Agency throughout the ‘bathing season’.

It’s another small step in the right direction and so we’ve asked members of the Country Life team and contributors to reveal where they most like to swim in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Where? Trananaigh beach, Co Cork, Ireland

Who? Jonathan Self, Country Life contributor

Our nearest beach is Trananaigh, at the innermost end of Tralong Bay, a hidden, bottle-shaped cove much frequented by seals. It can be reached on foot by edging around various fields (one of which is home to a grumpy bull) or via a potholed road that leads nowhere else. It is overlooked by a grassy promontory, currently carpeted with thrift, sea campion, bird’s-foot trefoil and wild thyme.

Even in the middle of summer, it is generally empty. My late father believed that because West Cork is touched by the Gulf Stream the sea was warm enough to swim in all year round.

Personally, the thermometer has to reach 30℃ before I will even paddle. But if I am going to swim (if someone who struggles with the doggy paddle can ever be said to be swimming) there is nowhere else I would rather be.

Where? Somewhere in South Devon

Who? Rosie Paterson, Digital Content Director & Travel Editor

I cannot tell you where my favourite swim spot is — which, I admit, slightly defeats the point of this feature — because it involves blatant trespassing. However, I can hint at where it is and you can then take matters, and the chance that you might be told off, into your own hands.

It’s a natural pool, separated from the ocean by a concrete wall, erected, I believe, during the Second World War, and refreshed during big tides and bad weather. You can only reach it at low tide and by scrambling over some low but jagged rocks — and I only brave it when the ebbing water coincides with sunrise, when there are fewer people around.

The water, which is the colour of green sea glass, is milkier (you cannot see your toes) and calmer than the ocean — which you can hear crashing faintly in the distance. The need to swim in silence so as not to be discovered means it's a wonderfully peaceful experience.

Where? Duxford Ford, Oxfordshire

Who? Bella Fulford, Editorial Assistant

In the west Oxfordshire countryside, just outside Duxford, there is a bridleway that crosses the River Thames. I never intended for the deeper side of it to become a wild swimming spot, but, when my dog was a puppy with what seemed like a death wish, it had to become one.

I retrieved her from the water more times than I can count. One time, fully-clothed, in chest-high water, I realised I was standing at the beginning of a ritual I hadn’t realised I needed. From then on, I returned — willingly — in the summer months, every year.

Where? John’s Water, Blickling, Norfolk

Who? Flora Watkins, Country Life contributor

Follow a meandering lane along the valley of the River Bure and you will eventually reach a solitary mill cottage by a twin-arched bridge. A mill-race tumbles through one of the arches into a wide, dark pool, the water embroidered by vivid-green water buttercups and reeds. It could be a painting by Seago and it is known as John’s Water, though no one is sure why.

The fine gravel bed is shallow at first; my daughter paddles here, watching the fish as, with a gasp — even on the hottest of days — I push off the shelf into the glassy mill-pond.

As my sons and their friends dare each other to jump from the bridge, I roll onto my back and float like Millais’ Ophelia, weaving her weedy garlands.

Where? Builth Wells’ ‘hell hole’, Powys, Wales

Who? Tiffany Daneff, Gardens Editor

We've spent many days at 'hell hole' just outside Builth Wells — a patch in the River Wye where the water forms a pool deep enough to jump in from the rocks above. It’s far too scary for me ever to attempt that seven-foot leap, but everyone else loves it. I just swim up and down the river, which widens below the pool and is hidden from the nearby road and any signs of human habitation.

There are smooth rocks for lying on when it's hot and for picnicking whatever the weather. You reach it by parking in a layby and clambering over a style that someone has helpfully coated in barbed wire — there may even be a notice that says ‘Private’ — and then it's an easy five-minute walk down to the water.

Where? Grantchester Meadows, Cambridge

Who? Lotte Brundle, Digital Writer

As a student, many happy summer days were spent in Grantchester Meadows in Cambridge. Lounging around on the banks of the River Cam, snacking on picnic food and chatting foolishly about our dreams of an adulthood that didn't yet exist. Taking a leisurely dip in the river to cool off was always the best part. They were some of the happiest days of my life.

Two friends even got married there and had their wedding reception in the Orchard Tea Garden, a short walk further down the river. I can't visit the city now without recalling cycling full pelt down the path to the river with a sunburnt back, my swimming costume on under a summer's dress and a clunking tote bag of refreshments, racing my friends to the cool water.

Where? Loch Striven, Argyll and Bute, Scotland

Who? Jo Rodgers, Country Life contributor

I was staying on the Cowal Peninsula along the west coast of Scotland recently, and had a week of numbing, endorphin-fired swims in Loch Striven. It’s an extraordinarily pretty sea loch, surrounded by evergreens and the snow-capped Cowal Hills on three sides.

The banks are rocky and I'd forgotten swim shoes, so I'd go in wearing a wetsuit and doubled-up hiking socks. Somehow this part of the southern Highlands is still overlooked by most travellers. There was nobody to see me squelching back to land.

Where? Frensham Great Pond, Surrey

Who? Katie Ruocco, Account Director

I began swimming at Frensham Great Pond in that first strange summer of lockdown, entering the water at dawn while mist still hovered over the surface and the heath felt wonderfully still.

Long after restrictions eased, I kept going. It’s less about the cold-water thrill now and more about the ritual of it. I like the unhurried wade from the sandy edge into the cool, the tea-coloured water, and breathing in the pine and heather as I go.

In summer, dragonflies skim past, and herons rise from the reeds; in winter, the grebes and coots are reliable companions.

For a while, it’s just sky, water and peace. I arrive home pink-cheeked and clear-headed — and a little pleased with myself before breakfast.

Where? The Mediterranean

Who? Flo Allen, Social Media Editor

I am so sorry, but I prefer to stick to heated swimming pools and The Med.

Where? Brighton Beach, East Sussex

Who? Will Hosie, Lifestyle Editor

My favourite spot to go wild swimming is in Brighton: just there on the beach, right by the pier. Maybe it's because I'm a closeted exhibitionist, but I've rarely enjoyed myself so much as when I went to Brighton for my birthday two years ago in November, and stripped to my trunks running into the freezing water while onlookers looked at me petrified, ignoring the gulls swooping in on their chips.

I like wild swimming in November because it's already so cold outside that getting into icy water is less of an ordeal than getting into mildly warmer water in summer, when the outdoor temperature is in the high 20s. I can handle the cold; it's the contrast that proves an issue.

Where? Llanelltyd river pool, Gwynedd, Wales

Who? Pamela Goodman, Country Life contributor

Under the stone arches of Old Llanelltyd Bridge, just outside Dolgellau in the southern reaches of Eryri National Park (aka Snowdonia), is a large and languid river pool — a truly scenic spot in the River Mawdacch before it widens into the glorious (and synonymous) estuary on its slow trundle to the sea at Barmouth.

Don’t let the nearby A470 put you off — the road means easy access.

A grassy field nudges a pebbly beach, ideal for families and picnickers, and the pool itself is gentle, deep and suitably chilly. The ruins of Cistercian Cymer Abbey are right there, too, after which a five-minute drive will have you at Penmaenpool for a pie and a pint at the picturesque George III inn.

Where? Dawlish Warren, Devon

Who? Paula Minchin, Managing & Features Editor

Dawlish Warren — a 1.5-mile-long stretch of white sand — is a sweeping, unspoilt and usually blissfully quiet spot on the south coast of Devon, where it's possible to wade out into the waves without the need for swimming shoes.

It also has plenty of handy wooden groynes, which are especially useful for leaving phones, clothes and a towel on, so you can easily get warm and dry after a dip in the surf, without having to drag on the soggy garments that you've left safely on the edge of the sand dunes, only to find they've been soaked by the incoming tide.

Cold-water and wild swimming can be dangerous. Visit the Governmentand Royal Life Saving Society websites for more information.

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.

For those fond of wearing cut-off denim shorts with Wellington boots, the end of June in England means one of two things. Either you are heading to Glastonbury with 140,000 other revellers, or you are on your way to Groundswell, the regenerative farming festival in Hertfordshire, now dubbed — with only mild irony — the Glasto of farming.

This year is a fallow summer for Glastonbury. Groundswell, meanwhile, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. From a modest gathering of 450 farmers discussing no-till agriculture in a shed, Groundswell has grown to a world-famous convening of the agri-ecologically curious. Among last year’s 10,500 visitors were government officials, corporate sustainability teams and The Prince of Wales, all treated to artisanal food pop ups, wellbeing workshops and live music alongside discussions on hedgerow management and soil health. Its wide ranging appeal means a number of Glastonbury attendees can also be found dancing here, not least Andy Cato, co-founder of farm-to-plate food business Wildfarmed and one half of Groove Armada, who DJs at both festivals, sometimes just 24 hours apart.

Slickly produced and Instagram ready, this blurring of genres shows how far the farming festival has travelled from its country-show roots. But when tickets are snapped up by punters and corporations who wouldn’t know a plough share from a power harrow, does this risk driving away the very people they are supposed to be for?

The agricultural show is one of Britain’s oldest social happenings, proliferating in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a mechanism for disseminating new farming techniques, science and practice. Its foundational assumption was that the farmer was the focus. While 39% of visitors to the Royal Welsh Show have no connection with agriculture, no one is in any doubt whose world they were in, and who the show is for.

That world has contracted. When the first Royal Show took place in 1839, agriculture was the largest single employer in Britain. By the time it held its last outing in 2009 after 170 years, with breaks only for war and foot-and-mouth, visitors, which once included Elizabeth II and the Prime Minister, had dropped from a quarter of a million to 120,000. It closed not because farming had lost its audience, but because the farming community had become too small to make the economics workable.

In choosing to launch the inaugural ‘Great British Farm Fest’ on the same site in Warwickshire’s Stoneleigh Park this May, Jeremy Clarkson was making a point. Farming is back, but this time — as their website declared — it is ‘rock and roll farming’. Some 52,000 spectators came over three days. Whereas visitors to The Royal Show applauded rosette-winning farmers for specimen cattle and champion sheep, leading some to call it ‘the FA Cup for livestock’, Farm Fest offered tractors pulling apart a car, lookalike competitions for TV farm-star Kaleb Cooper and an orchestra playing music on vegetables drilled and chiselled into edible penny whistles.

But perhaps this is exactly the point: if a bridge needs building between an urban population disconnected from the land and those who grow their food, watching a white-coated judge praise the defined rump of a British Blue is unlikely to do it. Celebrity chefs cooking demonstrations and the chance to feed goats sticking their heads through a wooden windmill might.

What is not in doubt is that farming could use all the PR it can get. Average farm income across all types fell by almost 50% in in 2023/4. Cereal farms were hit hardest, with a 73% drop. There have been six Secretary of States at DEFRA in as many years. In the last year alone, the Government abolished the Sustainable Farming Incentive payment scheme without warning, reintroduced it with a cap, and announced inheritance tax changes so inflammatory that scenes of tractors blocking Parliament Square in protest have become commonplace. The boom in farming festivals in this context feels less entertainment and more a call to arms. The message for moral support appears to be getting through where pleas for financial support have failed. One in 10 people in the UK now visit a farming show each year. In 2023, record attendances were driven largely by non-farmers. But while aerial displays and Shetland Pony Races may be crowd pleasers, can these modern kinds of farming festivals keep sufficient space for their original purpose?

‘We have always said Groundswell is for farmers, by farmers’ says Alex Cherry, event director and son of co-founder Paul. Even so, fewer than half of last years’ Groundswell attendees were farm owners. This year the festival is offering a discounted farmer ticket in recognition of the sector’s financial challenges and Cherry is clear the programming is always conceived ‘thinking about the farmer in the room — we don’t want it to be dumbed down’. Sessions have, however, been diversified, ranging across fibre and flower growing, and policy and supply chain discussions to one of the most popular panels last year: the challenge of maintaining a marriage while running a family farm.

Cherry’s theory as to why the festival appeals to audiences outside agriculture has less to do with boujee burger offerings, and more about the underlying themes. Most of his London friendship group once thought him mad to return to the land. ‘Now they ring me up wanting to get out of the city, to get their hands dirty’ Cherry says. ‘This way of farming offers meaning in a world that can feel disconnected and dystopian.’ In both its aesthetic and its ethos, it is easy to see how Groundswell appeals to a disillusioned millennial hot-desker from Hackney.

How does Cherry respond to those who feel the proliferation of urbanites and corporates has changed the festivals’ character? ‘I now don’t worry about it’ Cherry says. ‘We do very little sponsorship — we have six festival partners, some of whom pay nothing. Our funding relies on ticket sales and exhibitors’ revenue. We are totally independent’. He is aware of the warning offered by the music festival world, where the majority of the 600 festivals taking place each year are now owned by a handful of mega-companies: ‘As soon as a festival comes into ownership run by someone in the events industry, it loses its soul.'

An example of one farming festival which has done exactly this is the Oxford Real Farming Conference. Begun as a fringe protest of 50 people in conscious opposition to the Oxford Farming Conference — the established, industry-aligned annual gathering held in the same town on the same dates — it has grown to a global gathering of nearly 5,000 with a range of ecologically minded discussions interspersed by music, book readings, film screenings, speed dating and morning meditation sessions.

However, despite government and business making sharp pivots towards sustainable farming in the last few years, it will not share its platform with the organisations it was set up to oppose. Some find this obstinacy reassuring. Others find it limiting. But the festivals’ identity and purpose remains clear, to both those who attend and those who don’t.

This sharing of a collective cause is the magic ingredient that seems to keep farmers at the centre of a festival, maintaining the balance between education and entertainment. Rachel Hall of Gutchpool Farm in Dorset, who attended the first Groundswell, says she comes back each year because ‘there are always interesting people to find and listen to’. This crosses not just ages but nationalities. This year Hall is attending a Groundswell reunion with fellow nominees for a Top 50 Farmer in Europe Award, representing 26 countries.

Cato has become an unlikely barometer of where the farming and music festival worlds intersect. He is clear about the difference between a festival for farmers and one about farming. The first is essentially a work event; the second a social one. Even so, the view from the Groundswell DJ booth is, says Cato, ‘pretty wild — farmers definitely know how to party’. As someone who has played to audiences of tens of thousands, he’s in the position to judge. But there is, thinks Cato, something special about his Groundswell set which comes down to a shared purpose: everyone has spent the day discussing how to better steward land and knows what is at stake. Dancing together seems to seal this mission: it is, says Cato, ‘a lovely moment of unity’.

In Groundswell’s wake, others are now swimming. From Cumbria to Jersey, there are now more regenerative farming festivals than months in the year. Most are squarely aimed at farmers. Others, such as ARK Summit on Steve Winwood’s Gloucestershire farm, are also stepping into the middle ground with policy debates alongside breathwork sessions, a pilgrimage walk and lunch cooked over open fire by Bushcamp Wilderness Cooking.

Philip Larkin, watching the Bellingham Show in 1973, saw in its annual gathering as something more than livestock and produce competitions: a whole community briefly visible to itself, before dispersing back into the countryside it had come from. This summer may bring more curious Glastonbury revellers than ever to Groundswell’s fields. As long as the farmers in the tent still feel the purpose is to learn and share as well as celebrate and showcase, farming festivals will continue to thrive in their modern interpretation of the agricultural show.

If they do, their farmer fan base will continue to agree with the final line of Larkin’s Show Saturday. ‘Let it always be there’.

A male common pheasant in full breeding regalia is arguably one of the most colourful sights in all of British birdlife. When two cocks spar in spring, facing up to one another in prolonged tail-twisting jousts, they are nothing less than spectacular. It’s not only their weird, fleshy crimson goggles, imperial purple ear-horns and emerald gourgets, but their exquisite repeat rows of elliptical black tips to all the orange-cinnamon breast feathers and the longitudinal black-and-buff margins to their neck and shoulder plumes.

Male pheasants appear exotic and, in some senses, they are out of place amid the subdued tones of our woodlands. Both parts of the bird’s scientific name, Phasianus colchicus, refer to its true origins, which stretched right across Asia from China to the Caucasus. Yet Europeans acquired their first captive stock at the western edge of the bird’s range, in an area on the eastern shores of the Black Sea with the ancient name of Colchis.

Medieval aristocrats were entranced by the bird’s Asiatic beauty, although few could have anticipated the pheasant’s gradual triumph over the sporting imagination, to the point where it had a central place in shaping the very lands of Europe. The bird was repeatedly introduced and acquired self-sustaining populations from Norway to Bulgaria. It was also taken around the world to North America, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. In this country, records of pheasants may go back to Roman times, but certainly date from the Norman period.

Now, it is indubitably the gamebird of choice. Its exalted place has been much enlarged since the late 20th century, partly because of the parallel population declines of our other native sporting birds — red and black grouse and grey partridge. For all the pheasant’s long heritage in these islands, it remains a non-native species, classiied by officialdom on Category C, together with other aliens, such as parakeets and mandarin ducks.

There is also a kind of unofficial sniffiness among birdwatchers. Twitchers almost scrupulously ignore pheasant behaviour and the birds barely feature as a subject for study. Those attitudes were humorously captured by one wag, who once saw a pheasant being washed briefly into the sea as it stood on a rocky Scottish shoreline. ‘This is probably the only known case,’ he wrote, ‘of a pheasant doing something interesting.’

In some ways, he could not have been more wrong. Like the duelling cock birds evoked in my opening scenario, there are now two opposed pheasant camps jousting with one another. At issue is the birds’ present-day abundance. Hand-reared poults, bred in pens, fed from grain hoppers and released in the summer in time for the start of the shooting season in the autumn have become the largest single species’ contribution to our entire avian biomass.

Even placing a figure on the numbers now being liberated has itself become part of the heated pheasant debate. Estimates range between 25 and 60 million, depending on the claimant’s position, however, an authority accepted by most sides has proposed that in 2019, 47 million were released.

Pheasants are largely vegetarian, yet switch to a mixed diet in spring and summer. The exact proportion of animal matter may fluctuate, but not the charge that large numbers of released pheasants are having major local effects on invertebrate populations.

A study in Belgium looking at the impact of pheasant releases upon reptiles — slow worms, lizards and snakes — has been taken as proof that they are having disproportionate and adverse effects on overall biodiversity. The pro-pheasant lobby is reluctant to go so far and prefers to stress the positives in terms of employment and economic stimulus to our rural places.

Another side issue is the grisly matter of road-kill. A minimum estimate for mortality on our roads is 2.8 million pheasants. One consequence is the food bounty that the squashed carcasses provide for foxes. Opponents of pheasants argue that it is the shooting community — ironically, those least sympathetic to old Reynard — that is providing the biggest boost to fox numbers. These animals are then driving fox predation of other beleaguered ground-nesting birds, such as curlews and lapwings.

Soar point: Phasianus colchicus is a sporting bird that continues to polarise opinionErnie Janes/naturepl.com Aristocrats were entranced by the bird’s Asiatic beauty

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

What we think of when we picture luxury travel has changed over the years. Now it’s less private jets and piña coladas and more yoga retreats and home-made kombucha. We are, it seems, looking for meaningful experiences that enrich our lives instead of flashy status-symbols. As usual, throughout this process, people have been reminded that nature is priceless — particularly when it comes to the British countryside.

Although scrambling through the hedgerow in search of rosehips may not instantly scream ‘five star getaway’, foraging courses are now on the docket for many a luxury hotel guest in the UK.

At Bovey Castle, set amongst Dartmoor National Park in Devon, navelwort and nettle beer are on the menu just as much as caviar and Champagne are. It is just one of the Pride of Britain (PoB) Hotels — a curated collection of British hotels is annually reviewed — that are putting on foraging days.

‘A lot of people come to the hotel and they'll look at the view, but they won't actually explore the grounds. When you go out into these grounds today, you'll think: “Why are people not exploring this?” It's heaven down there, it's fantastic,’ says Thomas Radford, who is leading our foraging walk.

On the allure of foraging he adds: ‘I think people like to be guided and feel safe and, as opposed to just another boring drudge around the woods, it is something that brings it to life.’ In this country foraging is legal, as long as it’s not done on private land (for this you must have specific permission).

If we look back 300 years, knowledge about the plants you could and couldn’t eat was absolutely essential to survival. Some women possessed such a startling botanical arsenal that they were accused of witchcraft — something which many of them paid for with their lives. Sadly, with the rise of farming, when we started domesticating crops, and more recently supermarkets, this communal knowledge has since been mostly lost, with the exception of a few individuals.

As he leads us on a two hour walk around the grounds of Bovey Castle, a Grade II-listed early 20th-century mansion, Thomas points out the various plants we can gather and tells us about some of their uses. Elderflower is in season at the moment, and can be used to make cordial, flavoured gin or even elderflower wine. ‘But best use plastic bottles, as it does have a propensity to explode,’ Thomas says, detailing a particularly gory incident when a friend of his used glass bottles which, when one exploded, took his eye out.

Wild garlic is another useful ingredient in the foragers pantry, as is pink purslane, mint, navelwort, Jack-by-the-hedge and cleavers (otherwise known, amusingly, as ‘sticky willy’ — they make a brilliant diuretic that tastes of cucumber when left to soak in water overnight, apparently). Nettles, as long as they are pulled out with a glove to avoid stinging, make excellent nettle soup or beer.

The main thing that puts people off foraging, says Thomas, are ‘lookalikes’. Mushrooms are a prime example. We all, I’m sure, love the idea of cheffing up some self-foraged chanterelles on toast for supper as much as the next person, but many of us remember all too well reading a news story detailing someone’s death after accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom.

When it comes to lookalikes, Thomas never tastes the risk. As he puts it: ‘If you're going to die for something, don’t let it be salad.’ In Dartmoor, hemlock is the most common dangerous plant and can easily be confused with the totally benign cow parsley. Well known as the poison that killed Socrates, the innocuously-delicate white flowers of the plant bloom in clusters by bodies of water. If ingested, the alkaloids in the plant slowly poison the nerve-muscle junctions and cause the failure of the breathing muscles. Thomas aptly, but awfully, describes this as ‘a meat coffin that lasts hours’. We see plenty of it on our walk and I make sure to keep a healthy distance.

Despite the less than appetising description above, the trip did stoke my appetite for foraging. As long as you steer clear of those deadly lookalikes, it’s a healthy and interesting way to reconnect with nature and snaffle up some free grub while you’re at it. Plus the two-hour walk made sure I was ravenous for anything (but hemlock) once we were back in the hotel restaurant.

Booking for The Wild Larder: A Foraging Walk & Lunch with Thomas Radford is open now. Upcoming sessions at PoB Hotels include Thurlestone Hotel, Devon, on June 26 and Calcot & Spa, the Cotswolds, on June 30.

The Prince of Wales is to join an eminent line-up of royal Guest Editors when he takes charge of the November 11 issue of Country Life to celebrate his love of the countryside, as well as his desire to protect and enhance the environment.

In taking the reins of this special souvenir edition, Prince William is following in the footsteps of his father, The King, who has twice guest edited the magazine, on the occasion of his 65th birthday in November 2013 and his 70th in 2018. In 2020, his aunt, The Princess Royal, masterminded the July 29 issue. The Queen — when The Duchess of Cornwall — was the next to take her turn in the editorial chair when overseeing the July 13, 2022 issue, which became the biggest-selling edition of all time.

Last year, Sir David Beckham oversaw the popular October 22 issue.

The Prince of Wales’s edition will reflect His Royal Highness’s advocacy for improving access to mental-health services in the countryside, together with his most cherished view, his favourite recipe, his favourite painting and his selection of notable rural champions.

‘I’m thrilled that The Prince of Wales has agreed to edit a very special issue of Country Life,’ says Editor-in-Chief Mark Hedges. ‘Having met with him last week to discuss his plans for his edition, I was struck by what a passionate countryman he is and how much he cares about the welfare of those who manage it.'

'I believe that his views, concerns and hopes for its future will resonate deeply with our readers and I am excited to see how his energy and commitment to changing lives will be reflected in his specially curated issue.’

As the old joke goes, how do you know if someone’s into cold-water swimming? Answer: they’ll tell you. These days, more and more of these people move among us. ‘Oh I simply can’t start my day without a dip,’ they cry, before listing multiple ailments that have mysteriously been improved by their new habit of flinging themselves into the nearest river or pond like a Labrador.

One dubious website extolling cold-water swimming’s virtues lists as many as 50 benefits. These include, but are not limited to: it boosts the immune system, increases one’s metabolism, promotes better sleep, helps the libido (how, exactly?), improves balance and memory, apparently, ‘because the anti-inflammatory effect… is beneficial in those experiencing dementia or other memory deficits.’ None of these are medically proven, I’d like to add.

I remain unconvinced by cold-water swimming. Even the phrase is silly. Performative. What’s wrong with simply ‘swimming’? It’s not as if you’re going to be ‘hot water’ swimming in your local river, is it? The kind of swimming I like is on a hot day, with a cool (ish) swimming pool nearby, along with a sunbed and a plentiful supply of dry towels. I’m not that interested in slipping into a body of water that’s murky, potentially hiding creatures, and which may make you ill.

‘It’s lovely once you’re in!’ comes the smug cry from someone who stripped off and waded straight in. Meanwhile, you stand there shivering on the bank, extremely unwilling to peel off your coat and even less willing to stick a body part, any body part, into the brown water that will — supposedly — leave you feeling so perky.

The last time I managed it was in Guernsey, where cold-water swimming is very popular. Little wonder, they have sensationally pretty beaches and coves which are, on the face of it, much more inviting than, say, a grubby canal.

And yet a mere toe in the water felt enough for frostbite. ‘Come on, it’s gorgeous!’ friends shouted from the sea where they were, naturally, already bobbing about like seals. I managed almost a minute in the water and then scurried out again. Sure, I felt a vague warm glow once I’d pulled my clothes back on again, but I can get the same sort of wellbeing from a glass of wine in the bath.

If you find yourself staying with friends who insist on this tiresome practice, you could either claim you’ve forgotten your swimmers (although in my experience those who are keen on this pastime are gung-ho sorts who won’t brook this kind of excuse). You could feign a heart condition, or a recent chest infection. Or, if you don’t want to feel a stick-in-the-mud, you could join in — but very briefly.

‘Is there a dryrobe I could borrow?’ you can ask, to make it sound as if you know what you’re talking about when it comes to the clobber.

Arrive at said location and strip off quickly, as if to denote enthusiasm. The quicker you get in, the quicker you can get out again. Try not to take half an hour to get in. That only prolongs the torture. Jump, if you can. A short sharp shock to the nether regions, but at least then you’re submerged. Splash around a bit, exclaim how lovely is it, make sure everyone sees you, and then you can claim cramp and hop out again. Bravo. Now go and have a hot shower.

As England begins its World Cup campaign tonight, aiming to end 60 years of hurt, I am once again wondering what makes a great football team? It’s an interesting question. You naturally need players and individuals bursting with talent, but more than that it’s necessary to work together on the pitch, with resilience, trust and coordination. Easier said than done, especially for this England team in recent years.

One place that England could look to for inspiration might be wildlife itself, which takes great pride in, well, resilience, coordination and trust. What then could football learn from nature? It seemed like a good question and one that our friends at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) were more than happy to answer. They identified six lessons from the world’s most iconic species that Thomas Tuchel and The Lads could use to bring it home. Here’s hoping they’re reading this.

The high press: African Wild dogs

No team can succeed by sitting back and letting the other team just play, so a high press is important. African Wild dogs, although sadly endangered, are the benchmark for an intense press. Reaching speeds of 44mph, they work as a pack, chasing prey together, with each dog taking its turn at the front to keep the pressure on.

Defensive shape: Emperor penguins

A good attack will win you games, but a great defence will win you championships, so the saying goes. Staying organised and in a coherent shape is the essence of a strong back four, although for emperor penguins, that might resemble a ‘back thousand’. When temperatures in the Antarctic drop, they form a close huddle, conserving heat and shielding themselves from the wind. Each penguin takes a turn on the outside of the huddle, before rotating back inside.

Coordination: Chimpanzee

Teamwork isn’t just moving together as one, but also communicating clearly and effectively, anticipating things and telling your teammates what’s going to happen before it happens. In the wild, chimpanzees are some of the most intelligent animals around, signalling to other members of their group and using vocal calls during hunts to help catch prey.

Set pieces: Humpback whales

Arsenal basically used them to win this year’s Premier League, so we’ll just have to accept that the set piece is as important to winning football games as it has ever been, even if it rendered the whole sport basically unwatchable. In the wild, fine proponents of the set piece could be humpback whales, which work together to herd fish with spirals of bubbles before surging upward to feed. Known as ‘bubble-net feeding’, the technique shows what a well-drilled move can achieve. I also reckon a humpback whale could make a pretty handy goalkeeper.

Patient build up: Marine turtles

You can’t attack all the time in football, and with temperatures in the USA, Mexico and Canada forecasted to be 30º or higher, conserving energy is key. Step forward our marine turtles, who cross entire oceans through steady, purposeful movement. They are capable of high speed when necessary, but their movement is typically defined by endurance and efficiency.

The exception: Cheetahs

Every team needs a star. Who will it be for England: Bukayo Saka, Harry Kane, Morgan Rogers, Jude Bellingham or someone else? Sometimes, to win the big games, you need individual moments of brilliance. The cheetah is a solo hunter, the fastest land animal, and its unique agility and speed that gives it success.

Ed. update: No, it's not Sir David Beckham, another of our previous cover stars — it's the Atlantic puffin, barn owl, buff-tailed bumblebee and European hedgehog, which have been announced as the new faces of our banknotes.

A European honeybee was our annual Sustainability issue front cover star, in June 2019, so we have long been fans of the wider species. However, not everyone on the Country Life team was pro puffin, owl, bee and hedgehog. Here is who they wanted to see crowned — and why.

Kemi Badenoch said it was ‘a silly thing to do’, Nigel Farage termed it ‘crackers’ and the RSPCA demanded incredulously to know where the ‘pigeons, rats and gulls’ were, but at least one person was pleased about our new banknotes featuring illustrations of native British wildlife. When asked about Winston Churchill’s face potentially being replaced by a badger, his granddaughter Emma Soames proclaimed ‘lucky badger!’ Well said.

Cash may no longer be king, but who or what appears on the front of our notes has been a topic of hot contention among the British public recently. The change will mark a shakeup from the illustrations of famous faces, such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, that have been on our £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes since 1970. The one human to remain will be Charles III — maybe cash really is king, after all.

At Country Life, we think this no bad thing. What better to celebrate than our native wildlife, which adds so much value to our countryside, beaches and even cities. The public have until July 3 to make up their minds so, without further ado, here are the Country Life team’s bids for the creatures they want creeping onto our cash.

Bottlenose dolphin

My friends had posters of boy bands on their walls; I had posters of dolphins. Specifically, the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) — which is one of the largest dolphin species, growing up to four metres long. I remember thinking that a dolphin — an animal we, or at least I, typically associate with far-flung places and warm waters — couldn't possibly inhabit the UK because it was oh so exotic. In fact, they thrive in places such as the Moray Firth in Scotland, Cardigan Bay inWales, and off the coasts of Cornwall and Yorkshire.

In adulthood, I've had the privilege of seeing and even diving with bottlenose dolphins and other dolphin species. Like dogs and horses, they possess magical, therapeutic abilities. Sadly, I've never seen one in the UK — despite years of trying. The biggest threats they face in our waters are entanglement in fishing gear, chemical pollution and heavy boat traffic, but surely the beaming smiles they bring to the faces of everyone who come across them makes them worthy of all the good PR they can get.

— Rosie Paterson, Digital Content Director & Travel Editor

Brown hare

Nothing, simply nothing compares to the brown hare (Lepus europaeus). Associated with the moon, springtime and witchcraft — how else could our ancestors explain its magical qualities? — the hare is the big dude of small mammals. It doesn’t need to hide from predators, it’s too cool for that, but blitzes them with a burst of speed that nothing else can match while throwing in moves that Houdini could only dream of. Blessed with runway looks and more mythology than Merlin, the hare is freedom. It’s the true spirit of the land.

— Mark Hedges, Editor in Chief

European hedgehog

What’s more British than a European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus)? Spiky and standoffish on the outside, but completely charming once you get past its prickly exterior. Not only are they cute (a good enough reason on its own to appear on our money, in my opinion) but they also handily gobble up a whole load of gardeners’ pests, such as beetles, caterpillars and slugs, to boot. Sadly, the European Hedgehog is now Red Listed in Great Britain, meaning it's at risk of local extinction. So, let's not only get this brilliant creature on our banknotes, but back in our gardens too. My personal choice of model for our future cash would be my favourite hedgehog of all time, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

— Lotte Brundle, Digital Writer

Grey seal

Long before I knew there were seal species native to Britain, or understood quite how important grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) are to our marine ecosystems, I simply thought they were the most adorable creatures I'd ever laid eyes on. So much so, in fact, that I once pinched a small seal toy from the Natural History Museum on a Year 1 school trip — a letter of apology swiftly followed, of course, but nothing was going to come between me and that seal. Britain is home to around 40% of the world's grey seals, making us internationally important custodians of the species. Highly intelligent and curious, they have been observed learning from one another and displaying distinct personalities. I'd support a return to cash if it meant being greeted by those whiskered faces every time I opened my purse.

— Florence Allen, Social Media Editor

Atlantic puffin

It was on the Isle of Lunga that the first puffin shot past my ear, with a beak full of sand eels, its wings fizzing like a badly hit golf ball. There were thousands of them, marching in and out of their nests, staring out to sea, flying back and forth endlessly. They are so small, yet so richly coloured and expressive, you could be forgiven for thinking you could sit down and chat to one.

I had wanted to see a puffin for years. The flora and fauna of the UK is rich and varied, but you could not call it colourful — apart from Fratercula arctica. These essential and fearless seabirds are as close as we get to exotic, and for want of a better word, they are absolutely adorable. They are, as all good things tend to be these days, at risk, as their habitats and food sources strain under the pressure of a changing climate and overfishing. What better way to remind ourselves of their plight and their brilliance than by putting them on the very thing that is likely leading to their doom: money.

— James Fisher, Digital Commissioning Editor

Barn owl

Barn owls (Tyto alba) are the supermodels of the strigine world. Their long legs, white undersides and beige plumage — unchanging throughout the year — mean they are the envy of other owls; and, indeed, of birds more generally. They swoop and glide with a heart-shaped face that could melt even the coldest of souls while being one of the only nocturnal creatures shortlisted for our bank notes. Since nightlife accounts for £112 billion of the economy (more than sport), I think we ought to show some respect. The barn owl can be the disc jockey's representative on polymer.

— Will Hosie, Lifestyle Editor

Basking shark

Hedgehogs? Baby seals? Please, we're not selling schmaltzy postcards here: this is an opportunity to do something different with our banknotes. Something surprising. Something, well, cool. And as everyone knows, sharks are nothing if not cool.

They're also — rather surprisingly — British. The waters off our island are home to dozens of different types of shark, all of which have incredible tales to tell, from the mako shark, which can swim at 45mph, to the Greenland shark, which can live to be 400 years old. So, rather than taking the obvious Beatrix Potter-inspired route of fluffy and cute, let's go with a creature that is less-celebrated, but just as wonderful.

The basking shark (cetorhinus maximus) is the second largest fish in the ocean, a plankton-eating gentle giant, and a British success story: the marine-protected area created for them off Orkney has helped stabilise a creature that had been hunted almost to extinction.

— Toby Keel, Digital Director

Buff-tailed bumblebee

The lazy, baritone buzz of a bumblebee is the merry little voice of an English summer garden. The buff-tailed variety (Bombus terrestris) is a commendable early riser — among the very first bumblebees to emerge from hibernation (sometimes as early as February). He’s an unassuming, portly little gentleman, going about his important business of being a super pollinator without fuss (buff-tails are famously docile and mild-mannered). He’s also the UK’s largest bumblebee. Most importantly, he’s a cheerful little fellow, exceptionally tough in cold weather, and highly adaptable, happy to nest in a variety of unusual locations, from rodent burrows to compost heaps. As William Blake noted, ‘the busy bee has no time for sorrow’.

— Agnes Stamp, Associate Features Editor

The pine marten, red fox, common kingfisher, Eurasian curlew, great spotted woodpecker, white-tailed eagle, Atlantic salmon, common frog, emperor dragonfly and marsh fritillary butterfly are also contenders. To have your say on which native animal should appear on our banknotes cast your vote here before 11.59pm on July 3, 2026.

Almost every year, the largest crowd in Britain can reliably be found at Glastonbury. Some 210,000 revellers cram into a site spanning 1,100 acres and let loose to the sound of music until the cows come home. Not this year. Worthy Farm, which hosts the festival, is taking a backseat. The cows are home and need no summoning.

It seems fitting, therefore, that some of the largest crowds of 2026 should gather around a tribute to farm life. The Royal Welsh Show in Powys expects to welcome up to 65,000 people a day (July 20–23) and the Royal Bath & West, which took place in Somerset on the last week of May, registered just under half of Glastonbury’s total capacity in only three days.

County shows are frequented by seven million people each year. There are as many as 156 across the country, and they have been held, in one form or another, since the 18th century. Beginning as informal gatherings for local folk eager to trade savoir-faire across craft and farming, they later morphed into a premial and educational showcase of country living, held on permanent showgrounds since the 1960s. Perhaps surprisingly, they are growing more popular. What by urbanite maxims could have spelt their eventual decline has, instead, proven a boon. Championing the very traditions held in contempt by vegans and agrofuturists has allowed the county show to appeal, ironically, to city dwellers — many of them young parents with small children, who now make up the shows’ primary attendees.

Those seeking a connection to the land that feeds them are beginning to realise what has long been obvious to the farmer: that agriculture is a conduit to culture itself. Sheep shearing, livestock parades and Shetland pony racing all offer a glimpse into our agrarian heritage. ‘The young ones,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1973’s Show Saturday, ‘thunder their ponies in competition/Twice round the ring.’ Businesses are catching on. The Newt in Somerset is hosting its very own Summer Farm Show, on July 4–5. ‘The farm is intrinsic to who we are,’ says Charles Freeman, head of sales. The show is included in membership and members can bring up to six guests on day tickets, at £35 each. ‘We are transforming the paddock,’ Charles explains, ‘into a space for demonstrations of traditional farming methods, welly wanging, and a dog and duck show.’

Besides its educational purposes, it is also somewhere for people to let their hair down. Michael Eavis, founder of Glastonbury, now sponsors the Bath & West’s Pilton Tent: a music marquee which show director Rupert Uloth tells me was full to the brim on both Friday and Saturday nights.

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