New York is one of those cities where you must always expect to see the unexpected. It’s a cliché for sure, but in the Big Apple it is a pertinent one. You cannot squeeze 8.5 million people into such a small space and not expect to see an odd assortment of things.

That strangeness breeds beauty. As mayor Zohran Mamdani correctly identified in his speech celebrating the NBA Championship winning New York Knickerbockers, this city and its residents are endlessly resilient. They find ways to make things work, in ways you wouldn’t expect. So, for the trained New Yorker, of course it makes sense to build a small New-England style cottage on top of an apartment building in Greenwich Village. Where else would you put it?

This delight is currently for sale with The Full Ask for the sum of $10.5 million. Is it the finest house in New York City? It is unlikely, but it is certainly one of the more interesting and tasteful manifestations of a penthouse that I can remember seeing for some time.

Set over two floors, the property offers a fraction over 3,000sq ft of living space, which translates into four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The majority of the home can be found on the ‘first floor’ (which is actually the sixth floor), where the current owners have created a welcoming and spacious living area ideal for entertaining.

The highlight is a vast and open dining-kitchen-living area, which occupies most of the floor. Three bedrooms are also on this floor, of which one is currently used as an office. The primary bedroom occupies the corner and offers a dual aspect, as well as a walk-in closet and en-suite bathroom. The fourth bedroom can be found in the mezzanine space between the first and second floors.

Of course, it all looks very nice, but the star of the show must certainly be the terrace and roof garden, with its corresponding ‘cottage’. The structure and ‘the meadow’ were built in 2003, to the drawings of the architect Lawrence Tobe. About 1,200sq ft of sedum sits on about seven inches of soil, underneath which are drainage and protective layers.

Sadly, Country Life isn’t the first magazine to discover the beauty of this property. The New York Times covered it in 2006, National Geographic in 2009 and it was photographed by George Steinmetz in 2015, publishing the pictures in Gothamist.

The views over downtown New York are, of course, sublime. To the south, One World Trade Center stands tall and to the north, the towers of Hudson Yards and the Empire State Building. Near neighbours include, but are not limited to, Taylor Swift.

The penthouse at 719 Greenwich Street, New York, is for sale with The Full Ask for $10.5 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

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Imagine you could go into an apothecary and, instead of seeing rows of jars with their cures, there was a display of all the plants from which they came. You’d be able to point down to a tiny snowdrop or up to a very large horse-chestnut tree. There would be an entire herbaceous border, sweet peas and roses, daisies and foxgloves.

On the shady bottom shelf, there would be an array of frogs and snails and even, possibly, puppy-dog tails. Many ailments or dilemmas are serious, others whimsical and then there are those that spring from the kind of lives we lead now.

Nature’s aspirin

The first published account of willow bark’s medical uses dates back to 1763 in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, when the Revd Edward Stone used it to treat malarial fever, common in England at the time. He nibbled on a willow twig and was impressed by its bitterness (he knew quinine, a malarial cure, was bitter), made a powder and was astonished by the results: ‘There is the bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders.’

It would take many more years, and scientists, to turn that discovery into what we know as aspirin. In 1828, scientists isolated what we now recognise as salicin, named after the botanical name of the willow, Salix alba. This was later converted in the laboratory to salicylic acid, which was more effective, and then a way was found to reduce its bitterness. It was sold for the first time as aspirin in 1899 by the German company Bayer.

Burn, baby, burn

Turmeric, ginger and white willow bark are all anti-inflammatory herbs that can reduce pain, but, in the greenhouse, there is something a little bit spicier. There are thousands of kinds of chilli pepper and, mostly, they are used to enliven food. When you bite into a chilli, you immediately feel the burn. That is caused by capsaicin, the active ingredient and, when applied to the skin in a cream or via patches, it can also produce a burning or stinging sensation.

However, it is also thought that the capsaicin is absorbed by the nerve cells, is transported to the spinal cord and then decreases the amount of pain-transmitting chemicals sent to the brain. The types of peppers used tend to be those with the most available, as in cayenne and serrano peppers (both Capsicum annuum), and those highest in capsaicin, which include the ghost pepper, also known as bhut jolokia, a cultivar of Capsicum chinense.

Short arms and deep pockets

There is nothing wrong with wanting to pay only your part of every bill, but it’s when you start to feel you may be tipping over into downright stinginess that you might seek help. There’s being careful, and then there’s being Scrooge. Fortunately, the garden has a cure for this — and it won’t cost much either.

Buy a packet of courgette seeds, sow about 10 and, of those, choose six to grow. Sow indoors in mid to late spring or directly outside from late spring. They will start to produce courgettes from midsummer at an average of three to four per week (more in a good year). From your six plants, you will have about 24 courgettes a week. Steam and sauté them. Make ratatouille until you can’t stand the sight of it. Grate them in salads. Use them in cakes, muffins, quick breads. Don’t forget soup. Give as many as possible to friends and when you run out (of friends) give them to everyone else. Leave them near your gate with a sign that reads: ‘Free to You’ or ‘Deliciously FREE’. You will be the king or queen of courgettes and experience the glow of being generous. You will be a giver, not a taker.

One final word: the following year, plant something else. No one wants a million courgettes two years in a row.

One too many

There is no official cure for a hangover, but the garden has some suggestions. First, coconut water — it’s full of electrolytes to recharge your body and can also help with a headache and nausea. Tomato juice (no vodka) can also be an effective remedy. Of course, tomato juice also includes a lot of water and tomatoes contain beta-carotene, vitamins A and C and the antioxidants lycopene and glutathione. In both these cases, you can pre-treat the problem by drinking a glass before you go out.

Other options are bananas (replenishing that potassium) and ginger (good for nausea). There’s also milk thistle (Silybum marianum), a herbal remedy aimed at protecting the liver. Finally, and this will make for a very interesting breakfast addition, there is the humble artichoke (Cynara cardunculus), which is also a type of thistle, said to improve liver health and digestion.

Pitter patter of tiny feet

If you have a dislike or fear of rodents, it’s important to find their weak spot and, in this case, it’s their noses or, to be more precise, their olfactory receptors. Mice have an acute sense of smell and they also have a secondary organ for detecting smells: the vomeronasal pathway. The garden cure for deterring mice is mint. The stronger the scent, the better, so use the good old-fashioned peppermint (Mentha x piperita) or spearmint (M. spicata).

The key to all of this is menthol. That mentholated aroma — clean and green, some would say bracing — can overwhelm the cold receptors in those tiny mice nasal passages. The battle begins with cotton-wool balls soaked in peppermint oil. Place these in spots (inside) where you think you’ve spotted a mouse: in the eaves, attic or skirting boards. When mopping the floors, add a drop of peppermint oil to the washing liquid.

Feeling bloated

Dandelions are one of those plants that appear indestructible. They grow everywhere and anywhere and, as Nicholas Culpeper noted in his The Complete Herbal of 1653: ‘It flowereth in one place or another almost all year long.’ Every part of it is edible and the toothed leaves are bursting with vitamins A, B, C and D. In Chinese medicine, the dandelion is seen as something of a cure-all, with the Chinese Pharmacopoeia in 2020 listing 40 patent medicines with the Taraxacum genus for use in treating more than 50 diseases.

In the West, it is famous for its diuretic capabilities — its more common name in France is pissenlit and in Britain it has always been known, as Culpeper puts it, ‘vulgarly’, as ‘piss-a-beds’. The leaves are an effective diuretic as they increase urine output without depleting potassium levels. The root has been used to support liver function and (also with leaves) for constipation. The roots and leaves contain inulin, a prebiotic fibre that helps beneficial gut bacteria.

There is no lack of ways to eat dandelions either. The flowers can be used to make tea or add to a salad, whereas the leaves (soak overnight to avoid bitterness) are used in salads or cooked as a vegetable (often with bacon). The roots can be grated into salads or roasted to use as a coffee substitute. A multi-tasking plant on every level.

Aloe there!

Aloe vera has quite the reputation. The ancient Egyptians called it the ‘plant of immortality’ and Cleopatra herself reportedly used it in her daily beauty routine. In ancient Greece, it is said that Alexander the Great was advised by his tutor Aristotle to conquer the island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea to secure supplies of the plant for his wounded soldiers. It was reputed to soothe rashes, heal wounds, settle stomachs and act as a laxative or ‘cleanser’.

The fleshy, pointy leaves have a layer of yellow latex that is responsible for the laxative effect, the use of which has been banned in some countries. They also contain a gel that is mostly water and includes a mix of amino acids, lipids, sterols and vitamins. It’s the gel that interests us here because if you have sunburn (or, indeed, frostbite), it will soothe your skin and, as the pain ebbs, your soul. It is rich in antioxidants and is a natural hydrating moisturiser, which may also help with peeling.

Forget-me-not

The common snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) may look small and delicate, with its slender green leaves and nodding, white, pendant blooms, but it is anything but. All parts of the plant are toxic (no herbivore is going to nibble away at this little one) and it possesses a natural antifreeze that inhibits the ice crystals that kill so many other plants. Plus, its leaves have specially hardened tips that help break through frozen ground. That’s quite an armoury for a flower that looks entirely innocent in every way.

It’s a common churchyard plant and was grown in abbeys to treat mal de tête or ‘headache’. There are now thousands of varieties: it’s one of those plants that has a sophisticated fan base and galanthophiles are serious collectors who will pay large sums for unusual or rare bulbs. It is not known what inspired Russian scientists in the 1940s and 1950s to study Galanthus woronowii, a species with broad, bright green leaves that is native to the Caucasus, and break down its chemical structure. All parts of the plant were found to contain a chemical that they called galantamine, but it is particularly concentrated in the bulbs.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was discovered that the chemical can be used to manage Alzheimer’s disease, as it elevates the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain. This improves memory and cognitive function and has been shown to be effective in managing early to moderate Alzheimer’s.

And so to sleep…

Many plants have reputations as sleep aids. Lavender (Lavandula), St John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum), red Korean ginseng (Panax ginseng), chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) and kava-kava (Piper methysticum), to name a few.

One of the most prevalent is common valerian (Valeriana officinalis), which has tall stems and white flowerheads with many tiny blooms loved by bees. It is known as a herb with calming and sedative properties and has been studied many times for its effectiveness in treating insomnia and/or anxiety. The results of the studies seem to be conclusively inconclusive, as they are difficult to compare, involving different concentrations and settings. However, that has not stopped the European Medicines Agency approving valerian as a traditional herb to aid sleep and valerian dry-ethanol extract being recognised as a herbal remedy for improving sleep.

It is not fully understood how, or why, valerian works, but it is known that GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is a major inhibitory neurotransmitter (think of it as an ‘off switch’) in the central nervous system. Its receptor GABA-A is the key player for many drugs that aim to help sleep (these include benzodiazepines, such as Xanax and Valium). Valerenic acid and valerenol, compounds found in the root, have been shown to bind to GABA-A receptors and could be behind its sleepy reputation.

This is a condensed extract from the author’s ‘RHS The Garden Cure: 100 Remarkable Remedies for the Curious Gardener’ (Mitchell Beazley, £20), which is out now.

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

Are you checking in?

Spend 24 hours in the corridors of Claridge’s, the luxury London hotel that never sleeps, in the company of Emma Hughes

Alpacalypse now

Mary Skipwith speaks to alpaca owners about the comic camelids that serve as woolly wedding guests and living lawnmowers

Luxury

Jonathan Self is captivated by the little miracles of cameos and Amie Elizabeth White seeks out the ultimate silk pocket square

Local heroes

Christian and Jessica Fleming tell Giles Kime how they created a new family home in harmony with its Cotswolds surroundings

The evolution of the office

Leading designers throw open the doors of their modern working spaces for Arabella Youens

New looks for a new season

Amelia Thorpe shares fresh ideas for every room in the home

A passion for pattern

Matthew Dennison reveals how Watts 1874 is building on the legacy of George Gilbert Scott Jnr

It’s a kind of magic

Carla Passino outlines the route to commissioning the ideal artist to paint the perfect portrait

Joanna Scanlan’s favourite painting

The actress chooses a portrait that is a picture of concentration

Country-house treasures

A model ship made by Italian prisoners of war is forever docked at Chavenage. John Goodall sets sail for the Gloucestershire seat

An ideal for living

The spirit of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement is alive and well at Church Rate Corner, Cambridge. William Fawcett investigates

The legacy

Giles Kime hails the influence of the distinctive interior designer David Hicks, who combined modernism with classic ideals

Let’s go coconuts

Rob Crossan unwraps the Bounty bar, a snack that promised a taste of the exotic when it landed on our post-war shores 75 years ago

In glowing colours

Charles Quest-Ritson applauds the ornamental and innovative 11 acres of gardens at Littlethorpe Manor in Ripon, North Yorkshire

The veal thing

‘Keep it simple, don’t skimp on the size and serve it fresh’ is the sage wiener-schnitzel advice from Tom Parker Bowles

Countryside mysteries

John Wright reveals the truth about tree burrs, imperfections highly prized by cabinetmakers

Raising the proof

Poitín, the illicit Irish moonshine, is making a cocktail-bar comeback, reveals Melanie Cable-Alexander

Travel

Rosie Paterson unpacks the latest winter-sun news, Mark Hedges eats out Sydney style and Sam Carlisle finds the essence of Mexico

Arts & antiques

Carla Passino profiles Hokusai, an artist truly made waves

Terracotta tones

Inspired by hand-carved lino patterns, this design by Fiona Howard celebrates the quiet joy of a day by the river. Gone Fishing Wallpaper in Ruddy Duck costs £144 per 10 metre roll.

Elegant mix

Teaming block-printed blooms with a hand-drawn pattern, Floral Block wallpaper in Chocolate and Red on a textured ground is by UK-based fabric and wallpaper studio Barneby Gates. It costs £141 per 10 metre roll.

Bringing the outdoors in

Inspired by the colours of an English garden, interior designer Octavia Dickinson has created three shades for Edward Bulmer Natural Paint, including Hedge Mustard, shown here. ‘Octavia’s palette feels natural, even in deep saturated colours,’ says Edward Bulmer. ‘Our pigments have proved to be a good friend, bringing that softly tonal depth, which she handles so well.’ From £66 for 2.5-litre emulsion.

Earthy warmth

Designed to bring depth and comfort to any room, Burnt Sienna paint costs £59 for 2.5-litre matt emulsion, from Neptune.

Hot news

Paint manufacturer Mylands and cast-iron radiator specialist Castrads have joined forces in a move that sees all Castrads designs available in any Mylands colour, making it possible to blend or contrast a radiator in any room setting. Radiator prices from £800.

Character colour

Made by Fenwick & Tilbrook for interior-design firm Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, Pimlico Green brings depth and joy to this inviting entrance hall, prices from £68 for 2.5-litre pure matt emulsion.

Soft hues

Known for the gentle warmth of her collections, Susie Watson offers an ever-evolving range of paint colours designed to create a harmonious finish. The paint colour fan deck costs £3.50, paint prices from £58 for 2.5-litre emulsion.

Green and pleasant

Fresh Olive brings energy to this kitchen cabinetry, its rich tones paired with softly neutral walls in Lambskin, from £21.50 for 0.94-litre matt emulsion, from Benjamin Moore.

Striking simplicity

Flag wallpaper features graphic shapes in a quilt-like design that has a nostalgic charm. It costs £195 per 10 metre roll from Fermoie.

New take

The Voysey House wallpaper collection reimagines original designs by influential architect and designer C. F. A. Voysey. ‘We’ve taken the essence of his work — his stylised nature, narrative charm and strong graphic structure —and refined it through contemporary scale, colour and materials,’ says Rebecca Craig, head of design at Morris & Co. Papyrus River is a mural wallpaper inspired by The River Rug, dating from 1903, and costs £439 for three panels printed as one continuous roll of 9 metres.

Blossoming beauty

CommonRoom’s collection of Japanese-inspired wallpapers is taken from Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art), a Japanese magazine published between 1901 and 1906. Originally a woodblock print on paper, Sakura by Furuya Kōrin transforms cherry blossoms into a tapestry of form and colour. It costs £185 per 10 metre roll.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'One of the finest, if not the very best, of the small Cotswold Tudor houses,’ was the verdict of the late architectural historian and author Sir Nikolaus Pevsner of Temple Guiting Manor.

Historic England agree: Temple Guiting is one of just a couple of dozen or so houses in the Cotswolds that's Grade I-listed. For several years it's been run as one of the smartest places to stay in the country — with the early 16th century manor house and the five barns amid the 14 acres of grounds available to rent at prices starting from around £1,000 a night. Country Life's Paula Minchin tried out the latter in 2023 and absolutely loved both the house itself, and what owners Jane and Steven Collins had done with the place. 'Manor from heaven' was the headline.

It seems that there's been a change of approach at Temple Guiting, though. It was always possible to book the entire estate for a single party, but it's now been put on the rental market proper, with the agents quoting £55,650 per week.

What does that get you? The house and barns that include 15 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms, the swimming pool, the tennis court, the gardens, the yoga studio, the gym, the children's playground, the boating lake and the intriguingly-named secret cinema, which is built in to one of the two ancient dovecotes. (The other dovecote is home to a hot tub.)

And the gardens? They're the work of genius Jinny Blom, a psychologist-cum-philosopher-turned-garden designer.

There's no doubt that country life doesn't get much better than this. However, there's no doubt that this is a lot of money: the rental price works out at just under £2.9 million a year, which is enough to buy you a pretty fantastic Cotswolds home outright. Such as this gorgeous place in Hook Norton, or this one near Cheltenham. And with a bit of back and forth you might be able to pick up this one near Stroud.

So who is the target renter for a place like Temple Guiting? Quite simply, it's the cost of trying before you buy. Taking on a listed building is worlds away from spending a few hundred thousand pounds to rent one out for a month or two, and no doubt there will be some potential buyers who are calculating that, given the current shaky market conditions, renting for a while could end up saving more than it costs. As well as offering the benefit of seeing if Cotswold life is right for you.

Those taking that opportunity are, for want of a better term, the new jetset. 'The Cotswolds is now competing with the South of France and Tuscany for the international summer crowd in a way it simply wasn't 10 years ago,' says Olivia Conway, director of lettings at UK Sotheby’s International Realty.

'We are seeing American and Middle Eastern families take houses for a month or two, bringing children, grandparents and friends with them. They want privacy, space and enough going on that they can stay put. An estate like Temple Guiting, with separate houses, a pool, tennis court and lake, is made for that.

'There is also a growing "try before you buy" market among international buyers. A weekend at a Cotswolds hotel is one thing; living here for six weeks is quite another. You quickly learn which villages you actually like and whether you want complete seclusion or to be closer to the social scene.'

Temple Guiting isn't alone — there are several landmark Cotswolds homes available for rent at the moment. Kirtlington Park in Oxfordshire is also up for rent, with an even higher asking price of £60,000 a week, and the nearby Ardington House is up at £48,000 a week. That suggests that all those sums do indeed make sense for some.

'If you're considering spending several million pounds on a country house, renting first makes enormous sense,' adds Collins. 'By the end of the summer, clients often know exactly where and what they want to buy. Increasingly for UHNW buyers, the holiday house is becoming the starting point for the house hunt.'

The Temple Guiting Estate is available to rent through UK Sotheby’s International Realty — see more details.

Which city, would you say, is the artistic capital of the world? It’s a billion-dollar question that can be taken either one of two ways. The first: which is the world’s most creatively fertile city? The one home to the highest number of artists and the busiest scene? The second: which city commands the highest art sales? The two yield different answers. The first is probably Mexico City; the second is obviously New York.

London, by contrast, occupies more of a middle ground. The capital’s status as a cradle for artists and art dealers, respectively, has ebbed and flowed; both aspects are currently in flux. Emerging artists are returning to the city’s blue-chip galleries in greater numbers than they have in a while. The art market, disrupted by Brexit, has shifted to Paris and Milan.

Perhaps this is no bad thing. A city is unable to be a bastion of the art market and a well of countercultural activity to the same extent or at the same time. A glance at New York’s creative alumni since the city switched allegiance from artists to bankers in the 1990s reveals a dearth of names on par with those of the Downtown scene, such as Koons, Basquiat or Keith Haring. Basquiat could not have become Basquiat had he been unable to afford even a squalid flat in Lower Manhattan.

Contemporary artists have long been outpaced — and outpriced — by the same gentrifying forces that allow their predecessors to monopolise sales. Yet what goes up must come down. In London, the pendulum is swinging back. Although fewer buyers may be worrisome to dealers, our most prestigious gallerists are using such a moment to pivot towards new artistic subsets.

Pilar Corrias, a blue-chip gallery on Mayfair’s Conduit Street, has started showcasing young talent such as Sholto Blissett. At Halcyon Gallery on New Bond Street, works by Warhol (worth millions) sit alongside those by Wang Tingxin, whose pieces often sell for more modest five-digit figures. Over ten years, the Mayor of London has created what City Hall refers to as ‘ten football pitches’ of affordable studio space, allowing artists to rent these for far below market rates.

It is amid such circumstances that patrons begin to think beyond the household name — and to move the market forward even as they avoid buying a Magritte.

Such dips in the market are necessary for it not to remain static. As Frieze Art Fair returns to The Regent’s Park this month, opportunistic buyers are muscling in to play among the big leagues.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters run from October 14-18.

Every so often we set about to wondering why more people don't live in Northumberland. Wide open skies, gloriously unspoilt countryside and pristine beaches give it 'all the ingredients of perfection', as Viscount Ridley put it in a piece for Country Life last year. 'Most tourists speed through Northumberland heading for Scotland — big mistake, but long may they do so.'

Northumberland's allure is made all the greater by the country houses that dot this landscape, and a wonderful example has come up in the form of Adderstone House, which is being sold by Ryan Eve of Corbridge-based Finest at a guide price of £2.95 million.

This substantial early-Victorian home is set in 10½ acres of wonderful gardens and grounds within the Northumberland coastal plain, 1½ miles from Belford village, 4½ miles from Bamburgh and 16 miles from Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The main house is a solid, stone-built affair that offers some 6,520 square feet of well organised family accommodation on three floors, including three reception rooms, a study, office and a contemporary Smallbone kitchen/diner on the down floor, with a cellar below.

The first floor has six bedrooms, two of which are en-suite while the other two share two further bathrooms.

The second floor is a converted attic that's listed as a further bedroom, but it's enormous — more than 33ft long — and could be used for all sorts of other things. What a playroom it would make...

Yet the main house is only part of the story here, because there's an annexe which has been created in complete contrast to the Victorian principal house.

Built by the current owners, it's a striking, two-bedroom lakeside home, designed with energy efficiency firmly in mind. Set low into the landscape beside the water, its sweeping profile and planted roof allow it to sit discreetly within the gardens.

Those gardens were created from scratch: this was 10 acres of virgin farmland 20 years ago before the current owners moved in. They brought in local garden designer Sean Murray, whose considerable talents are showcased in the now well-established gardens at Adderstone House.

There are mixed borders, a walled garden, orchard, woodland garden, rose walk, formal garden, dry border, boathouse folly, lakeside walk, Japanese garden — with a Tora gate — and a tea house.

In 2009, the Adderstone House team planted a small private vineyard, listed by the national winegrowers’ association as the most northerly vineyard in England. Here, 100 Rondo vines, a Northern European variety, were planted in 2009 and now yield some 150 litres of excellent juice annually.

This is pasteurised and given away (in return for a donation) when the gardens are opened to the public twice a year in aid of hospice care in north Northumberland.

Adderstone House is for sale at a guide price of £2.95 million with Finest — see more details.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of trying a piece of clothing on in a shop — preferably one with good-size changing rooms and flattering lighting — and it fitting like a tailor-made glove. Covid did its best to rid us of such sensory joys, but I'm delighted to report that in-person shopping is making a major comeback.

‘The decision to open our first flagship store in Belgravia was a direct result of customer demand,' says Wiggy Hindmarch, founder of womenswear brand Wiggy Kit, whose pop-ups proved so successful that ‘a permanent space was an inevitable decision'.

I've always believed that in-store shopping gives us a better understanding of fabric, quality details and finishing touches, and what suits our bodies. Plus, it's impossible to tell how something will make you feel from a digital description. The opportunity to judge with our own eyes and hands will always be more fun, fruitful and efficient than doom-scrolling online.

When menswear label Thom Sweeney launched its Autumn/Winter collection, they decided to step away from e-commerce altogether. ‘We wanted to go back to our roots to focus on what we have always done best,' said founders Thom Whiddett and Luke Sweeney, ‘getting to know the client and dressing them in person.' Collections are still visible on the website, but treat it less like a catalogue and more like an invitation to visit the Old Burlington Street, Mayfair, store.

This month, American brands Loeffler Randall, famed for its pleated bow shoes and citing 'British appetite', and Ulla Johnson threw open the doors to their London flagship stores on Chiltern Street and Sloane Street, respectively. DeMellier will follow in their fashionable footsteps this autumn, in Chelsea, and Dunhill is busy putting the finishing touches to its new flagship shop in Mayfair.

Somewhat residential in feel, these retail spaces often comprise gallery walls and spaces to relax in among the rails, and sometimes cafés and gardens. Occasionally, they open inside actual former townhouses — like Audemars Piguet.

I, for one, am delighted and ready to move in. It's goodbye clicks and hello bricks.

When Walter Basset married Cecilia de Dunstanville in 1150, he not only gained a wife, but one of the most important (and profitable) estates in England. And, over time, the Basset family would go on to become one of the most powerful Cornish mining dynasties. In fact, the family, their home and ancestral lands were so well known that Winston Graham wove them all into his epic 'Poldark' series.

When Country Life decided to photograph the gardens in the late 19th century, the Basset estate encompassed land from Redruth to St Ives, and 12 miles of Atlantic coastline.

It's safe to assume that the Editor was not very happy with the resulting images. Fourteen survive in our Archive, but none of them were ever published. Until now.

We own plenty of unpublished photographs of Britain's great country estates and gardens, but what makes this situation unusual is the fact that the photographer would have suffered through an arduous and expensive steam train journey — on what would go on to become the Riviera Express.

On the odyssey — which culminated in a bumpy carriage ride from the station to the house — the photographer would've been encumbered by a heavy camera, lenses and tripod. Plus a number of fragile, large-format glass plates.

In the background of these photographs, there are tantalising slivers and wholes of the now-lost Tehidy House. A myriad houses took it in turns to stand on the Basset's land during their tenure of it, and this one was relatively new.

Tehidy was commissioned by John Francis Basset in 1861 and was a vast expansion of an existing Palladian house by Thomas Edwards of Greenwich.

Edwards’s elegant, symmetrical mansion was built with large quantities of imported Portland and Bath stone, supplemented with granite from the family’s quarry at Carn Brea. His grand design consisted of a central pedimented main block connected via curved, sweeping quadrant wings to four detached corner pavilions.

Inside, the property was decorated with sumptuous Adam style ceilings and fireplaces, and paintings by Peter Lely, Sir Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough.

John Francis's enhancements were overseen by William Burn of Piccadilly — and the result was what is now considered to be Cornwall's first modern manor house.

In just two years, the property doubled in size, eventually comprising a grand entrance hall, seven reception rooms, 21 principal bedrooms, 14 servant's bedrooms and a very generous, for the time, six bathrooms. Plus, electric lights, a hot-water heating system and fire hydrants.

This modernisation, however, came at a cost: £150,000 to be exact, or more than £16 million in today's money.

Unfortunately, the family fortune — built on the tin and copper mining industries, both of which were now in decline — was dwindling. John Francis, however, didn't have too long to worry about things. Six years after the build was finished, he died, aged 39.

His two brothers inherited the estate and its mounting debts, but they too died, in 1888, and so it passed to a son called Arthur.

Arthur’s main passion in life was racing — a disastrous hobby for anyone in financial difficulty, but he clung on to Tehidy until 1915. Remarkably, it did sell — to Cornwall County Council. Their plan to convert it into a much-needed tuberculosis isolation hospital succeeded and by late 1917 the first patients were in place.

On February 26, 1919, Sister Everett — who was comforting someone about to succumb to the disease — noticed an unusual smell and raised the alarm. The building was on fire.

The local fire brigade battled valiantly to extinguish the flames but, by the next day, all that remained of Tehidy were the exterior walls and the quadrant pavilions.

The hospital was quickly rebuilt, but without, of course, the wonderful original interiors. In 1986, it was transformed once again and divided into luxury apartments.

The grounds, and parts of the Basset estate now form Tehidy Country Park.

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J. D. Vance likening Emily in Paris to the work of Shakespeare was not on my 2026 bingo card, although perhaps it should have been. In case you didn’t know, the Vice-President recently decided the best use of his time was to defend a show once called a ‘work scheme’ for ‘people who can’t act’ (its final season airs in December) and laud it as a satire of millennial decision-making and tacit defence of the nuclear family. ‘It’s obvious,’ Vance said, ‘that Emily should end up with the French chef’ rather than wasting her time ‘with random people or [focusing] on her job.’ Such antics are emblematic of our era of PLU politics, where leaders seek to show that they are people like us as well as people, like us.

If the latter is a time-honoured tradition, the former is a novelty of our media-literate age. To be like us (no comma) in 2026 is to be clued into the zeitgeist, akin to members of a club keeping up with a culture that moves faster than Richard Hammond on an A road in Herefordshire. An almost academic obsession with a show about fashion and seductive Europeans is not the same as, say, enjoying the football.

The aim is not for Vance to pose as an electable everyman but as an esteemed member of the Emily in Paris fan club: the vox populi has become that of Netflix Et Chill. Cultural fandom is now the ultimate members’ club and belonging to one is highly prized. Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, recently found time to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live (‘I love you Jimmy,’ he gushed effusively). Kemi Badenoch, for her part, managed to nab front-row seats to Marks & Spencer’s show during London Fashion Week (supermarket clothing wasn’t enough to entice the noticeably absent Anna Wintour) and party with young Conservatives at the Tory party conference last week in Birmingham.

Even a retired stooge such as Barack Obama compiles a public music playlist each summer, weighing in on the discourse. The question is: why? Uniting around, say, an album, song or television show perhaps is a safer bet in an age where political fractures make it hard to unite around Big Issues. There is another, more left-field theory: people at the top seek to belong because they feel lonely.

Notice how it’s always those in the C-suite who most lament our ‘lack of community’, no doubt the trendiest buzzword of 2026, even as anyone who has recently attended a gig can attest that community is alive and well, neither hard to find nor prohibitive to enjoy. Pity James David Vance, who simply must want an invitation to the season-six premiere of his absolute favourite series. It is, after all, Emily’s grand finale, an outcome he personally hopes to avoid when the midterms roll around next month. Bonne chance!

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

A little over a year ago, a beautiful invitation dropped into my inbox (how millennial) that informed me my dear cousin and his gorgeous fiancée were tying the knot. The setting? A 15th-century barn on Symondsbury Estate, less than five miles from the Jurassic Coast. Naturally, my first concern was not where to stay or what to wear, but what would be the perfect wedding guest car.

All the best wedding cars have been well documented — they’re typically something you wouldn’t get to drive in daily life, be that down to their prohibitive price tag or rarity. Think of your Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, E-Types, DB5s, and so on. Although some to-be-weds opt for old bangers that have a sentimental significance, you can normally, and should, bet on the wedding car being the most impressive chariot on the big day.

However, when it comes to choosing the best wedding guest car, little has been written and perhaps even less understood. You don’t want to upstage the bride and groom's carriage of choice, but equally you don’t want to get lost in a car park of Range Rover Evoques and Sports. It’s a fine line to tread. Ideally, it wants to be something no one else is going to turn up in, but also practical enough to help with any disaster-averting errands.

To determine what makes the best wedding guest car, we must consider the circumstances and the role of the wedding guest. Is it urban or rural? July or November? Maid of honour or ring bearer? In my case it will be Dorset, the August bank holiday and general family member #14. We are hoping for sun, but it will probably be muddy and I could be asked to do anything from ferrying granny back to the Airbnb after one too many Chablis, to picking up the DJ and all their gear after his 1976 VW campervan breaks down.

Having done some reconnaissance a few months before when visiting family (yes, I am fun at parties), I knew the main and overflow car parks were effectively graded dirt and gravel, on an incline, uphill from the venue. With this in mind, and that regardless of the time of year you can always half expect rain as a wedding crasher, we’re going to want something with a two-speed transfer box and diff-lock just in case.

Since it’s the end of August precipitation is likely, but it’s also the last of the summer wine, we'll undoubtedly hit congested roads with holdout holidaymakers and caravans in tow. So, nothing sporty or low slung, as we won’t be going anywhere fast. The aim of the game is riding in comfort, high up to see over hatchbacks and around winding lanes.

Dorset is Land Rover country. Every model year and conceivable configuration retires here after hard yards in the fields, now resigned to doing over-priced faux farm shop runs and chauffeuring cockapoos to brunch. Anything too flash will elicit hypocritical accusations of Chelsea tractors. We want salt-of-the-earth credentials and nouveau-country-folk approval.

Family obligations are the make or break for a wedding guest car, but with a little experience and foresight you can anticipate almost any eventuality, no matter how eccentric or patience testing. If you’re a younger guest like me, driving rather than drinking, you’re going to get asked to ferry the infirm, tiddly or both. That means a minimum of five seats, plenty of room for gifts and headroom for all manner of headdress. But once you’re amenable to transport someone, you are inevitably going to be asked to haul some thing, so boot space for all and sundry is a must.

With these all important criteria in mind, I opted for the Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster Black Edition. Sensible.

As expected, I got caught behind every flavour of tentbox, caravan, campervan and motorhome headed down South for the bank holiday weekend. Crisp air conditioning and an outstanding sound system made the paint-drying traffic tolerable and the start-stop engine meant my wallet wasn’t completely empty after the five-hour drive.

On the morning of the wedding, that auntie (you know the one) pre-gamed the breakfast mimosas a little too hard and needed a shuttle to the venue. Apparently, there was ‘no longer space’ for her in any of the wedding procession cars… And, despite being told multiple times that we weren’t doing fascinators, she still insisted on wearing one because, ‘Princess Beatrice still does'. Fortunately, for both of us, there were no issues accommodating the obnoxious ornamentation.

My weather prediction soon became a reality. The heavens opened and the car park turned to sludge. Elevated on 18-inch alloys and chunky Bridgestones, we had no problem negotiating the rivers and ponds forming in the claggy conditions; and thankfully, the JBL subwoofer in the rear, right under that auntie, drowned out the back seat driving.

The rain was truly torrential. Auspiciously, but quite unplanned, this particular Quartermaster came with a 270 degree batwing awning. Aside from evoking images of Bruce and Alfred sitting on folding chairs in a Caravan and Motorhome Club campsite, sipping tea from the Bat-Thermos, it was a life saver. The wing spanned the entirety of the passenger side so we all popped out dry (save my better half, who extended the awning) and deployed our Bat-Umbrellas for a quick dash to the church.

After the ceremony, the clouds parted, giving everyone enough time to make it back to their cars and onto the reception. A small but growing group of gentleman guests were crowded round the Quartermaster in its tuxedo, which in turn was surrounded by a sea of navy Range Rovers and Land Rovers. The attention was short-lived though. As the bridal car came to collect the newlyweds, the crowd dispersed to fawn over the English White Rolls-Royce Phantom, adorned with matching ribbon and stringed tin cans.

While trying to negotiate the fleet of Rovers Land and Range all trying to leave at once, one of the bridal cars picked up a puncture, which meant I now needed to ferry four new passengers — three bridesmaids and the ring bearer (Pippa the cockapoo), along with a boot load of booze to the reception venue. Which sadly meant that auntie would need to find alternative transportation to the reception. What rotten luck.

I almost made it to Cinderella time without further incident, but there was one final 'Trinity, would you mind…?'. I was introduced to three groomsmen holding each other up like a tipsy-teepee, covered head-to-toe in muck from trying, and failing, to traverse the sodden field standing between them and their accommodation. My other half herded them into the truck bed, shut the tonneau cover and we took a very gentle drive across the field to reunite them with their long suffering girlfriends.

Most will deride the Quartermaster as overkill for the seemingly simple task(s) of a wedding guest car, but much like the people that scoff at the humble doomsday prepper, they’ll all be running to you when the zombies come, begging for shelter and your tins of SPAM.

In 1935, Country Life reported that just two years earlier, an article by Lady Kitty Ritson had appeared in a London newspaper titled ‘What Is a Schnauzer?’ The staunch, sturdy little dogs had arrived in Britain only a decade earlier, and in a short space of time had ‘gained in popularity, that such a question is now scarcely ever heard at a show, and even in the country, as a yokel points to one of these dogs, you may overhear the remark: “Them’s Snorzers, them is.”’

The Duchess of Montrose was one of the first to bring Schnauzers to Britain, keeping them at her extensive kennel at Brodick Castle on the Isle of Arran. A standard bitch called Busserl von der Grünenbaum, imported as a puppy from Vienna in 1924, would deliver her first litter on British soil in January 1926. Arthur Croxton Smith would later credit the Duchess with ‘being the pioneer of a breed that is likely to become popular’. In 1926, she wrote to the magazine about the ‘rare breed’ to inquire if anyone else knew of this dog ‘in England, as [she had not] seen more than [her] own and one belonging to a celebrated soldier, who had his dog all through the war’.

When the breed arrived in England, Country Life reported that it seemed as if they would ‘boom’ in much the same way as Alsatians had done a few years earlier, but the approach of the Second World War prevented the breed’s advancement. Like Poodles, Schnauzers come in three sizes: the standard (or medium-sized) variety; the Miniature or Zwergschnauzer (introduced to the United Kingdom by Mr W. H. Hancock in 1930); and the Giant, Munich, or Riesenschnauzer, a variety that would not appear on British shores until the 1960s.

A common misconception is that Schnauzers are associated with the terrier family; they are, in fact, herding dogs. Von Stephanitz, in The German Shepherd Dog, declares that Schnauzers belong to the rough-haired intermediate form of driving dogs, and expressed emphatically that they have nothing to do with the short and stocky Pinschers or snappers. Schnauzer enthusiast Captain Williams revealed to Country Life in 1937 that he believed the breed originated from cattle drovers from the Württemberg pastures, who had driven cattle up into Germany. Those who had achieved good sales at the carousel sought other means of transport home and left some of their dogs behind. These were crossed with the wolf-grey Spitz, and later with the French Poodle. In the case of the Giant Schnauzer, it would be crossed with the black Great Dane, ‘to make his hair shorter and his body larger and black’.

The Schnauzer was once known in its native Germany as the rauche or wire-haired Pinscher, while ‘Schnauzer’ was more or less a nickname, meaning snout, and refers to the dog’s outstanding feature — the strong whiskered muzzle. The hirsute furnishings of the face are certainly the breed’s distinguishing feature, ‘plentifully equipped with hair about the head, which is strong and long. They have a moustache and chin whiskers, and their eyebrows are beetling’, Country Life expressed in 1937.

Although the breed’s original vocation was that of a general-purpose farm dog and an excellent vermin exterminator, the Schnauzer’s ‘amazing faculty for discriminating between friend and foe have made him the most popular of all dogs in Germany and Austria for the protection of warehouses’. The Giant Schnauzer has been used as a police and army dog and the little Miniature, ‘with a growl which might well belong to a dog three times his size, still guards the bakers’ carts as their masters deliver the bread from door to door’, Country Life revealed in 1935.

Champions of the breed would also note that they ‘adore children as much as they hate rats, and their temperament does not lead them into mischief in the country’ and, as the faithful little dog with a Teutonic yap ages, ‘his beard may go white, his youthful sense of fun never diminishes, and if he has a fault, it is that, when at last you put him to rest, you can only heal the hurt by buying another Schnauzer’.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

Scottish Borders — £8 million to £15 million

Simply magnificent, Portmore House and its surrounding estate is a breathtaking slice of Scotland centred near Peebles. The 10-bedroom house at the heart is delightful and original. If a mere 1,227 acres isn't enough, a further 2,233 acres are available. And did we mention the organ yet?

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

Hertfordshire — £1.95 million

Five bedrooms and six reception rooms in this house in a private and secluded plot in Letchworth Garden City. Plenty of space at over 4,000sq ft, wonderful privacy, fine gardens and superb access to London via road and rail. That's a lot of boxes ticked.

For sale via Michael Graham — see more details and pictures.

Berkshire — £4.75 million

It's places like this that make you wonder how the clergy used to live: this fine old rectory near Newbury has eight bedrooms, a swimming pool and a party barn. Wonderful.

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

Berkshire – £10.15 million

More than 300 acres of the home counties are on offer at this extraordinary property which runs right up to the bank of the River Thames. There are two listed farmhouses, six further cottages, equestrian facilities, staff flats, an indoor pool, a party barn and much more.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vendors are happy to split this up into three lots.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Buckinghamshire — £750,000

Proving that you don't have to be a millionaire to live in a beautiful country home, this devastatingly pretty cottage in Thornborough has four bedrooms, a thatched roof and a gorgeous garden which (unlike some of the other homes on this page) won't need a team of full-time gardeners to look after.

For sale via Russell & Butler via OnTheMarket — see more details and pictures.

Somerset — £875,000

Rodney Stoke might sound like a boy you went to school with, but it's actually a pretty little village in Somerset where you'll find this country house for sale.

Built from stone, with over 3,000sq ft and fine views, it has space, character and the sort of rural setting that'll make you wonder why you lived in the city for so long.

For sale via Sandersons — see more details and pictures.

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.’

Whitehall is a name and place synonymous with the British government. Amid its familiar landmarks — such as the Treasury, Foreign Office, Banqueting House and the gates of Downing Street — are several important buildings that continue to serve as offices and are rarely seen by the public. Just beyond Horse Guards, facing a jumble of Victorian frontages and recessed from the road behind high screen walls are three interlocking properties of this kind. They jointly manifest more than 400 years of naval history, and conceal some little-known interiors of great interest.

The youngest of the three, contrarily known as Old Admiralty, is the showiest. It is not seen from Whitehall at all, but forms one side of Horse Guards Parade beyond. Constructed during the 1890s and the early 1900s, it was a major addition to the much older pair of buildings that quietly spans the Whitehall frontage and stands on sites long associated with the Royal Navy.

The connection extends back to 1622, when the 1st Duke of Buckingham took up residence here in a property called Wallingford House, built upon the former timber yard of Whitehall Palace. Buckingham had been appointed Lord High Admiral in 1619 and brought his office with him to Whitehall. In 1628, the year of Buckingham’s death, Charles I converted the office of Admiral of England into a commission, with the control of the Royal Navy passing to the Board of Admiralty. A parliamentary act invested authority upon seven commissioners or Lords of the Admiralty Board. Their roles included a right to a residence and there were several early offices around Tower Hill.

When the Buckingham lease expired in 1694, Wallingford House was demolished, presenting an opportunity for the construction of a new home for the Admiralty (which since the Restoration in 1660 had been operating from Duke Street, Westminster). Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to erect ‘a Sufficient Pyle of Building’, which he provided swiftly and to straightforward design. This was up and occupied by 1695, but was ultimately destined to last no more than three decades.

By 1723, the Admiralty, having purchased and cleared adjacent properties, demolished the Wren building, considering it in bad condition and failing to meet needs. Upon the now enlarged site rose the grand edifice we see today, three-sided around an open courtyard as designed by Thomas Ripley. What is today known as the Ripley Building was conceived as a piazza and was to comprise townhouse residences for the Admiralty Lords in the wings, with the central block providing space for offices and a fine board room. Entrance to the offices was through a giant Ionic portico (Fig 1), its pediment surmounted with the Admiralty badge in a carved cartouche.

The present proportions of the portico are a compromise. In the original scheme, a larger, wider pediment would have limited light to the upper windows. An 11th-hour rejig addressed this, but, as the stone columns were already cut, a proportional concession had to be made, squeezing the hefty columns into the narrower configuration we see today. When it was first completed, the portico was criticised and even mocked, but, since 1761, a screen closing it off from the street has softened its awkwardness (Fig 2).

The screen is Robert Adam’s earliest work in London, a Doric arcade set between pedimented pavilions. In the pediments are carvings by Michael Henry Spang of the prow of a Roman ship and a British man-of-war. Beneath, triple niches were intended for statuary. Central to the screen composition is an entrance archway carved with panels of dolphins and surmounted by beautifully writhing hippo-campi. To either side are pedestrian gates. The present form of the screen, which respects Adam’s original design, actually dates back only to a restoration of 1923. That’s because, in 1827, the Duke of Clarence — later William IV, but then Lord High Admiral — smashed two side entrances through the structure to create more convenient access for his carriage.

Beyond the screen, the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty was in the left-hand corner of the internal courtyard. By 1781, this accommodation was already considered insufficient. A proposal for adding ‘a few rooms’ behind was approved by the Prime Minister and Treasury. Properties immediately beside it on Whitehall were purchased in 1785 by the Naval Commissioners, then cleared to make way for an expanded Admiralty House.

The project, undertaken by Samuel Pepys Cockerell, grew rapidly in ambition. What had begun as a proposal to create a few new rooms gradually transformed into the creation of a grand aristocratic mansion, comprising three main storeys with basement and attic. Cockerell was a student of Sir Robert Taylor, from whom he took on the role of surveyor to the Admiralty. As Taylor resided at Spring Gardens just to the rear of this site, he would certainly have been involved in his protégé’s project, although he died shortly before the building was complete by Christmas 1788.

As the concept had begun life as a rear extension, the approach to the enlarged Admiralty House remained via the existing Ripley courtyard. This left what would have been a large forecourt area between Cockerell’s new building and the street free for a detached, double-height kitchen. A high, blind wall topped with formidable iron railings and scrolled lamp brackets conceals this structure from Whitehall. Despite being hidden, the street façade of Admiralty House is well balanced and polite, of golden stock brick with simple stone dressing. Its centrepiece is a Venetian window framed within a semicircular recess.

The entrance to Cockerell’s mansion remains through Ripley’s front door. Only as the visitor enters the inner hall does the building assume the grandeur of an official residence, with a vaulted ceilingand fluted Doric pilasters and columns (Fig 3). Facing the visitor as they enter is an oversized cast-iron stove in the form of a columna rostra, a Roman victory column ornamented with the prows of ships and celebrating a naval engagement.

At the far end of the inner hall is an arch that frames a magnificent stair. It rises away from the visitor, then divides into paired return flights transcribing a graceful horseshoe curve. This imperial stone staircase maximises elegance in compact perfection (Fig 4); three floors of restrained wrought-iron balustrade and balconied landings, with a glazed dome sailing overhead.

From the inner hall, four grand rooms open to form a suite for formal entertainment. The function of these spaces has changed over the centuries, but today they are named the State Dining Room, Drawing Room, Music Room and Band Room. On the floor above is a matching circuit of rooms intended as the First Lord’s private apartments. Services and stairs are neatly tucked away to resolve this compact plan.

Ornate vaulted and finely decorated ceilings cover the rooms facing Whitehall and magnificent marble chimneypieces feature prominently throughout. Cockerell sourced most of these from other great houses, including Egremont House in Piccadilly, York House on the Strand and a property called Wricklemarsh in Blackheath. Unfortunately, as the names and functions of rooms have changed, it has become impossible to say with absolute confidence which fireplace came from which house. Cockerell also purchased and re-used doors and doorcases, columns, even second-hand window shutters. Presumably, he was trying to save money in the light of the spiralling costs of the project as a whole.

Such space as was freed up in the Ripley Building by Cockerell’s expansion of Admiralty House was quietly annexed and converted into offices. Of this working part of the building, the Boardroom where the Lords of the Admiralty met was always the standout interior (Fig 5). With its carved decoration and panelling, Corinthian pilasters and portraits, the first impression is of an interior that has served unchanged as the nerve centre of British naval history from the age of Nelson to Churchill and beyond. This is not the case.

The panelling pre-dates the room, having been salvaged from the Wren building on the site that was demolished in 1723. The ceiling, meanwhile, was inserted by Cockerell in 1786 and the same pattern of interlacing circles and rosettes is found next door in the First Lord’s bedroom. Over the fireplace is an anemoscope, or wind-dial, framed by magnificent pearwood festoons attributed to Grinling Gibbons. The incised date of 1695 supports this. These include nautical instruments — ring dials, astrolabes, quadrants and so on — rendered in marvellous detail. Along the top of the chimneypiece is a frothy band of shells, fish, fruit, flowers, bay, oak and palm leaves (Fig 6). In the centre, Fame’s trumpets are combined with a royal crown, sword, sceptre and anchor and the motif of an eye in a sunburst.

The wind-dial, dated between 1707–14, is stylistically linked to another in the King’s Gallery at Kensington Palace, designed by cartographer Robert Morden with mechanism by Thomas Tompion. British seas and adjacent coastlines from Norway to the Pyrenees are mapped out, as ships, whales and allegorical figures shiver among the waves.

Not only, then, are the elements of this splendid room of different dates, but they have been demonstrably reconfigured over time. In the early 19th century, the wind-dial, for example, was located on an end wall (to the north) and built in with bookcases. The carvings, meanwhile, were assembled at the opposite end of the room and a series of pull-down maps installed above the fireplace. The current organisation of the interior broadly dates from 1847, after which two full-length portraits were introduced; Lord Nelson by Guzzardi, acquired by the Admiralty in 1848, and William IV by Beechey, purchased in 1894.

The mighty board table is most likely of 1789 and clearly bespoke. The semi-circular cutaway at one end is made, not for accommodating the corpulence of an undisclosed First Lord as sometimes imagined (and as the arrangement within it of a particularly magnificent chair implies). Rather, it was designed for the hard-working secretaries, to allow better access to the inevitable sea of paperwork that they needed to manage.

Explosions have twice near-destroyed this room; once from a Fenian bomb in 1885 and then again during the Blitz in the 1940s. That the repair has in each instance constituted faithful reinstatement indicates the great historical importance attached to this space.

In 1964, the Labour government merged the Board of Admiralty with the Air Ministry and War Office to create the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which relocated to the present MoD across Whitehall. Thereafter, the buildings have been used by other Government departments and the Boardroom has become a quiet survival. Shown on building tours and occasionally used for meetings, it has, over the decades, taken on the revered air of a museum piece; library-quiet and with the reassuringly warm aroma of dust and beeswax. Having not outwardly changed in nearly 180 years, this is no surprise and makes the evocative interior all the more delightful.

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

In 1851, the UK Census showed that 10.1 million people regularly attended church services of some kind — that's 55% of the population. Today, it's around 5% . We live in secular times, and the number of churches with dwindling congregations is a fact of life. The only recent report that claimed otherwise turned out to be based on data that was later debunked.

It's hardly surprising, then, that religious institutions have been selling their buildings off for some decades — a decision which often leads to people wringing their hands, but which is usually unarguable from the point of view of those running the Church of England, Church of Scotland and the other grand old ecclesiastical institutions.

What's more surprising is the prices that some of those buildings are being sold for. Last year eyebrows were raised at the Church of Scotland's 'property for sale' page, which included magnificent buildings such as Culross Abbey on the market for as little as £35,000.

The prices explained by the difficult questions that come with these buildings: what will you do with them? And how will you do it?

Lucy Denton wrote about this exact problem for Country Life last year, and got some fascinating answers. 'Churches have a unique buyer type who see the conversion of a historical building such as this as a project of passion,’ Tom Stewart-Moore of Knight Frank told her. 'Some buyers may be fortunate enough to have deep pockets, but others will very much have a budget to work to.

'It might seem as if the asking prices are low, but, with higher building costs, the heritage and planning implications, and, of course, the general state of repair of the building at the point of purchase, there is a lot for a buyer to think about’.

In some instances, the approaches taken by those brave buyers have led to the creation of truly beautiful homes. Take the case of Greystead Old Church in Northumberland, for example, has been beautifully done and came up for sale earlier this year.

Another example is on the market in Manchester at £325,000, where St George's on Arundel Street has been turned into 25 modern flats.

St Georges makes for an extraordinary apartment block. This 200-year-old church has quite a few original windows, beams and more preserved, particularly in the communal areas.... though as the pictures show, far more has been stripped out and replaced.

That's a solution at one end of the spectrum; many others are at the other end, where the feel is of an almost-untouched church that's simply had pews replaced with sofas and kitchen islands. The best tread the line somewhere in between; here's our pick of some of the finest converted churches on the market today.

Hampshire — £1.25 million


For 93 years, Woodlands Chapel welcomed worshippers, until, in 1982, its doors closed and it was transformed into a comfortable family home with a difference. How many homeowners, for example, can boast of having stained-glass windows that catch the sunlight and cast colour across their rooms? There is even a triptych, which forms part of the show-stopping double-height sitting room/dining room and where the former sanctuary has been turned into a raised seating area.

The nearby kitchen/breakfast room plays host to a Neptune fitted kitchen with granite worktops and whatever is prepared here can easily be carried to the terraced and paved areas outside that are perfect for alfresco dining. One of the four bedrooms is on the ground floor, although it doubles up as a study.

Woodlands Chapel is in the eponymous hamlet close to the market towns of Alresford and Petersfield and within the South Downs National Park, guaranteeing an abundance of natural beauty.

For sale via Carter Jonas — see more details and pictures.

Norfolk — £1.5 million

The Chapel near North Elmham was built with brick and flint elevations in 1883 on the former site of Norfolk County School. Although the school was intended to educate the sons of farmers and artisans, numbers were low and it closed in 1895, only 21 years after opening.

Afterwards, the nearby chapel witnessed the school becoming an orphans’ home and then Watts Naval School, until it shut in 1953. The new owner, therefore, is buying a site with a rich history, as well as a chapel with spectacular proportions that has been tastefully converted and modernised.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance is the first floor’s vaulted 70ft reception room with its stone window that leads out to a balcony where guests and family alike can gaze over the grounds, which run to just over 5¾ acres.

In all, there are four reception rooms and five bedrooms (four of which are on the ground floor). There is also two-bedroom annexe.

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

Cambridgeshire — £775,000

St Mary Magdalene’s Church dates back to the 11th century, so the new owners of what is now a Grade II*-listed conversion will certainly be buying themselves a piece of ancient history, as well as walking in the footsteps of generations of worshippers from the nearby village of Caldecote.

Victoria Short, the agent, says: ‘Church House is far more than a home of exceptional architectural importance; its breathtaking rural position and beautiful grounds create a sense of complete privacy, making it a truly special retreat.’

New arrivals will enjoy seeing the gardens with their lawns and terraces and then, once inside, the principal living areas, including the vaulted sitting and dining rooms and modern, well-appointed kitchen, which are arranged within the nave and historic core of the building.

Three bedrooms and two bathrooms are sited across two floors. Peterborough is about 11 miles away.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Devon — £875,000

As befits a property within the surroundings of a converted Trappist monastery, the lower ground floor of Vespers in Woodleigh near Kingsbridge has been designed as a sanctuary. It contains three bedrooms, each with its own private garden terrace reached via doors that create seamless connections between indoor and outdoor living.

The impressive, light-filled 25½ft by 27½ft sitting room, which is centred around a Portland-stone fireplace, is located on the first floor, as is the open-plan kitchen/dining room, from which elegant arched doors open onto a balcony, offering those sitting there — perhaps enjoying morning coffee or evening supper — idyllic views over some of the 80 acres of landscaped grounds.

The second floor currently contains a study with mezzanine and the third an office. In the restored chapel, the new owners will enjoy exclusive access to a leisure complex that includes an indoor swimming pool, sauna and jacuzzi.

For sale via Marchand Petit — see more details and pictures.

London — £1.65 million

Who wouldn’t love to come home to The Chapel on Munster Road, SW6, after a long day in the office? Where better to perch at this quieter point of the day than in the open-plan kitchen, dining and living space beneath the glorious vaulted ceiling and exposed timber beams, glass of wine or G&T in hand? Whereas some London properties can be gloomy, The Chapel is flooded with natural light — all the better for seeing the building’s period detailing, which marries perfectly with its modern finishes.

The flexible accommodation consists of two or three bedrooms — the third lending itself to use as a study if required. ‘Every detail has been considered to deliver effortless contemporary living, from the bespoke kitchen and premium fittings to the sophisticated bathrooms and high-quality finishes throughout,’ says the agent. As this property forms part of a new development, a separate Land Registry title has yet to be issued.

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

Imagine, for a moment, that you have travelled back in time to an evening in 1923. A man who would not look out of place in one of Sidney Paget’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ illustrations has paused on the landing of his London house and is looking up at the open nursery door. Out in the world he is known for being reserved, even chilly, but, as he watches his young son saying his prayers, a much softer side of his character is clearly visible. There is a chaise in the corner of the nursery and lying on it is a teddy bear — a much-loved birthday present from the Harrods toy department.

Now imagine that, some 40 miles away, in the Surrey village of Shamley Green, another man is walking up the lane to the cottage he shares with his wife and children. He is worn out after a long day in the London office of Punch magazine, but he is whistling something cheerful; he is that sort of person. The lamps have been lit at home and, as he pushes open the gate, he smiles as he spots a small, rotund silhouette on an upstairs windowsill: the toy bear that his 16-year-old son has outgrown, but cannot bring himself to part with.

Alan Milne and Ernest Shepard, as they were then known, had both carved out impressive niches for themselves by the early 1920s. Milne’s effervescent plays were the toast of London and New York; Shepard’s witty cartoons were instrumental to Punch’s popularity. Yet, within a few years, their names would forever be associated with that of a honey-loving little bear: Winnie-the-Pooh. A global superstar — at last count, he has been translated into 72 languages — he is this month celebrating the centenary of his first appearance in a book.

‘The fact that 100 years later we’re still calling people an Eeyore or a Tigger is a testament to Milne’s characterisation and Shepard’s artistry,’ notes James Campbell, author of The Men Who Created Winnie-the-Pooh (Michael O’Mara Books, £25). After marrying into the family — his wife is the artist’s great-granddaughter — he has spent years piecing together the story of an unlikely pair, both greatly affected by the First World War, who together made a new and enduring kind of magic.

Someone intimately familiar with this is Jane Riordan, the writer entrusted with Milne’s legacy and the author of A Little Boy And His Bear, a brand-new collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories (Farshore, £20) with illustrations by Andrew Grey that channel Shepard’s. ‘I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know the books, but every time I re-read them I find something completely new or a joke I missed when I was younger,’ she says.

Unlike his creation, A. A. Milne was a Bear of Very Great Brain. Born in 1882, he was taught by H. G. Wells at the north London prep school his parents ran and, after going up to Cambridge, got to know future Bloomsburyites such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He became the editor of Granta, the university’s literary journal, and then joined the staff of Punch in 1906 (after being turned down by Country Life, to whom, he later remembered, he had emphasised ‘my games record… and my early collections of birds’ eggs and butterflies’).

Not given to what Eeyore would later call ‘gaiety, song-and-dance, here we go round the mulberry bush’, he was married late to Daphne de Sélincourt, the gregarious goddaughter of Punch’s editor. He gained a well-run home, she an escape from the spinsterhood for which so many women of her generation were destined, but it was a pragmatic match that became increasingly distant.

A pacifist (to the dismay of his conservative seniors at Punch), Milne nevertheless was commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment in 1915 and experienced the horrors of the Somme before trench fever sent him home to work in propaganda. He took a small toy-dog mascot out to France with him: Carmen, who has since found her way to the Hundred Acre Wood in Riordan’s work. The post-war years were brightened by the arrival, in 1920, of a longed-for son, Christopher Robin, and making a home on Mallord Street in Chelsea, where Augustus John was a neighbour. Still, he was restless. ‘I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality,’ he later admitted.

Shepard was born in 1879 in St John’s Wood, into an artistic family, but his happy childhood ended abruptly in his 10th year when his mother died. His father fell into a decline, finances became precarious and the young Ernest had to grow up fast (he was especially fond of go-getting Piglet, keeping a set of drawings in his studio for the rest of his life). In 1904, he married a fellow Royal Academy Schools student, Florence Chaplin, and the pair — known as Kipper and Pie — settled down to a modest, but contented existence as working artists in rural Surrey.

His life might have looked bohemian, but Shepard was unambiguously in favour of military action against Germany in 1914 and became an officer in the Royal Artillery, experiencing several very near misses. He continued sketching, sometimes on behalf of military intelligence. ‘His earlier work was very heavily hatched, much more static, but during the war he simply didn’t have the time,’ explains Campbell. ‘He had to go faster, so his style changed — he was using fewer lines, but making them work better.’ It was an evolution born of grim necessity, but it would help him bring the Hundred Acre Wood vividly to life.

The world’s most famous bear made his print debut without a name on February 13, 1924, in an illustration alongside Teddy Bear, a Milne poem printed in Punch before being published by Methuen as part of the collection When We Were Very Young. E. V. Lucas, Methuen’s chairman, matchmade Milne and Shepard for the project: he had a hunch that Shepard’s easygoing demeanour would make him an excellent foil for the introspective, occasionally prickly Milne.

Things got off to a bumpy start. After sending him several poems and approving the sketches Shepard produced, Milne invited him to Chelsea to sketch him reading to Christopher Robin. The door was answered by the parlourmaid who, acting on the instructions of the ever socially conscious Daphne Milne, asked Shepard to use the tradesmen’s entrance. Shepard politely refused, went home and wrote to Milne to explain why he had left. From then on, he always used the front door and their partnership was an equal one. ‘The way they worked was unique at that point in time, as far as we know,’ believes Campbell. ‘Never before had a writer and an illustrator been around the same table saying “a bit more of this, a bit less of that”.’

The poems were well received by Punch readers, but Methuen published them without special fanfare in November 1924. Yet the initial print run sold out on the first day and, by the end of the year, more than 50,000 copies had flown off the shelves in the UK and USA. After a shattering war and the Spanish Flu pandemic, readers were longing for light, joy and freedom — Milne’s words and Shepard’s pictures transported them to the safety of their own recollected childhoods, sunny days spent wandering ‘down to the wood where the blue-bells grow’ and daydreaming by the sea.

The duo, together with the real Christopher Robin, became celebrities and a sequel was inevitable. This time, the setting would be Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, where the Milnes had recently bought a weekend home, Cotchford Farm (later the home of the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones). The focus, too, would shift to the world Milne had been building in bedtime stories for his son, at the heart of which was the Harrods bear formerly known as Edward, but now named Winnie after a real one at London Zoo (the ‘Pooh’ suffix was borrowed from Christopher Robin’s word for swans).

Never a great one for whimsy in his everyday life, Milne revelled in the silliness and jokes. ‘I think for him it was an escape of sorts and it became one for his readers,’ observes Riordan. Guileless and stout-hearted, Pooh is fond of the existential musings that are such a feature of young children’s conversation; today, you can buy a book of his philosophy, The Tao of Pooh.

Up to 150 community libraries housed in former red phone boxes can receive free copies of the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories and the new authorised sequel, A Little Boy and His Bear written by Jane Riordan.

The campaign supports the National Year of Reading and launched on Tuesday (October 6^th) in Canterbury, with Sally Phillips reading to local schoolchildren, alongside author of sequel Jane Riordan and illustrator Andrew Grey.

Anyone who has adapted a phone box can apply to receive copies by clicking here.

Shepard travelled regularly from Surrey with his sketchbook to sit down with Milne, draw Christopher Robin, his collection of soft toys (which by now included a forlorn donkey and a kangaroo) and Ashdown Forest itself. He wandered among its 6,500-acre patchwork of heathery heath, fern-carpeted valleys criss-crossed by streams and ancient deci-duous trees, sketching as he went. Back in his garden studio, he worked in details from photographs of his own son, Graham, as a little boy and Graham’s portly bear Growler, from whom he borrowed Pooh’s ‘tub’.

What emerged was a kind of Eden, which at first glance might seem to have little to do with the Roaring Twenties, but nods to the decade’s Devil-may-care spirit. ‘There are no worries beyond perhaps getting lost in the mist and there’s never a bedtime because it’s always time for elevenses,’ says Riordan. With his scruffy smock and unruly hair, Shepard’s Christopher Robin was refreshingly unlike the cherubic, rather chocolate-boxy children drawn by contemporary artists such as Lilian Hocknell.

His Hundred Acre Wood, meanwhile, was untouched by recent history, like the England Philip Larkin would later conjure in his 1914-set poem MCMXIV, the ‘place-names all hazed over/With flowering grasses’.

Winnie-The-Pooh was published on October 14, 1926, to universal acclaim. Readers of all ages fell in love with Pooh’s gentle humour and, in a world in which moving pictures were scarce, they were entranced by the dynamic imagery. Country Life called the book a ‘lovely portrait’, running Shepard illustrations alongside its review and following it with a tongue-in-cheek piece on Woozle Hunting in its December 4 issue. The book was serialised in the Daily Express and the Evening News and by the end of the year, hundreds of thousands of copies had sold. These were usually read aloud, as they still are today. ‘It’s an integral part of them: because Milne was a playwright, he really understood pacing and how conversation works,’ explains Riordan. ‘It’s something I’m very mindful of writing my new stories — my poor family do have to listen to a lot!’

Now We Are Six, the 1927 return to the Hundred Acre Wood, acknowledged the passage of time by giving Christopher Robin a human friend in the form of Anne, yet ended with his wish to remain ‘six now for ever and ever’. His real-life equivalent would soon be making the uncomfortable transition from child star to public schoolboy: Christopher Milne was mercilessly bullied for the promotional activities in which his mother had involved him, souring his relationship with his parents.

Milne’s wish had come true: by the late 1920s, he was one of the country’s bestselling authors, shoulder to shoulder with the likes of H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie and Noël Coward. Yet, as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he came to resent his creation, seeing Pooh as a distraction from his work for adults. Shepard, meanwhile, was grieving after the sudden death of his wife in 1927. The House at Pooh Corner, which came out in October 1928, was to be their final Winnie-the-Pooh book, they decided. They left readers two further lasting gifts: Tigger, bouncy paw eternally raised, and the game of Pooh Sticks.

Yet their partnership endured, with Shepard even illustrating Milne’s Year In, Year Out (1952), his final book. He wrote prolifically for adults, as well as publishing two autobiographies, although Pooh would always define him, to his chagrin. ‘He never really thought of himself as a children’s author,’ points out Riordan. The inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood continued to call on Shepard’s services as new colour editions were printed, but he never fell out of love with them: a 1970 colour sketch entitled ‘Part of a Pooh Orchestra’ shows Eeyore entangled in a tuba as Piglet saws away enthusiastically at a cello.

Milne died at Cotchford Farm in 1956, leaving part of the rights to his literary estate to the Royal Literary Fund, which continues to support authors through them. He is commemorated alongside Shepard by a plaque at Gill’s Lap (called Galleon’s Lap by Milne), Ashdown Forest’s highest point. This was unveiled in 1979 by Christopher Milne himself, who, later in life, after opening a bookshop and becoming a writer himself, reached an understanding with Pooh. The children who visited then are now bringing their own children to the same place to soak up its magic.

Riordan spends a lot of time in the forest seeking out inspiration, following in Pooh’s paw-prints. ‘You really feel as if you’re stepping into one of the illustrations every time you go there,’ she says. ‘It’s changed, of course, but it’s still so familiar from the books.’ Thanks to A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard, it will forever be an enchanted place where a boy and his bear play.

Winnie-the-Pooh: A Little Boy and His Bear by Jane Riordan and illustrated by Andrew Gray, is out now

The Men Who Created Winnie the Pooh by James Campbell, published by Michael O’Mara Books, is out now

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

‘I was left-handed at birth, and at school in Turkey, when I first started primary school, I was converted to using my right hand. That was the first time I heard the word “exile”,’ Elif Shafak says. ‘The teacher was very adamant that I kept my left hand under the desk all the time, and sent it to exile.’ Soon, it would not just be her left hand that was exiled; as an adult Elif would be leaving her home country for fear of retribution for her writing.

The Turkish-British author has published 21 books including The Forty Rules of Love, There are Rivers in the Sky and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, but it was her 2006 novel The Bastard of Istanbul that got her in trouble with the Turkish authorities.

‘It was a shock, I didn’t expect it at all,’ she says of her prosecution for the crime of ‘insulting Turkishness’, according to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The novel discusses the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government denies. ‘Suddenly I was put on trial in a very unexpected way,’ Elif recalls. ‘There is an article in the Turkish Constitution that protects Turkishness against insults, but nobody knows what that means, to be honest. This had been used against journalists and historians, but never ever before against a fiction writer.

‘The words of fictional characters were taken out and used as evidence in the court room. The prosecutor asked for three years in prison for writing a work of fiction. I was acquitted eventually, but it was a very unsettling period, after which I decided to move out of Turkey.’

Elif came to the UK, which ‘became her home’. Two further works, The Gaze and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World were investigated by the Prosecutors Office for ‘the crime of obscenity’, as Elif explored themes of gendered violence, sexual violence and child brides, ‘which in my opinion means child abuse’. ‘Whatever you write about, from history to sexuality, you can easily offend the authorities and you can get into trouble. As a novelist, that's very very difficult,’ she says.

Despite real threats of retribution, Elif continues to write. Lately she has been working on her new novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, which will be released on October 15. ‘I am only now emerging from that intense work, and these days I’m doing lots of literary festivals… I am an introvert by nature, but I love doing book events,’ she says. She will be speaking twice at Cheltenham Literature Festival this month.

Writing itself, however, is still a challenge. ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s your first book, fifth book or 10th book, you always go through valleys of self-doubt and anxiety. The only thing I’ve learnt is that all of that is part of the writing process.’

Your aesthetic hero

I love James Baldwin. The way he carried himself, the way he spoke, his tone, his whole aura, that is very important to me. In terms of colours and hues, I’m very interested in Francisco Goya, the Spanish painter. In his work, the range is mind blowing, from dark, sometimes gloomy drawings to very colourful, bright, vivid hues. He has such complexity in his body of work. So, I would say James Baldwin and Francisco Goya.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. I had the honour of being one of the three judges in 2025. That was very memorable for me because so many artworks were submitted and displayed, not only paintings but also sculptures, video installations and even tapestries, so it is quite interdisciplinary. Some of the people whose work was being displayed were less well known, some were just members of the public, although there were also very famous painters within the exhibition. That juxtaposition, in the fact that they were all displayed in a very egalitarian way together, is something that really stayed with me.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I mean, I spend a lot of time buying stationery. I just can't stop. If I see a shop full of notebooks I just have to go in there.

The possession you would never sell

I have some first edition books that have been gifted to me. For example, there’s a lovely edition of Madame Bovary on my shelf. I don’t think I would ever sell that, and Madame Bovary also plays a role in my upcoming novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity. But I’d always choose things that have emotional value rather than financial value.

The music that you work to

I have always loved heavy metal since my youth. Now that I am a middle-aged woman people don’t expect me to listen to it, but I still love it. I think many metalheads actually are gentle souls, and I also think that heavy metal is a large vast kingdom. The only thing that’s happened [with age] is that I have moved to subgenres of heavy metal, so now I listen to more industrial metal, metalcore, melodic death metal, sometimes symphonic heavy metal, Viking and Scandinavian bands.

I listen to this kind of music all the time when I’m writing, but I listen to one song on repeat so it becomes like a loop. Seventy, 90 times I can listen to the same song. That’s how I write. It transports me to a different place and I love its high energy. It is very raw. It helps me to write, hopefully, more calmly.

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to podcasts all the time. I was listening to Stephen Fry speak about the Tudors today, although it was an audiobook, so not strictly a podcast. I listened to that as I walked my dog. There’s also a lovely podcast called Hardcore Literature, and I listen to The News Agents and In Our Time, of course. Those are the ones that immediately come to mind.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I have found so many books inspiring for different reasons. Sometimes we are drawn to the story, sometimes to the style, the rhythm. Sometimes it’s the craftsmanship, how the structure has been built. I also like re-reading the books that I love because it’s a very different experience. So honestly, I don’t know how to choose just one book.

Maybe I would say Don Quixote. That has really been life changing for me. I was very young when I first read a children's edition, and I didn't know novels could do that. It just blew me away. This crazy night roaming La Mancha, the Iberian Peninsula — that stayed very vividly with me.

Who would play you in a film of your life

I don’t know how to answer that, honestly. I have a lot of respect for films, but I don’t feel like I have enough say in that kind of matter.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My family and my library.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Every morning is different and we can't expect to be cheerful, smiling, hopeful every day. Sometimes it is difficult to get out of bed. We never talk about these things, but I think we must. At the same time, though, there is so much love, gratitude, humanity, empathy, connectivity. I think the worst thing that we can do to ourselves is to fall into apathy, numbness. So love, you know, gets me out of bed. Gratitude gets me out of bed. Empathy, stories, family, friends, nature, and also humanity. These are the things that I try to focus on.

The items you collect

I don't collect anything. When you live such a nomadic life — and I had to live a very nomadic life for a long time — you cannot keep things. You know, how many things can you put in a suitcase? How much of your home can you carry with you if you are going to another country? I left Istanbul and I haven’t been back for over 11 years now. I always think: Had I known that I would not go back, what would I have taken with me? I would have loved to take a sapling, maybe of a fig tree. So, when you live a peripatetic life, it's difficult to become a collector.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I adore family run hotels, in Spain, Italy, France. Usually the ones that have a loving warm energy, and that are not too corporate and commercial. Places where everything is prepared lovingly, and the breakfast is prepared by, maybe, the mother who is in the kitchen, for example. I like such environments a lot.

Your favourite painting

That’s tricky. I don’t know what my favourite painting is. It’s very difficult to choose just one. I’ve started writing on Substack, and for each essay I write I choose a painting and build a literary essay around it. Paintings have been very important to me, always, ever since I was a child in Madrid. I can never forget the time I visited The Prado Museum, it was just mind-blowing.

I like Goya a lot and Velázquez. There is a painting by Velázquez called Las Meninas, in which the painter is inside the painting. I like things that have, of course, stories. Almost all paintings do, but I like it when there’s a layer within a layer within a layer. I wouldn’t call it my favourite painting, because maybe there isn’t just one painting that I can choose in that sense, but it is one of my favourite paintings by Velázquez.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

Any meal that you share where you break bread with family and friends. It’s not only the food but it’s the feelings, the sharing. Food has always been very important in my writing. I was raised by a grandmother, for whom food was a language. Grandmother, when she didn't know about how to talk about difficult subjects, would instead feed you. Food was how she expressed her love.

In many of my books, there are menus. So, for instance, I dreamed of an imaginary tavern in The Island of Missing Trees called The Happy Fig, and many people told me that they so wanted to be in The Happy Fig, and taste that. So food is really very important in my writing because I think it is a language, it is culture, it is history. Much more than mixing up a few ingredients.

The best present you’ve ever received

We got our little dog — Romeo Cappuccino is his name — when he was just a newborn puppy. That was a big gift, but also every day is a gift, every sunrise, every book we receive and pass on. Any blessing, any beauty, any act of love is a gift.

Elif Shafak will be speaking at Cheltenham Literature Festival this month. In conversation with Simon Armitage and about her new novel, ‘In One Brief Moment All Eternity’. Tickets are still available. ‘In One Brief Moment All Eternity’ will be published on October 15.

Dear like-minded travellers, are you thinking of heading south — of packing up your notebooks and chasing the same coruscating light that has always drawn dreamers to the Côte d’Azur?

Here, it is easy to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald balanced on the rocks in Antibes, Jean Cocteau drafting angels in Menton or James Baldwin writing late at night at home in Saint Paul-de-Vence. Why don’t you follow them there?

For more than a century, the French Riviera has been more of a story than a coastline — written and rewritten by exiles, novelists and poets who came in search of silence, spectacle or to find themselves reflected in its mirrored sea.

It was not all down to the light. We should not deceive ourselves: luxury, peace and pleasure are tempting indulgences. Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Côte d’Azur for this new generation of modern artists was the sheer hedonism suggested by those blue skies and the warm sunshine.

As the 20th century dawned, the Riviera became a refuge for some of the world’s most famous painters. Renoir built himself a villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907 and was still painting fleshy nudes until his death in 1919. Matisse moved permanently to Nice in the early 1920s, when his favourite subject was painting semi-naked odalisques bathed in sunshine. This was also the era when socialites and writers such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Somerset Maugham were drawn to the Côte d’Azur.

After the Second World War, the reputation of the Rivera for hedonism and creativity was secure. The most famous artist in the world, Picasso, moved to the Golfe-Juan in 1946 and Marc Chagall was also a convert. He spent the last four decades of his life in the area, moving first to Vence in 1949 and then to the hilltop village of St-Paul-de-Vence. His subjects were more whimsical, but suffused nevertheless with the light and colour of the south.

The Riviera they knew, however, is not quite the one you will find. The bohemian hotels they once frequented have become five-star palaces and their beaches privatised; the cafés curated for Instagram. Today, you’ll find inspiration in the Riviera’s quieter corners: in small hotels scented with orange blossom, in the back rooms of restaurants where menus are scribbled in chalk and in garden cafés where a glass of rosé is poured without performance.

This is a slow journey along the coast towards places that still reward time and attention.

Who? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso

Where? Antibes

Begin in Antibes, as Fitzgerald did before you. The American author arrived with his wife, Zelda, in 1925, in search of respite from the excesses of New York. They rented Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins, rechristening it Villa America, where Fitzgerald began work on his semi-autobiographical novel Tender is the Night.

The light remains extraordinary. Stand on Cap d’Antibes as dusk falls and you will see what he saw: the sea wrapped around you like swathes of blue silk; the sky bruised pink and cream.

The difference is, of course, that Fitzgerald stayed on the Riviera when it was surprisingly inexpensive and known more as a winter refuge than a summer playground. Today, his villa masquerades as a hotel, the Belle Rives, where even the sun loungers come at a steep price.

Instead, head further round the cap to La Villa Fabulite, a 12-room hideaway shaded by fragrant pine and lemon trees. After a vermouth cassis cocktail, traverse the coastline on foot to the Musée Picasso. Look at them long enough and you’ll start to see the artist’s Cubist faces in the rock formations on Plage de la Garoupe.

Pablo Picasso first came to the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, but it was his return here 1946 that was to prove a turning point in his life. After enduring the Occupation in Paris, he had emerged from the war with renewed energy and a new lover, the young artist Françoise Gilot. That June, the two of them headed south to the Golfe-Juan and then, in September, he was offered an empty room on the second floor of a medieval château in Antibes.

For two months, he worked feverishly. With artists’ materials still scarce after the war, he improvised with boat paint, asbestos-cement panels and decorators’ brushes.

A succession of exuberant still lifes, nudes and humorous sailors poured from his brush. The masterpiece was La Joie de Vivre, a monumental celebration of peace, sunlight and sensuality, with Gilot dancing naked at its centre.

The couple then moved to nearby Vallauris and Picasso began to experiment with ceramics, producing thousands of pieces over the next decade, as well as the great murals War and Peace.

However, he was not an easy man to live with. In 1953, the relationship with Gilot failed and she was replaced in his affections by Jacqueline Roque — a 27-year-old girl who worked in the local pottery shop. They moved to Cannes, then, in 1958, the château at Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, which had a view of his hero, Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire.

After they married in 1961, Picasso spent the rest of his life with Jacqueline and he lies buried in Vauvenargues. Yet, it was the decade in the Golfe-Juan when he was perhaps at his happiest and you can still see the work he made during those golden years in the museums in Antibes and Vallauris.

Who? Alexandre Dumas and the Impressionists

Where? Nice

In 1841, Alexandre Dumas wrote: ‘A beautiful courtesan, softly lying on the edge of her azure mirror, in the shade of her orange trees in bloom, with her long hair abandoned to the sea breezes, and whose waves would come to wet her bare feet, for Nice is the city of sweet laziness and easy pleasures’ — and plus ça change.

If Antibes is the cocktail party, then Nice is the café the morning after: a little battered, but all the more alive because of it. Here, the Belle Époque façades are peeling, charmingly, the Cours Saleya market is a riot of flowers and the smell of socca drifts from wood-fired stoves in Old Town alleys.

In March 1882, Eugène Manet boarded a train from Nice to Paris with a stash of freshly made oil paintings in his baggage. They included a view of the fishing boats in the port at Nice and one especially charming and spontaneous depiction of his daughter Julie playing on the beach. The work of his wife, Berthe Morisot, both pictures were destined for the seventh Impressionist exhibition, which opened the following month on the rue St Honoré.

Morisot, the most prominent female artist of the group, had spent the winter in the Hôtel Richemont with Eugène and Julie. The mild winter climate of the Côte d’Azur had been a boon for an artist who was deeply committed to the new movement, which championed a more spontaneous approach to painting. As did her fellow Impressionists, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, she strove to capture the fleeting effects of light and the atmosphere by working en plein air and immersing herself in her subjects.

Such an approach was fine during the summer in the coastal resorts of Normandy, where Impressionism was born during the 1870s, but it was not so alluring when winter came and the weather turned cold and grey. By heading south, Morisot was part of a new geographical trend — the moment when the light of the south began to filter into French painting. Over the next century, the landscapes of Provence and the sunny skies of the Riviera were to become one of the most important themes in modern art.

Nowadays, writers and artists seek out the Hôtel du Couvent, where a resident herbalist blends together teas and tinctures using herbs growing in the cloister garden, to help sharpen thoughts.

Stop by Les Grandes Caves Caprioglio — a family-run institution since 1910 — for a thoughtfully priced selection of local Bellet and Provence wines. Or Pizza Pili, where the montagnarde — crème fraîche, lardons, potatoes, reblochon — can be carried, hot, to the beach and eaten on the stones as the Mediterranean folds itself against the shore.

Who? W. Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau and Princess Grace of Monaco

Where? Cap d’Ail

There are few train journeys lovelier than the one that connects Nice and Cap d’Ail. The train pauses at Villefranche-sur-Mer—a station set directly above the water—where Cap Ferrat juts into view.

W. Somerset Maugham settled on this peninsula for much of his life, although he also described the south of France as ‘a sunny place for shady people’. His choice of guests — Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf — suggest otherwise.

Cap d’Ail is a pocket of calm at complete odds to Monaco. It was here that Greta Garbo retreated from Hollywood, where Sir Winston Churchill painted and where Gabrielle Réval lived and wrote about the town’s intimate relationship with the sea. She is buried here, overlooking the sea she so often returned to in her work.

From the train station, a staircase winds its way down, through palms and pines, to Plage Mala, a crescent of sand and stone. It feels like a secret. In this cove, it's not about being seen.

Villa les Camélias: Musée à Cap d'Ail is the only Belle Époque villa in Cap d’Ail open to the public and exhibits objects and countless photographs dating from the late 19th century to the 1950s, capturing the daily life of Cap d’Ail’s visitors and residents (Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Princess Grace of Monaco).

The Nietzsche Path, a steep mountain trail that starts here and ends in Èze, takes about 1½ hours to climb. The philosopher from which it takes its name was inspired to complete Thus Spoke Zarathustra when braving it. (‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,’ he once wrote.)

Èze, a medieval village, clings to the mountain like a mirage and is sometimes referred to as ‘the eagle’s nest’. Stay at Les Terrasses d’Èze, a hotel and spa in which you can partake in a form of float therapy. Lying in near silence, weightless, in saltwater, your imagination slowly starts to drift.

Who? James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall

Where? Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Vence

James Baldwin lived in Saint-Paul-de-Vence for 17 years and his house, Chez Baldwin, was a meeting space for intellectuals, artists and exiles. The Provencal landscape, he said, ‘demanded contemplation’. La Colombe d’Or, a historic restaurant with rooms, is Saint Paul’s calling card — its walls hung with Picassos and Braques, left behind in lieu of payment. Alternatively, there is Orion Treehouses, which sits in the middle of a cedarwood forest just around the corner from the Fondation Maeght.

The market town of Vence, Saint Paul’s larger and more authentic sibling, was the first resting place of D.H. Lawrence — before his wife, Frieda, had his remains exhumed and moved, five years after his death.

It was here that Henri Matisse found a second wind: Chapelle du Rosaire was, in his own words, ‘the culmination of a whole life of work and the flowering of a tremendous, sincere, and difficult effort’. Bathed in cobalt blue, lemon yellow and emerald green, the chapel is one of the most spiritual spaces on the Riviera. Pared back and radiant, it is a reminder that simplicity boasts its own kind of grandeur.

If Nietzsche hasn’t made you feel Human, All Too Human, climb to the peak of Baou de Saint-Jeannet, an enormous cliff whose viewpoint attracted Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall. It’s a lesson in perspective: climb higher, see further.

(St Tropez: Best left to the superyachts and paparazzi. A writer will find little here but distraction.)

Who? Blaise Cendrars, Patti Smith and Anthony Bourdain

Where? Marseille

Marseille, France's second-most populous city (above), is all too often dismissed as being rough around the edges, but it’s never felt more vibrant. Novelist Blaise Cendrars described it as ‘a mess after my own heart’; Patti Smith performed at the Gare de Marseille-Saint-Charles; Anthony Bourdain wanted to retire here. ‘Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseille,’ observed Jean-Claude Izzo, the author of the Fabio Montale hard-boiled detective novels. He was right.

The city is raw, restless and constantly being refashioned. There is, right now, a new wave of chefs determined to do more than bouillabaisse and looking to its migrant population, past and present, for inspiration.

At La Friche la Belle de Mai — a multifaceted public space that’s part restaurant, part Arts centre, part market, part skatepark — enjoy a glass of pastis with panisses (chickpea fritters), then slip into Atelier Renata, an exclusive supper club venue without a menu, where dinner is whatever the chef picked up that day. In the morning, browse the sap green Librairie Mazette for something to read before moving east along the coast.

Who? Frédéric Mistral and the Fauvist painters

Where? Cassis

‘He who has seen Paris and not Cassis, has seen nothing’ wrote the poet Frédéric Mistral. The colourful fishing port, with its limestone cliffs, terracotta houses and sheltered, fjord-like inlets known as calanques, once drew in the Fauvist painters — André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck — who captured its magic on canvas, in bold and vivid tones. Linger here.

At Le Petit Oyster Bar, work your way through oysters, razor clams, shrimps, and moules gratinées, washed down with bone-dry Cassis AOC whites. And then onto the Calanques, where the water is so clear that boats look like they’re suspended in mid air. The Calanque d'En-Vau, a narrow limestone cove backed by sheer cliffs, can be reached by boat or a steep, two hour-long trail that’s worth every uphill step.

For writers and artists, this fabled coastline has long offered lessons in how life is best lived. Good writing, like sculpture, removes excess to reveal essence. Inspiration is found not in the opulence of hotel lobbies, but in winding, cliffside paths with the promise of a view at the top. Carry a notebook, and let the landscape do the rest.

Nick Trend’s new book, ‘France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists’, is out now (Thames & Hudson, £50).

‘Painting the French Riviera’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until January 31, 2027.

The spectacular modern garden at Alnwick — 25 years this month — has proved an unqualified success. The scale of its layout is astonishing and its plantings are beautiful. Moreover, thanks to the vision and tenacity of its creator, Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, it has transformed the economy of the North-East and given pleasure to visitors from all over the world.

The Duchess was brought up in a gardening family. Her mother was a keen plantswoman who spent as much time as possible in her garden at Kailzie, near Peebles. The then Jane Richard learnt about plants, especially their names and how to grow them, working alongside her mother. When she married Lord Ralph Percy, the younger son of the 10th Duke of Northumberland, he was 22 and she was 21. They had a relatively impecunious start to married life, so she learnt to do everything for herself.

The skills she acquired were invaluable when her bachelor brother-in-law, the 11th Duke, died unexpectedly and her husband had to take on all the responsibilities that went with being the 12th Duke, including managing Alnwick Castle, its collections and the substantial Percy estates.

Back then, in 1995, Alnwick Castle itself was open to the public, but its grand Italianate garden had long since disappeared. The Percys had ‘dug for Victory’ during the Second World War, but after 1950 all signs of cultivation disappeared and the walled garden was put to growing conifers.

When they took on the estate, the Duke said to his wife, in effect: ‘You know about gardens and gardening… what should we do with the old walled garden?’

The Duchess’s response was that it must be an attraction in its own right — and it must be of benefit not only to visitors, but to the people of Alnwick, too. This is the principle that has guided her at every stage of the garden’s development.

Friends who know the Duchess will tell you that she is, above all, an ‘ideas person’ and very soon she saw the potential of the steep hill that adjoins one side of the kitchen garden. Running water — perhaps some sort of waterfall — might be a feature, she thought, and she began to discuss her ideas with garden architects and designers.

None came up with a scheme that matched her vision for the hillside until a Scottish friend — the owner of a famous historic garden — suggested she should look for a European landscape architect. That explains how, after discussions and meetings with three of Europe’s best-known garden architects, she ended up asking the Belgian Jacques Wirtz to take on the design of the Alnwick Garden.

The most memorable feature of Wirtz’s design is the massive cascade that runs down the hillside opposite the entrance to the garden. Its surreal outline, its 21 steps and its squirting spouts and fountains were something of a puzzle to some observers at first, but water offers innumerable possibilities to gardens and gardeners and Alnwick’s Grand Cascade resonates strongly with visitors. Now, it rates alongside the Angel of the North as one of the region’s proudest modern icons.

The old walled garden, 3¾ acres at the top of the cascade, now the Ornamental Garden, is where the horticultural interest lies.The design is formal and the plantings are opulent. Some of the hedges are composed of unusual plants such as dogwoods and crab apples — Malus ‘Red Sentinel’ takes to hard pruning surprisingly well, whether as a hedge or when pleached. Soft fruit, including raspberries, currants and gooseberries, are interplanted with standard roses. Large pots are filled with spring bulbs or summer-flowering agapanthus. Clematis, roses and honeysuckles clamber up elegant pergolas and trellises. Delphiniums and peonies lead the list of handsome herbaceous plants, all displayed in harmonious colour combinations.

The beautiful Rose Garden was another of the original features when the Alnwick Garden opened in 2001. David Austin planted it and it is regularly replenished with improved varieties. The emphasis is upon roses as good garden plants and includes many of Austin’s own latest introductions. A substantial replanting is planned for this winter.

The Garden was a winner right from the start when the Prince of Wales, now The King, offered to become its patron. What few people realised then was the extent to which it would become a major tourist attraction, the new Versailles of the North. In 2002, Country Life pinpointed Alnwick as the best place to live in Britain, but the Duchess remembers that there was high unemployment and economic depression — and that foot-and-mouth disease had pummelled the local farmers in 2001.

The garden, however, became a force for regeneration. In one year alone, the Duchess remembers, 100 farmers and other locals applied for planning permission to turn their houses and outbuildings into B&Bs. Today, more than 200 people work full time for the garden and almost every business in Alnwick itself has benefited directly or indirectly. Local people support the garden enthusiastically, including some 100 volunteers who consider it their garden.

Shortly after its opening, the Percys realised that the garden must develop as an educational charity for the benefit of visitors. Consequently, the entire garden was transferred to a charitable trust in 2003. This means that not a penny passes to the Percys and the Duchess is free to raise funds for further expansion. Much of her work today focuses on fundraising for social and educational activities.

The Poison Garden was a significant addition early in 2005. More than 100 different poisonous plants are grown and displayed behind black gates adorned with skull and crossbones. A sign by the firmly locked entrance warns visitors that ‘These Plants Can Kill’. They include everything from Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade) and foxgloves to laburnum trees, hemlock and the handsome evergreen tree Strychnos nuxvomica, the attractive orange-like fruits of which are the main source of strychnine. The garden has a licence to grow cannabis, coca and opium poppies. All visits are accompanied and children — who are told about the medical uses of plants and the dangers of misuse — love its allure.

Much more followed: the Treehouse — one of the largest in the world — opened in 2004, supported by a copse of mature lime trees. It is an extraordinary eyrie, with suspended walkways and rope bridges with a restaurant at the centre. The Serpent Garden came the following year — eight fascinating stainless-steel water sculptures by William Pye surround a snaking hedge of holly. These are both beautiful and educational, just as grottos and shell houses were in the 18th century.

The Cherry Orchard, which opened in 2008, is a feature of supreme beauty for two or three fleeting weeks in late spring. It occupies an entire hillside and is planted with only one cultivar — 329 trees of ‘Tai-Haku’, the Great White Cherry. It’s the sort of feature that many gardeners dream of creating, but lack the means or the confidence to do so.

In the Roots-and-Shoots Garden (2011), children are taught to sow seeds, plant vegetables and herbs, nurture their crops and harvest their produce. Elderly people with health worries, often the result of loneliness, maintain parts of the garden and are encouraged to join other activities.

The Alnwick Garden is an extraordinary achievement, but the Duchess is not a person who rests on her laurels. Indeed, she is now looking forward to completing the garden. New plantings, better buildings and improved waterworks are all part of the plan. ‘It’s not who you are that matters,’ she says, ‘but what you do for people.’

Find out more at the Alnwick Garden website.

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

Fine country houses for sale are as rare as hens’ teeth in Derbyshire and those that come onto the open market — even in tough times — can expect to find buyers beating a path to the front door.

Such a contender is historic, Grade II*-listed Bradbourne Hall, for sale for the first time in 62 years at a guide price of £3 million through the joint agents Derbyshire-based Ed Caudwell and Stuart Flint of Fisher German.

This Elizabethan/Jacobean country house is set in more than 10 acres of beautifully maintained gardens and grounds on the outskirts of the picturesque village of Bradbourne, five miles north of the market town of Ashbourne at the southern edge of the Peak District National Park.

Bradbourne Hall was built on the site of an earlier house by the Buxton family, who lived there until the 1880s. It was then let to a series of tenants before being sold in the early 1960s to a family from Leicestershire who never lived there.

The present owners acquired the hall in 1964, and the place has been much improved by the present owners, who undertook the re-roofing of the entire building some 25 years ago. That said, the decor is showing its age in many of the rooms, so some cosmetic updating will doubtless be on the cards for the new owners. Though if they don't keep the beautiful cream Aga in the kitchen, then the world will be a poorer place.

The house was built, according to its listing, on three storeys of coursed squared limestone with gritstone dressings and quoins under a slate roof.

In all, Bradbourne Hall offers 8,963sq ft of comfortable family living space on three main floors, including five reception rooms, seven bedrooms and four bathrooms. The ground floor houses a panelled reception hall, an elegant dining room, a well-fitted kitchen adjoining a large breakfast room and a charming sitting room with a stone fireplace.

The heart of the house is the magnificent first-floor panelled drawing room, which over-looks the front garden and boasts a wealth of period features. Steps lead down to the Oak Room, a large double bedroom that enjoys views over Bradbourne’s Grade I-listed village church of All Saints.

Also on this floor is the principal bedroom suite, two further double bedrooms and a family bathroom. The exposed beams and stripped floorboards are beautiful, and the effect — especially allied to a four-poster bed — gives the house a fairytale feel in places.

The second floor houses two further double bedrooms and three attic rooms, with a large playroom/family room on the third floor.

A versatile annexe, the former billiard room, serves as a family office with a further double bedroom and bathroom.

Surrounded by mature woodland, which ensures an exceptional degree of privacy, the gardens and grounds have been impeccably maintained over the years by the hall’s devoted full-time gardener.

They include abundant lawned areas, mature shrubs, a large kitchen garden and a heated outdoor pool served by a range of buildings. Outbuildings include garaging, machinery stores and stabling.

Bradbourne Hall is for sale at £3 million through based Caudwell & Co and Fisher German.

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I saw a coat and I liked it. This, in itself, is not unusual. Some people’s eyes are too big for their stomachs; my coat collection is too big for my wardrobe. And I’m particularly partial to a coat that looks great and can do battle with the British weather. The coat I saw is a Burberry parka with a map of London picked out in raised embroidery so tactile that the city appears to almost lift itself from the fabric.

I found myself wondering why I liked it. Was it the parka? The map? The slightly improbable combination of the two? And, more importantly, when did maps become cool enough for one of Britain’s biggest brands to start decorating entire collections with them?

London has been mapped for more than 2,000 years — though cartographers have not always been very interested in helping us get to where we want to go. Instead, they’ve revealed not only how the city has expanded outwards, but how Londoners understand their own city.

One of the earliest surviving depictions is the Cottonian map, dating from around the 12th or 13th century, when places were mapped according to their religious and political importance. It was followed by: the Tudor-era Agas map, made right before rapid Elizabethan expansion; William’s Morgan’s 1676 London map, produced after the Great Fire and a testament to Sir Christopher Wren’s rebuilding ambitions as well as the reality that emerged; and John Rocque’s monumental 1746 map which covered an area of squares, gardens, villages and newly developing suburbs that would soon be swallowed whole by London.

Then there are the maps that are not really maps at all, including Harry Beck’s 1931 Underground effort, Paula Scher’s riotous, 21-colour silkscreen treasure (above), and Ursula Hitz’s typographic offering. They were made in different centuries using different technologies, but they’re all big and bold and an attempt to make sense of London.

For all their beauty, maps have never quite had the headline-making cachet of other collectibles (think Lalanne sheep, Jean Royère furniture or Lucie Rie ceramics). Until now. Wealthy boomers collected blue-chip paintings. Gen Z — who view paper maps as aesthetic wall art or tools for experiential travel — is opting for collectibles, a $320 billion market. In 2022, Roque’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (c. 1749) sold for more than £58,000 at auction; last year, one of Beck’s annotated proofs fetched £88,900 at auction. Young collectors are striving to create a personal narrative, says Emanuela Tarizzo, director of Frieze Masters. ‘Collectors, whatever their age, are searching for stories that resonate with them, and for a sense of discovery.’ In other words, everyone is tired of homogenous, mass-produced slop.

Burberry's London landmark map design — which appears on fleeces, T-shirts, umbrellas and silk scarves, as well as the parka — turns the familiar business of mapping London into wearable art. The pieces, a part of the Winter 2026 collection, designed by Daniel Lee to celebrate Burberry’s 170th anniversary, are available to purchase at a month-long Harrods pop-up.

The brand opened its first store in the capital at 30, Haymarket in 1891; its trench coats — the garment with which the brand is still most readily associated — are synonymous with our wet, urban landscapes and have London names. Kensington, Chelsea, Waterloo and Camden. The midwinter show, held at Old Billingsgate Market, channeled a London that I, for one, definitely recognise: moody, damp and in a constant state of flux. The space was dimly lit, and decorated with resin puddles and check-patterned scaffolding.

In other words, Burberry has co-opted London as its own. Several of the pieces are embellished with their knight motif, but it is the map of famous landmarks, from Buckingham Palace to Burberry’s headline-making headquarters, that really stands out. Perhaps this is why I keep coming back to the parka. I, too, want to tame London, to understand it — and what better way to try and do that by wearing it. The best bit: it’s made to order, so you won’t find yourself playing spot-the-parka all over London.

Burberry's London map-embroidered cotton sateen parka in navy is POA. The Harrods pop-up is open until October 28.

Arguably the greatest party London has ever seen was the coronation of Henry VIII in 1509. The Tudor King was determined to upstage Edward I, who had ordered 22,460 chickens for his own coronation in 1274, and, aged only 17, was fizzing with the predictable buzz of a teenage boy with a crown on his head.

Henry’s bash, held at Westminster Hall, featured wine-flowing fountains, jousting and (clutch your pearls) a personal detail assigned to their ladyships who had to crawl under the table to rearrange their dresses whenever they needed to urinate. Debauchery? Darling, it barely touches the sides.

The closest we have come to such a bacchanal in recent times — that we know of — was in 2004, when Kate Moss threw her 30th birthday party inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Beautiful And The Damned. As with all the most legendary parties, accounts may vary, but the canonical reading is as follows. Serena Rees, co-founder of luxury lingerie label Agent Provocateur, and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood (later Taylor-Johnson) hosted two adjoining parties for the newly tricenarian model at their north London homes — one was ‘The Beautiful’, the other ‘The Damned’ — before the night progressed to a penthouse at Claridge’s, where Moss danced with Ronnie Wood, Marianne Faithfull and other cultural heavyweights until morning. It is the heady mix of stars, almost symbolic in their potency, for which the party is remembered — more than the alleged extracurriculars.

‘The right mix of people is the most essential party trick,’ says Anna Van Praagh, former deputy editor of ES Magazine and chief content officer of The Standard, who, throughout her career, has been lucky enough to attend some of the best bashes of her generation. ‘It is not so much about the great and the good as it is the great and the bad. You want a few serious people present, but only a few. Important people are often very dull and a host’s job is to make sure no guest is stuck for too long with anyone boring.’

As London heads into silly season, parties are being held every night across the capital. Society doyennes, diary journalists and fixtures of ‘The Scene’ are often contending with five or six different invitations an evening. It’s a nice problem to have for those who have it — but choosing which party to attend can be tricky. What could be the night of your life equally could end up a damp squib.

The greatest parties, often, are those that take you by surprise. ‘The best dos are the most spontaneous,’ says Dean Piper, a former celebrity journalist-turned-VIP strategist. ‘I’ve had more fun at baby showers that went on until the wee hours than at most film-premiere after parties.’ The best bash yours truly has attended this year was no doubt Yotam Ottolenghi’s harvest party, an event that may conjure an image of the labneh class reciting incantations around a giant courgette, but was, in fact, a hoedown of the highest order, attended by such names as Helen Fielding and Nigella Lawson. ‘Bad behaviour is very important,’ believes Van Praagh, ‘and a lot more likely to occur if you have enough young people present who don’t have much to lose.’ Attractive waiters are also a must.

To those hosting the parties, the pressure of competition can be fatal. As anxiety clouds judgement, priorities can be forsaken for nonsense. Ham-fisted attempts at entertainment or organised fun rarely fly. ‘I was always confused by the parties thrown at Sushisamba,’ says Piper, of the restaurant in the Heron Tower, EC2. ‘They’d hire these Brazilian people in carnival costumes — we’re talking full headdresses — that always struck me as bizarre and made the entire event feel claustrophobic.

‘I think any form of entertainment that puts the party on pause is a no-no,’ the former hack continues, ‘except the time that Amy Winehouse got up on stage at the Sanderson Hotel after the Brit Awards in 2004, to serenade us.’ Wine-flowing fountains à la Henry VIII are fine; trapeze artists or ballet solos are not. Only one place, Piper suggests, gets the entertainment right. ‘The Goring nails it. Sure, they have singers and magicians and the whole thing is a bit much — but it feels authentic to the hotel. You can tell that the staff love it, too, which makes a big difference.’

If entertainment is usually best avoided, on what should a host be sure to focus? ‘Music is far and away the most important thing,’ says Serena Connolly, head of under-35s membership at The Birley Clubs, which includes The George, Annabel’s, and Mark’s Club. ‘I could drink not a drop of alcohol and still dance until 5am if the music is good. If the music is bad, I’m out in under an hour.’ Van Praagh agrees, although believes that ‘weapons-grade alcohol’ is important. ‘You want people to get drunk quickly.’

Of course, a party needs more than mere music and drinks to deliver the ‘wow’ factor its punters are chasing. A cursory look at London’s greatest dos suggests that this is a must: the last Frost Fair of 1814 involved an elephant crossing the Thames; the 1994 premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral would not have gone down in history had Elizabeth Hurley not worn that Versace dress; and Sir Elton John’s 50th birthday, held at Hammersmith Palais, is legendary not only because he dressed up as Louis XIV, but because his costume involved a 3ft-tall wig that balanced a miniature Spanish warship and working cannon on its crest.

The most effective way of creating ‘a moment’ without interrupting the flow of the party, Van Praagh says, is via the guest list. ‘You want someone there whom no one is expecting to see,’ she explains. That doesn’t mean someone necessarily more famous or ‘above- grade’, but rather someone incongruous. ‘What made parties in the Noughties so exciting,’ says Van Praagh, ‘was the fact that you could be chatting with Noel Gallagher one minute and with A. C. Grayling the next.’

For Connolly, the best way to produce that memorable moment is through a performance that doesn’t put the evening on pause, but rather weaves into it. Attending The George’s summer party together in July, the downstairs bar filled with people trying to catch a glimpse of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who performed a set of floor-fillers for an hour in between DJ sets (her cover of Like A Prayer has lived in my head rent-free ever since). The right ‘moment’, she suggests, ‘should only bring more people onto the dancefloor’.

If, up until the early days of the Instagram era, a ‘moment’ could easily be created with an outfit going viral online (think of Rihanna’s Guo Pei dress worn at the Met Gala in 2015 that was instantly likened to an omelette), a party is now more likely to become a talking point by foregoing any digital presence; banning phones and cameras and shrouding the event in secrecy. ‘Celebrity parties are all going phone-free,’ Piper says. ‘Take Poppy Delevingne’s 40th birthday this summer. Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and Rita Ora were all there, yet no one was allowed to “pap” them. That made it a lot more enticing to those who weren’t present and ensured that it was talked about for weeks afterwards.

‘There is a movement of people wanting to bring back the “behind-closed-doors” ethos of the parties of yore,’ Piper continues. ‘All the best stuff happens after the Getty photographer has finished his shift.’ A great guest list, once more, does the heavy lifting. ‘Ideally,’ says Van Praagh, ‘you want to have someone there who has been recently cancelled, as everyone wants to speak to them.’

I wanted to put this latest theory to the test and, thinking I knew exactly which party might follow such a rule, emailed the head of events at The Spectator and asked if I could attend their Young Readers’ event as a reporter. Charming as it was, I was disappointed to find not one controversial person there — not even Douglas Murray — and asked attendees, mostly young men in their mid-to-late twenties, whether they agreed the party could have been enlivened by throwing someone controversial into the mix.

‘What do you mean by controversial?’ one quibbled. ‘Do you mean [the chairman] Charles Moore? Because he’s just over there.’ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘I do not mean Charles Moore. I didn’t think he was controversial. I mean someone properly cancelled like Peter Mandelson.’ My audience shrugged. One of our party, two drinks deep, began to round on Rory Stewart, co-host of The Rest Is Politics and scourge of the alt-right. ‘He is so annoying,’ he said irascibly. ‘Thinks he knows everything.’ People around us agreed. I concluded that a feather-ruffler is indeed a good party trick, yet different crowds have different triggers. Putting the cat among the pigeons depends on the cat and the pigeons.

A good venue also goes a long way. The Spectator, still host of one of the most exclusive summer parties around, is blessed with a townhouse that backs onto St James’s Park and a garden that looks bigger than it actually is. At full capacity, one cannot swing a purse without knocking out several politicians and at least one host of The Newsagents podcast.

London’s premiere party destination in recent decades was the Chiltern Firehouse, yet after that shut down due to a fire in 2024, others muscled in to claim the crown. The strongest substitute so far has been The Standard, King’s Cross, a hotel designed by Archer Humphries and Shawn Hausman (the man behind Hollywood Canteen and Bar Marmont in Los Angeles), which hopes to hold onto it when Chiltern reopens in late 2027. Sweeties, the hotel’s penthouse bar, is a pick for today’s album release parties and more intimate soirées are often held in Townhouse Eight, an apartment with its own bar and kitchen. The whole thing is soundproof, as are the suites that tend to host the afterparties.

No phones, no breaks in the set list, soundproof walls and handsome waiters: anything else needed to throw the party of the year? ‘Yes,’ says Van Praagh. ‘Always bring a pack of cigarettes, whether you smoke or not. All the right people smoke and, if you brandish cigarettes obviously enough, they will flock towards you like a moth to a flame.’

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Covid threw many of us into the land of remote work, willingly or unwillingly. Some have since returned to the office, but others certainly haven’t. For a growing number of people, me included, fixed locations are now a distant memory. For the past six years I’ve been roaming around the world, working from my laptop as I go. They call us 'digital nomads'.

The world I’m referring to isn’t one of teenage backpackers in a £3 a night hostel in Laos. An increasing number of working professionals, of all ages, are seeking a different pace and flexibility to life, stepping out of the predictable routines back home and embarking on adventures across the globe.

Some flock to the tried and tested destinations in Western Europe, but increasingly these are expensive and over-saturated with tourists — to the dissatisfaction of locals. Many long-term nomads, such as myself, choose distant terrain to work and enjoy instead. Here are six of my favourite ‘offices’ from around the world.

Tbilisi, Georgia (UK Summer GMT +3, Winter GMT +4)

The Georgian capital is the perfect mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar; it’s where east meets west, ringed by mountains and packed with character and history. It’s described as ‘the Berlin of the East’ with a world-famous arts and electronic music scene and a food-and-drink offer that rivals Western European capitals, but for a fraction of the price.

A few hours’ drive from the city, you have ski resorts, excellent hiking terrain and wine country — presenting a bounty of activities for weekends. Meanwhile, Tbilisi has excellent co-working facilities, city-wide fast internet and a booming nomadic community. You can see and experience more in a week in Tbilisi than you do in a year elsewhere.

Top tip: If you go skiing at the weekend, take your laptop. I once got stuck in a mountain resort for four days after the road back to Tbilisi was hit by an avalanche.

Taghazout/Tamraght, Morocco (Winter same as UK, Summer GMT -1)

A place where winter doesn’t really exist and sunshine is guaranteed most days per year. From October to April it’s a world surfing hub, drawing thousands of ‘digital nomads’ with surfboards in tow. Although only small, the laid-back surf villages contain an array of excellent co-working spaces, speciality coffee shops, tasty eateries and yoga/fitness studios. This is mixed in with an authentic Moroccan fishing community, who are renowned for their hospitality.

When not at the beach, the Atlas Mountains are only a stone’s throw away, offering great weekend escapes to waterfalls and pretty mountain vistas. Food and staples are cheap, the internet is good and it’s hard to feel stressed when the sun and surf vibe keep you in check.

Top tip: Avoid the summer months, it can be oppressively hot. Both this blonde Manxman and his laptop have overheated on a mistimed summer visit.

Santa Catarina Island/Floripa, Brazil (Summer GMT -3, Winter GMT -4)

If your working hours are tied to a British office clock, then you need to enjoy an early start to venture west of the UK. If you do, then the island of Santa Catarina, off the Southern Brazilian coast, doesn’t get much better. It offers miles of pristine beaches, backed by rainforest and lush hills, with numerous lakes in its centre. The beautiful nature is criss-crossed by hiking trails, which lead to small coastal towns, where an ice-cold beer, in an extraordinary setting, awaits you. One side of the island also contains the city of Florianopolis and the region is popular for water sports and marine-life spotting.

It’s also well set-up for remote working, with good Wi-Fi and a culinary offer that punches well above an island of its size. The area has all the beauty and Brazilian flair of Rio, but with a much better security landscape and a more relaxed pace to proceedings.

Top tip: Starting work early, means you finish early. Without caution one can get a little over excited at the beach bars in the afternoon, to the detriment of a 6am Teams call the next day.

Almaty, Kazakhstan (Summer GMT +4, Winter GMT +5)

The coolest city in Central Asia, acting as a major hub for not only businesses and creatives in the region, but also for digital nomads. Sitting on the edge of the Tian Shian Mountains, the leafy city has towering peaks to its south, where ski lifts can be reached in less than 40 minutes & wild nature awaits.

Culturally it’s fascinating: Kazakhstan is at a crossroads of cultures, with Almaty sitting on the edge of Central Asia, but only a few hours from China and in a former Soviet nation, with a large ethnic Russian community and a culture of traditional Kazakh nomadism.

Almaty is awash with excellent cafes, restaurants and bars and has the best music scene in Central Asia. Plus, it has the region’s best-connected airport — offering great short-trip potential across the continent and further afield.

Top tip: If you do decide to stumble into an electronic music event at a nearby ski resort, don’t take the work call (speaking from experience).

Montenegro (GMT +1 year-round)

Montenegro has an idyllic Adriatic coastline, which soon climbs up to the country’s mountains and highlands (which make up 85% of the nation’s territory). Think fresh seafood by the azure sea, with rocky mountains acting as your backdrop. It’s a nature lover's paradise and another top tier spot for hiking, near to ancient coastal towns that never seem to be in a rush.

The country has been flooded with investment in recent years, leading to high-speed internet, improved accommodation and better facilities. Think Croatia, but far cheaper and with more impressive nature.

Top tip: Avoid the height of summer, when the place is swarmed by the uncomfortable presence of cruise ships, decimating the peaceful charm along its coastline.

These are challenging times, especially when it comes to restoring a Grade I-listed building described by the selling agent as being ‘in need of extensive restoration and modernisation’. This is the case with Georgian, Grade I-listed Farfield Hall at Addingham, near Ilkley, West Yorkshire, which comes to the market for the first time in 35 years, at a guide price of £2.85 million through the Harrogate office of Carter Jonas.

Built in the early 18th century in the Yorkshire Baroque style, Farfield Hall stands in 6½ acres of landscaped grounds and woodland looking south over parkland towards Ilkley Moor. With the Dales on your doorstep, the thriving village of Addingham nearby, and local landmarks like Bolton Abbey a short drive, this is a lovely part of Yorkshire to be in.

The setting, the space and the architecture are all in place, then — and despite the agent's warning about the work that must be done, there is no doubt that this is a place full of potential. It's 'an opportunity to acquire a genuine trophy property in a beautiful setting', as the listing puts it.

According to a Country Life article by Architectural Editor Lawrence Weaver (in February 1915, the design of Farfield Hall was planned by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, widely known as the Architect Earl, and built to Burlington’s design for the widow of his friend George Myers, the steward of his Bolton Abbey estate.

Weaver was writing a few years after the house was bought by George Douglas, founder of Bradfield Dyers Association, an international textile conglomerate. ‘The interior has some good features, notably the staircase… it is of interest to note that the staircase ceiling is of carved wood instead of plaster. The back of the house is very plain and includes some older work from the farm that stood originally on the site.'

Much water has gone under the bridge since then but there's no doubt that Weaver, or the house's owner George Douglas, would recognise the place should they happen to walk in today. The staircase that Weaver admired, for example, is just as beautiful now as it was 111 years ago.

'The recent alterations made by Mr Douglas were done in a wise and conservative spirit,' the article goes on, explaining that, the doorway on the south front was originally the main entrance and a drive led to it; but this side has now been terraced, and the subsidiary door on the east side was made the chief entrance — a practical change.'

At that time, 'the main hall became a morning room; the dining room became the drawing room, and vice versa. Otherwise the ground-floor was practically unchanged: and the alterations upstairs were only to provide necessary bathrooms, etc. '. The house's floor space was later extended to 14,215 sq ft with the addition of a huge Art Deco-era music room, big enough to host a grand ball.

'In the gardens great improvements were made by garden designer Thomas Mawson,' Weaver continued.

'A new broad walk was made from the gate-piers westwards and took the place of a drive to the stable… the stable and outbuildings were completely remodelled internally.’ One of those, the Coach House, is listed Grade II in its own right.

Weaver's 1915 article went on to tell of many of the ups and downs of the house. Myers left a son who died young and unmarried and his daughter left no children at her death in 1742.

After passing through several hands, Farfield Hall was bought in 1805 by William, second son of John Cunliffe of Langbar and Addingham, and at the time of writing belonged to his great-nephew, Ellis Cunliffe Lister-Kay of Godmersham Park, Kent, who sold it in 1908 to Douglas.

After the Second World War, Farfield Hall was taken over by the West Riding County Council as a home for the elderly before being sold in 1990 to the current owners, who ran a family business on the ground floor and adapted the upper floors for residential use.

Selling agent Tony Wright of Carter Jonas comments: ‘Farfield Hall offers a series of grand, perfectly proportioned rooms with a wealth of period panelling and plasterwork, with the neighbouring, Grade II-listed coach house an added bonus.’

Farfield Hall is for sale through Carter Jonas at £2.85 million — see more details.

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If a group of ladybirds is a loveliness, then a collection of Ladybird books is lovely. An individual publication charms, but when seen en masse — as is the (book)case with Helen Day’s long-term touring exhibition, now at Mansfield Museum, Nottinghamshire (until November 21) — the subject becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Cataloguing, completing and curating are all essential elements of collecting and, although the process can be a pleasingly solitary endeavour, most collectors, such as Day, aspire to share their efforts.

Sometimes, the thrill of an audience prompts collectors to stray from a beaten path that is signposted by stamps, coins and fridge magnets.

Britain has numerous collecting trailblazers. Consider William Hamilton (1730–1803), who, having acquired a decent array of antiquities, focused his collecting on wax penises associated with the Italian cult of St Cosmo. Or George IV, who became obsessed with Napoleon’s personal artefacts.

Such strange items take on a Frankensteinian power as a collective. As Damien Hirst wrote on the dispersal of Walter Potter’s taxidermied collection: ‘It only makes sense (whatever sense it does make) if it is kept together. Individually, what have you got except for some bad examples of taxidermy?’

As a collection, the weird can become wonderful — and the same can be said of the collectors themselves.

Walter and Charles Rothschild

‘I’ve got a saddle on; doesn’t mean he’ll let you ride him,’ comes the warning in Racing Stripes, the 2005 film about a farming family who train a zebra to compete against Thoroughbreds. It took its lead from Lord Walter Rothschild (1868–1937), who sought to prove the animals could indeed be trained — he famously visited Buckingham Palace in 1898 in a zebra-drawn trap and bred hybrid animals known as zebroids.

In addition to his live menagerie, Rothschild feverishly collected butterflies, eggs, skins and more, amassing what is thought to be the largest-ever private natural-history collection: the museum he founded at Tring, Hertfordshire, holds more than one million avian-related specimens alone.

An entomological fascination bordering on compulsion ran in the family; Walter’s brother Charles Rothschild (1877–1923) also collected butterflies and his pinned examples— o f which he claimed there were no duplicates — were considered the gold standard in contemporary lepidoptery. It was, as Peter Marren writes in Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies, ‘the ultimate frontier of collecting, the polar opposite of a boy's day out with a net and a jam jar’.

Charles’s daughter Miriam (1908–2005) continued his research on fleas, cataloguing her father’s specimens (the 260,000-strong siphonaptera collection at Tring is largely his) and becoming a scientific authority in her own right.

Henry Wellcome

With its inlaid silver pattern, delicate monogrammed carving and surprisingly stiff bristles, Napoleon’s toothbrush is one of the more endearing items in Henry Wellcome’s collection of medical curiosities, together with a gruesome 16th-century amputation saw and a bronze cupping vessel from Pompeii. These are among 125,000 pieces that have been on permanent loan to London’s Science Museum since 1976; many are currently displayed in ‘Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries’.

As a pharmaceutical entrepreneur who founded one of the companies that would eventually merge to become GlaxoSmithKline, Wisconsin-born, British-naturalised Wellcome (1853–1936) had considerable opportunity to enlarge his collection, adding quirky items such as the medicine chest used by Capt Robert Scott in the Antarctic.

He later collected Egyptian and Sudanese antiquities with increasing fervour, culminating in his own large-scale excavations in Jebel Moya at the turn of the 20th century.

Although Wellcome was an occasionally indiscriminate collector — he sometimes acquired bulk lots under a pseudonym — he retained a penchant for medical memorabilia. His first museum in Wigmore Street featured instruments believed to have been used during the mummification process, including the canopic jars that held the internal organs of the deceased.

By the time of Wellcome’s death, his collection (of collections) was reportedly five times larger than those held by the Louvre.

William Buckland

When studying Britain’s most divisive mustelid for his 2013 book Badgerlands, Patrick Barkham was determined to examine all aspects of the animal. In one stomach-churning chapter, he samples stir-fried badger meat, served up by a chef specialising in road-kill cuisine.

It was an astonishing undertaking by a naturalist, but Barkham is not the first to taste his subjects. William Buckland (1784–1856), a paleontologist before the term had been invented, committed to eating every species on earth. His collection of animals at home — bolstered by his academic connections that enabled him to acquire exotic specimens, including a pet hyena called Billy — often ended up on the dinner table as part of his culinary exploration. Hedgehogs, tortoises, rats and frogs were consumed, with mole and bluebottle fly considered the most distasteful.

This was not a private undertaking — John Ruskin was said to have regretted declining an invitation to a meal in which mice were served and Peter Lund Simmonds reports that Buckland offered soup to his guests before claiming that it was made from an alligator that he had dissected earlier that day.

Buckland’s son Francis, following that parental doctrine to clear his plate, was also a keen zoophagist and became a founding member of the British acclimatisation society, an organisation that supported the introduction of non-native plants and animals, primarily as food sources.

Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Maj RT Donald Welsh and Mary Gardiner

Within her respectable collecting interests — including porcelain and fans — Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–95) had an ace up her frilly sleeve. Her collection of card memorabilia was a Victorian full deck, with examples gathered from across the world, including a tarot pack from Bologna and French-Spanish designs destined for South America. The cards, together with advertisements and other games, were bequeathed to the British Museum in 1896.

Among the catalogue is a late-19th-century two-of-spades American ‘squeezer’ playing card, so called because the value is indicated in one or two corners, allowing a player to ascertain their hand while holding closely arranged cards. There also was a complete pack of contemporary Chas Goodall & Son London cards, with the court cards featuring costumes from the Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian periods, and rare Chinese money-suited playing cards from the Qing dynasty.

Schrieber’s once quirky passion was popularised and other British collectors quickly jumped on the cardwagon. Maj R. T. Donald Welsh (1928–2017), co-founder of the English Playing Card Society in 1984, gathered more than 6,000 packs of playing cards and card games, which are currently being catalogued by the Bodleian Libraries.

As with most collecting circles, there’s always someone with a zanier specialism: the card collection of Mary Gardiner (1928–2002) centres on Happy Families, also part of the Bodleian’s ephemera and featured in the 2007 ‘Mr Bun the Baker’ exhibition.

Charles Waterton and Walter Potter

In Capt Edward Jones’s 1825 painting Charles Waterton capturing a cayman, the titular human subject is pictured straddling the crocodilian one as several men attempt to tether the poor beast, under the watchful eyes of armadillos, anteaters and birds of every feather.

The account of the Yorkshire squire’s South American escapades was much discussed — John Timbs’s English Eccentrics and Eccentricities includes Waterton (1782–1865) in the ‘Eccentric Travellers’ section — and might have been disputed, were it not for the deft preservation of the reptile, using the hunter’s own mercuric chloride-based taxidermy technique.

The creature was on show in Waterton’s home at Walton Hall, West Yorkshire, and is now owned by his alma mater Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, where it was recently displayed as part of a Shakespeare exhibition, with the animal a stand-in for the ‘What manner o’ thing is your crocodile’ dialogue in Antony and Cleopatra.

The cayman was the jewel in Waterton’s taxidermy collection, which he proudly declared contained no ‘stuffed’ animals, thanks to his hardening-scooping method. This enabled him to create monstrous creatures, such as a howler monkey's bottom turned into a human face.

The collection included a tableau of reptiles entitled 'The English Reformation Zoologically Demonstrated', foreseeing the Victorian trend for anthropomorphised taxidermy. Walter Potter (1835–1918) took up the pursuit with gusto, amassing some 10,000 specimens, including a kitten wedding, rabbit school and a diorama of ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin’, which contained 98 species of British birds.

Having been on public display for decades, the items were eventually auctioned, with Bonhams revealing Peter Blake and David Bailey among the bidders; the kitten nuptials went for £21,150.

Edward James

Anyone wishing to make an urgent call to the West Dean estate, West Sussex, when it was home to Edward James (1907–84) would meet an unexpected intermediary. James, a passionate collector of Surrealist art, was the dedicatee (and, according to some, collaborator) for several of Dalí’s lobster telephones, having significantly supported the artist throughout the 1930s.

A similarly crustacean-mounted receiver was also installed at James’s Wimpole Street home in London, where René Magritte painted his patron in Not to be Reproduced (1937). In an appropriately Surrealist turn, the line between collecting and living blurred and James’s residence on the West Dean estate, Monkton House, was transformed into a real-life Surrealist world, with Champagne coupes lamps, a Mae West lips sofa and purple stucco.

Later, James went to considerable expense to build his dream Surrealist sculpture garden in the rainforest north of Mexico City, where Escher-like stairways lead to nowhere and Alice-in-Wonderland concrete flora meets rare flowers. The phantasmagorical jungle enclave was declared an ‘Artistic Monument of the Nation in 2012’ and is open to visitors.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Hydrangeas are very useful late-summer shrubs. The typical mopheads, however, are not so easy to grow in the colder parts of our island. That is when and where the white-flowered species Hydrangea paniculata comes into its own.

The wild species comes from Japan and parts of south-eastern China and its flowers are invariably white, but with a tendency to turn pink as they age. They are happy in shady woodland or in open sunny positions, but all hydrangeas give of their best if they are grown in soil that does not dry out. The great value of H. paniculata is that it remains in flower for a very long time, sometimes through to the end of October.

One unusual feature of Hydrangea paniculata is its flower buds, which are completely round, like oversized green drums. The flowers, however, open out as long, conical panicles, which may hang from the branches or grow more upright, according to the strength and thickness of their stems. These panicles have large, sterile florets that attract pollinating insects towards the pollen and nectar of the insignificant fertile flowers.

They are usually scentless, but butterflies, wasps and honey bees nip busily in and out of them. The flower spikes of the wild species are fairly open, but almost all garden varieties are a mass of overlapping sterile florets, presenting a solid cone, slightly reminiscent of a very large lilac, but always white, and opening from green buds.

A stream of new cultivars has been arriving in garden centres on these shores in recent years, from breeders in Japan, France, the Netherlands and the USA. There isn’t a single dud among them — all will grow well in our conditions, flower for many months and give great pleasure.

There are nearly 200 cultivars now in the National Collection of Hydrangea paniculata at Darley Park in Derby. Almost all have massive flower spikes, but some have been developed for their ability to turn unusual shades of pink or crimson with age. Others have been chosen because they remain white right to the end or because the florets are green and slow to turn to white.

Small cultivars are also emerging — Pinky-Winky, now overtaken by newer varieties, is a July-flowering favourite that combines moderate growth with a rich pink colour as it matures. These shorter varieties reach about 3ft in height, whereas some of the larger ones, useful for landscaping, may end up closer to 8ft or 10ft, with vigorous upright and spreading branches if left unpruned.

The RHS four-year trial, organised by Debbie Roe, RHS trials officer, at Bridgewater Garden near Manchester of Hydrangea paniculata cultivars ended last autumn and the great number of Awards of Garden Merit the judges conferred reflects the excitement it generated.

It was an important exercise because it was linked to similar trials in eight European countries, including Belgium, Germany and France, run by the Royal Dutch Horticultural Society under the auspices of the Euro-Trial organisation. Exactly the same 83 cultivars were simultaneously propagated by the Dutch and circulated to all eight nations, so that the trials would have the same starting point and the RHS’s results, together with those from all the other trials, will be published in the Netherlands in a final overall report.

Each of the 83 varieties was represented by three plants: one was hard-pruned to ground level each year in spring, one lightly pruned and one left unpruned. All performed very well.

The results confirmed every gardener’s experience: pruning delays flowering, but the flowers are larger. Unpruned plants bloom sooner and have more flowers, but they are smaller.

The RHS recommends cutting them to the ground every year — some nurserymen do this with a chainsaw — but, whatever régime you adopt, you will not be disappointed: all Hydrangea paniculata varieties are reliable garden plants. The fact that they bloom only on this year’s new growth means that they will flower perfectly even if they are caught by a late frost, too.

The trial judges were told to mark the plants for their vigour and health, the colour of their stems and the size, shape, colour and season of their flowers. They also considered a number of characteristics that many of us would not have considered. For example, the judges looked for plants with strong, sturdy stems, because the large panicles fill up with water in rainy weather and may flop down and be spoiled by contact with the soil.

One very effective way to grow varieties such as Pinky-Winky, the stems of which cannot always bear the weight of its beautiful flowers, is to graft them onto the upright stem of a vigorous variety and grow it as a standard.

With many cultivars of Hydrangea paniculata now available and so many excellent new ones launched every year, it is increasingly difficult to choose between them, but you can be certain that all will be healthy, tough, easy to grow — and beautiful.

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

There's always a little bit of one-upmanship when it comes to our houses.

Don't get me wrong — the British are far too polite to rub each others' noses in it; we're not American, after all. But you can spot the subtle humblebrags a mile off: 'Oh yes, we're so lucky to have a [boot room / open fire / outdoor kitchen]', or 'I know it's silly really, but Jonny always dreamed of having a [workshop / underwater den / dedicated Scalextric wing], and he's been so good about my [flower room / hand-made linen curtains / helipad] that I just couldn't stand in his way.'

Just imagine, then, how good it would feel to casually drop into conversation that you have one of medieval Europe's greatest castles at the end of your garden. Rather amazingly, that's the case at Castle Reach, where you have Warwick Castle quite literally in your backyard. And that's just the start at a house that's priced at £4.5 million through Fine & Country.

Warwick isn't just any old pile of battlements and turrets. Our esteemed colleague John Goodall, the man who literally wrote the book on castles, described it earlier this year as 'one of the most celebrated and imposing of all English castles', and 'a theatre, where fantasy and history meet' in a pair of articles he wrote earlier this year (you can read them here and here). It's a 700-year-old masterpiece that is the stuff of fantasy, the sort of castle that's inspired everyone from Walter Scott to Hollywood directors, a picture-perfect building that's as close to the Platonic ideal of 'medieval castle' as you'll ever see. And it's also the view from the kitchen-diner of this house.

Castle Reach is much more than just a view, though: it's a new-build country house (something that we discussed just the other day) built by the multi-talented and multi-award-winning Ben Pentreath, one of the most sought-after architectural designers working in Britain today, and a man who has been featured in Country Life repeatedly in recent years (this piece, and this, are good starting points to get a feel for his design philosophy).

Set over three floors, it's a six-bedroom home laid out almost on an H-shaped plan, with most of the rooms linking off to the sides from the central space.

On the ground floor, that gives you a sitting room and dining room in one wing, with cloakrooms, boot room, utility and snug on the other side of the house — and the aforementioned kitchen-breakfast-family room at the back.

The latter is vast: 34 feet wide, and 20 feet deep, with light coming in both from the French windows at the back of the house, and from a skylight above.

The first floor is home to one of the most impressive bedroom suites we've seen in a while, taking up the entire south wing with its two dressing rooms (his and hers, as they're set up at the moment) and an en-suite bathroom so big that you could probably install a grand piano next to the bathtub, should you be so minded.

On the other side of the first floor are two more bedrooms, plus a 'plant/comms room'. We're not sure what the latter is for, exactly, but it definitely feels like another nice addition for that humblebrag list.

There are three more bedrooms on the second floor, two of which are en-suite; and if you're looking for a multi-generational living set-up, it's good to know that there's a self-contained one-bedroom apartment above the detached double garage.

This run-through of all the spaces probably detracts from the big selling points of the house: the finish and the fittings in place are beautifully done, happily straddling that line between smart and cosy, from the brick-walled wine room to the hallway with sweeping staircase and a chessboard stone floor.

Finally, though, we get to the outside, where the two acres of gardens go up to, and indeed across, the River Avon that streams along beside you. A private island on the river is part of the deal (again, add it to that list) as well as woodland, lawns and river frontage... and all of it with that quite amazing backdrop: Warwick Castle, the 700-year-old masterpiece at the end of the garden.

Castle Reach is for sale through Fine & Country — see more details.

As Athena can count the Parthenon as a home, she naturally takes great interest in it. The latest flare-up of the dispute between Britain and Greece over the Parthenon sculptures — familiarly known as the Elgin Marbles — reminds her that the ancient Greeks excelled in epics as well as architecture.

It is now 44 years since the former actress Melina Mercouri, then the Greek Minister for Culture, launched a campaign to return the sculptures to Athens from the British Museum, where they have been on display since 1817. Famously, she cried in front of the marbles for the benefit of journalists — a kind museum curator having pointed her in the right direction, as she had failed to recognise them.

For decades, most of the debate revolved around the question of whether or not the museum had legal title to the sculptures, which it purchased from Lord Elgin. Given the failure to marshal a definitively convincing argument that the British do not hold them legally, Athena thinks the issue of title is a rabbit hole that is best avoided, but this did not stop the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, declaring last month that ‘Greece cannot accept any arrangement that would require it to recognise the British Museum’s ownership of the sculptures’.

He was responding to a remark by the director of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, that the current loan by the French Government of the Bayeux Tapestry to the UK might provide a model for a loan of the sculptures to Athens. Mitsotakis was having none of it: ‘Nobody would seriously contemplate cutting what survives of the tapestry in two and displaying half in London and half in Bayeux and claiming this was an adequate way to understand it. Yet that is exactly what happened to the Parthenon sculptures. A single masterpiece was divided.’

This, sadly, is typical of the tendentious way the Greek authorities have approached the issue. There is no ‘single masterpiece’ in the case of the sculptures — only fragments of a whole that can never be reconstituted because a large part was irrevocably destroyed in 1687 by the explosion of a powder magazine.

Mitsotakis’s comment emphasises yet again that for the Greek authorities the issue of legal possession is more important than the possibility of seeing the marbles in Athens, which the British Museum would facilitate on the basis of a loan agreement. There seems to Athena to be no sound reasons why the Greek argument remains fruitlessly focused on issues of legal ownership rather than the aesthetic and scholarly benefits of seeing the sculptures in Athens.

Last month, it was reported that Greece’s Central Archaeological Council had refused a request by the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt for the loan for an exhibition of nine fragments from the Parthenon on the grounds that they would be shown alongside pieces lent by the British Museum. Allowing nationalistic emotion to override the priorities of art and scholarship does the Greek authorities no favours.

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

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Day one

Despite weeks of scaremongering from the press, social media and my dad, there are no queues at border control at Faro Airport. We — me and my university friend Annabel — sail through smugly. Our smiles, however, are short lived. The crowds have simply migrated to the car-hire desk, where we subsequently gather dust and burn through the majority of our substantial snack haul for more than an hour.

The journey to Casas da Quinta de Cima — a roughly 40-minute drive east, towards the Spanish border — is more straightforward. We arrive in the evening's soft gloam. Our senses are muffled by darkness and the gentle patter on cobblestones of the rain that we’ve thoughtfully brought with us, but we can smell what we think is jasmine.

We snatch glimpses of the hotel as we’re escorted to our room, one of nine former whitewashed worker’s cottages (below). It is simply and thoughtfully furnished with a terracotta brick floor, traditional cane and plaster ceiling and a mixture of contemporary and antique pieces of furniture. The bathroom — with its tongue and groove pocket doors, freestanding bath and ginormous walk-in shower, big enough for a party of five — is a masterpiece. It is so overwhelmingly calm that our eyelids start to droop during a dinner of delicious room service steak sandwiches.

Day two

Quinta de Cima is a working lemon, orange and avocado farm that’s been handed down through five generations of the same family. When they are grown next to one another, lemons and oranges, we learn, smell like jasmine. We walk past the leafy rows on our way to breakfast, which is served in one of the cathedral-like agricultural warehouses, its doors nearly always open to the cobbled courtyard beyond. In the middle, the spindly legs of an antique table groan beneath the weight of hams, cheese and yoghurts, fresh juice and thinly sliced fruit and bowls of homemade granola so good that we try to squirrel away handfuls of it in our jean pockets.

This region, the Algarve, is synonymous with golf resorts with false delusions of grandeur, but there is so, so much more to it, if only I can tempt you to leave the soulless confines of your gated hotel or, better yet, stay in one of the boutique offerings like Quinta de Cima that are popping up in pleasing numbers. They have a real sense of place.

There are far-reaching stretches of sand and surfing, Moorish architecture and moreish food. And salt. Some of the finest in the world, in fact. We roll from breakfast to Salmarin, whose salt flats are nestled into Sapal de Castro Marim Nature Reserve, the oldest nature reserve in the country and a vital habitat for black-winged stilts, common ringed plovers, white storks and more.

Good salt, says Salmarin’s founder Jorge Raiado, is at the mercy of nature and takes time. He demonstrates how to best use it to bring out the flavour of different foods by pairing it with tomatoes (expected) and strawberries (unexpected).

Under João III (1502–57), numerous new pans sprung up throughout the Algarve and towns such as Castro Marim — the fortress of which looms over Raiado’s land — and Tavira became rich and lively export hubs, trading salt to northern Europe. In the latter, we scale the ruins of a medieval castle the innards of which are now a very pretty garden and feast on creamy fig-cream from a kiosk next to the slow-flowing Gilão River.

In the later afternoon, the hotel reveals that it has arranged massages for us, in a bijou space next to the surprisingly spacious gym. Like everything here, it’s perfectly formed, unpretentious and, did I mention, calm. A life here, I surmise, would be one entirely devoid of problems.

Day three

The hotel has bussed in two elderly women and a man from a nearby village to teach us how to weave with local dwarf palms. I am determined, but not particularly good. Annabel is no better. I don’t speak Portuguese, but I understand the gentle jokes the women make about working faster than the men.

And so to Alentejo, Portugal’s vast central region renowned for its white wine. The drive is mostly on single-lane roads that gouge a winding line through narrow valleys. Occasionally, the view broadens to fields of spectacular wildflowers (it is mid April). Our precise destination is Quinta do Paral, a 210-acre wine estate. Its owner is Dieter Morszeck, who sold a majority stake in his Rimowa luggage brand to LVMH for €640 million. He has a 10-seater PC-12 Pilatus plane, in which he sometimes ferries guests on day trips to Morocco or Spain.

The difference between the two hotels is stark. Quinta de Cima is soft, Paral is sleek; de Cima feels like a hidden secret, protected from the outside world by densely planted fruit groves; Paral is very much open to it with expansive views over gently undulating vineyards. Some of their vines are ‘old’, or ‘ancient’, the not-very-technical term given to ageing plants that produce rich and complex wines due to their deep root systems and low yields. Inside the impressive winemaking facilities we spot six-or-seven-foot-tall replica clay vessels, or talha, in which grapes can be fermented. Used for more than 8,000 years and precursors to today’s stainless steel and oak barrels, they’re currently enjoying something of a renaissance.

In a rare fit of maturity I decide to unpack — and in every bag I find an orange or lemon, each one the size of two adult fists, that Annabel has stolen from Quinta de Cima. There will be no vitamin c deficiencies to speak of on this trip.

Day four

Day four passes at a languid pace. Breakfast in Portugal is a revelation. A proper meal, encompassing sweet and savoury. Here, it is served outside and there’s no menu. Instead, small dishes of everything — scrambled eggs, soft cheeses, meats, fruit — arrive in quick succession. Imagine an all you can eat buffet that you don’t even have to stand up for.

Several hours slip through our fingers lounging by the swimming pool and then it’s time to surreptitiously sneak into some of the other rooms. My favourite is one with a barrel roof and French doors that open out onto a communal courtyard. A walk-in wardrobe cleverly bisects the living bit from the bed.

Clemmie, a friend who (helpfully) lives in Portugal and (very helpfully) works for Lightfoot who has organised this very trip, arrives as dusk starts to gather at the edges of the sky. A chorus of frogs serenades her in. They live in the pond (above) in front of our room, one side of which has been sunken into the landscape so as to blur the boundary between lawn and water and stop wildlife from drowning. I’m thrilled that Clemmie can help me get through Annabel’s fruit stash.

We have dinner at The Wine Restaurant which spills out onto a still-fragile, but promising-looking herb garden. Wine pairing is practically de rigueur.

Day five

The three of us, plus the remaining citrus fruit, pile into the car for the one hour drive to Comporta, Portugal’s answer to The Hamptons. The road is studded with cavernous potholes, a not-very-welcome reminder of home, caused by recent, heavy flooding. On the way, there is a turning to Santiago do Cacém, the site of an ancient town mentioned by Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy. I make a mental note to come back to visit the Roman ruins.

I’ve never seen a stork before, but Comporta is full of them — nesting in massive, messy nests, balanced precariously on top of telephone poles, church steeples and chimneys (above). I’m the designated driver, but it’s hard not to crane my neck to catch a glimpse of them. Their smooth, gliding flight, peachy bills and monochrome plumage is captivating.

In recent years, this once-quiet, windswept stretch of Portugal has been co-opted by glamorous travellers who think bohemia is more of a trend than a lifestyle. It’s hard, however, to blame them. The village — a compact cluster of cafés and boutiques — still hasn’t burst its seams. Fishermen potter in the estuary and horses graze the dunes. Pine forests give way to rice paddies give way to beaches, each one wider than the last and all bashed, relentlessly, by wild Atlantic waves.

At dinner, at Sublime Comporta — a 168-acre resort shaded by cork trees — I cannot help but wonder which trusting member of staff has decided to sit me, a journalist, at a table next to Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie (Eugenie, 12th-in-line to the throne lives, part-time, nearby). I try to eavesdrop because I am not perfect, but am distracted by the best cheeseboard I have ever had. Portuguese cheese is, like its breakfast, a standout. Apparently, it's famous for its variety, which is news to me — and to my waistline. At even the most humble restaurants, including the one with paper tablecloths and school chairs that we sampled on our second night in the Algarve, meals start with something called couvert. Bread, local butter and regional cheeses and, if you’re lucky, olives and pâté. My favourites are the soft sheep cheeses.

Sublime’s rooms are scattered among the trees in cabin-style buildings. It’s like glamping for grown-ups, but with a supersize gym, phenomenal spa (a friend who stayed here cried tears of joy during her treatment) and a dramatic vaulted library-cum-bar. It’s set the standard for hotels in the area which are opening at lightning speed. Ando Living, Sublime Sand and Na Praia opened this year; two more are planned for 2027; a Six Senses for 2028.

Day six

It’s a wrench to drag myself out of what might be Portugal’s comfiest bed, but drag myself out of it I do, because me, Clemmie and Annabel have a ferry to catch. It crosses the protected Sado Estuary and deposits us in Setúbal, an hour away from Lisbon. We enter the capital via the futuristic-looking Vasco da Gama Bridge and head straight to Palácio Príncipe Real, one of Portugal’s most talked-about hotels.

The crumbling remains of a once proud pad — owned by the Teixeira da Mota family who hosted what sound like rip-roaring parties — were rescued by Gail and Miles Curley in 2014. The couple were lured in by its large-by-Lisbon-standards garden (what else, they’re British). It’s big enough that they’ve erected a swimming pool in it, around which a selection of yellow rubber ducks — gifted to them by staying guests — stand sentry. The Curleys are duck obsessed in the best kind of way. The hotel’s signature motif is an Indian runner duck and there are duck-shaped door knobs and ornaments, and duck-feet table legs. The couple make their own organic, extra-virgin olive oil, which is used generously at every available opportunity. The bottles are all stamped with a picture of an Indian runner duck.

We stumble uphill to Príncipe Real Garden, famed for its Mexican cypress tree which was planted in around 1869 (above). Its sweeping, horizontal canopy is now so large that it requires an internal iron and wooden framework to hold it up. In 1940, it was the very first tree in Lisbon to be listed as a Tree of Public Interest.

Day seven

While tumbling down Lisbon’s steep streets, on a private walking tour organised by Clemmie, we learn that Lisbon’s aristocratic families appropriated the lengths of pavement outside their houses and employed craftspeople to lay brick and stone in increasingly-elaborate patterns. And about the city’s Shops with History programme, an initiative to protect traditional and culturally significant shopfronts, which are identified by copper signs. There’s Sant’Anna, the city’s oldest ceramic factory, which took part in the rebuilding of Lisbon after 1755’s devastating earthquake by supplying tiled façades for new buildings and is therefore an indelible part of the Lisbon landscape you see today, and Caza das Vellas Loreto, which opened one month after the storming of the Bastille, making it one of the oldest candlemakers in the world.

We linger only briefly in Rossio — which sits directly on top of the buried ruins of a Roman hippodrome — because our affable guide is scarred by a previous client who insisted on dragging him around the square’s mega-Zara, the second-largest Zara store in the world, for four hours.

We spend longer, and rightly so, at the Church of St. Dominic (above). This is where Jesuit missionary Gabriel Malagrida was executed and where, in 1506, thousands of Jews were massacred by a Christian mob. Nature had its own way with it: the church was damaged by the 1531 earthquake and almost completely destroyed in the 18th-century one. In 1959, a fire killed two firefighters and took more than six hours to extinguish. The ceiling has since been rebuilt, painted in grotesque shades of pink and orange that are meant to be reminiscent of the flames, supported by still charred and sagging columns.

In Portugal, there is history hiding around every corner, and underneath every pavement. And variety — enough to rival any of Europe’s more established holiday destinations but without, so far, quite the same eye-watering prices or sense of having been overrun. Perhaps its most appealing quality is the sheer number of independent, family-run and boutique hotels, shops and restaurants. I’m already plotting my return — northwards, through the Douro, to Porto. You never know, Annabel’s stash of fruit might just run out by then.

Lightfoot Travel can organise seven-night, bespoke road trips through Portugal from £3,700 per person. The price is based on two people travelling together and includes: two nights at Casas Quinta de Cima, two nights at Quinta do Paral, one night at Sublime Comporta and two nights at Palacio Principe Real on a bed and breakfast basis. Plus, flights from the UK, a hire car and select meals, experiences and excursions.

Visit the Lightfoot Travel website for more information.

The Hanhart 417 and 417 ES chronograph had two important customers. The German army — specifically its pilots — and Steve McQueen. Quite how a 417 ES ended up on the wrist of one of America's most famous actors in the early 1960s is anyone's guess.

Despite being one of his favourite timepieces, it didn’t, however, come with huge fanfare like his TAG Heuer Monaco moment in the 1971 film Le Mans. Instead, its use was documented in family photographs.

'It was always assumed that my grandfather acquired the watch somewhere around The Great Escape time,' says his grandson, Chase McQueen. 'As we were going through the archives and talking to my grandmother [Neile Adams], we actually figured out that he probably acquired it somewhere in late 1960 or early 1961, because he's wearing the watch in a little known movie called The War Lover, where he plays a bomber pilot named Buzz Rickson. If you look, you can see the Hanhart watch in that film, so we know he discovered that watch at least two years before The Great Escape.'

Nearly 70 years on, Hanhart has released its first official Steve McQueen edition, developed in collaboration with Chase and his sister Madison McQueen. 'Projects like this are important to us,' Chase says. 'Not only is it a way for us to discover our family history and who my grandfather was, but it’s a way for younger generations to understand why he was so cool and to be able to touch and feel and see some of the things that made him who he was.'

The 417 ES Steve McQueen Limited Edition No.1 (about £2,185) is limited to just 300 examples worldwide. The McQueen family was keen for the replica to look as original as possible — with subtle nods to their grandfather, including his signature. Throughout the process the team referred to various photographs and films. The goal was to balance authenticity and modernity, in order to bring the right mixture of 1960s and 2020s together. The final watch features a historic Hanhart logo and aged radium lume — so the hands and numerals illuminate in a warm hue reminiscent of the time period.

'The most difficult part was that we don’t have high resolution photos from the 1960s,' says Felix Wallner, joint CEO of Hanhart. 'When zooming in, we saw some images where we think the lower line says "shockproof", so we put the signature there. In addition, we looked closely at the strap because we wanted to rebuild it as good as we could. In the colour photos, you can see that the strap he wore was a very dark brown cuff strap.'

The contemporary strap is made from a material called Shell Cordovan, by Italian tannery Comipel. The horse leather is said to be four times more robust than cow leather. An exhibition case back means that the wearer can see the flyback mechanism dancing away in the hand-wound piece.

One of Hanhart's chronograph's best-known identifiers is the red pusher — and this special-edition timepiece is no different. According to company legend, a pilot's wife painted his pusher red so that he would think of her when he used it — and come home safe. (The boring reality is that pressing the pusher resets the time, so it was painted red to warn off pilots from pushing it unnecessarily.)

In a nod to the romantic tale, each Steve McQueen edition comes with a bottle of red nail polish, concealed in the box underneath a plaque bearing the example’s number. It’s also accompanied by an ‘official timekeeping licence’, inspired by McQueen’s 1964 international racing license. The original document sold at auction in 2009 for $42,700. Hanhart’s version is signed by the individual watchmaker, and Chase and Madison McQueen.

The company crafts its watches in Germany's Black Forest, surrounded by steep hills studded with sheep, goats and cows. In McQueen’s honour, I cut through this perfectly peaceful environment in a 1969 Corvette Stingray while wearing a Limited Edition No.1 — in the name of journalism and to get a taste of what he would have felt, all those years ago. Despite its 39-millimetre case concealing my entire wrist, I felt like Stevia McQueen — a zero-calorie version of the King of Cool.

The watch and the car are icons today, but neither was that popular in their own time. The 417 ES was not available to purchase in the USA; the Stingray was overshadowed by the likes of the Mustang and Camaro, with less than 40,000 ever made in the 1960s. It’s a nostalgia for that era and the lore of legends who spotted their potential in the first place that has since changed things.

In, The Great Escape, McQueen’s character, Hilts, spend most of his time trying to reach the Swiss border — less than two hours from Hanhart's headquarters. This inspired some intrusive thoughts of disappearing into Switzerland with a classic Corvette and a one-of-300 timepiece, but the reality of Chevrolet’s 1960's engineering soon put an end to that scheme.

The Stingray, though gorgeous, is definitely more a case of form over function. Its brakes feel more like a suggestion than a certainty. Very little happens when you turn the steering wheel, and the automatic gearbox frantically scrambles around for the next gear. It is the utter antithesis of Hanhart’s precision horology.

The 417 ES is German engineering, top-to-bottom. It will take some time to break in, like a new recruit’s first pair of marching boots, but it keeps the cold watch back from your wrist.

'While we were simultaneously working with Felix, I would run to my grandmother [Neile] and ask her because she was the one who was around and was there when he had the original, and she gave me a great quote,' says Chase. 'She said, "You know, I'm sorry, honey, I'm 94, I don't know where that watch ended up, but I can tell you, he f***ing loved that watch."'

Luxury tinned tuna may sound like an oxymoron, although not if you pay a visit to the Tinned Fish Market in Borough, London SE1, or Spitalfields, E1.

‘People mistake high-quality tinned fish for a European invention,’ says founder Patrick Martinez, ‘when in fact it was nurtured on these shores and later became popular on the mainland.’ The best tinned fish, he claims, has been caught in Britain and marinated in Europe.

A native of Madrid, Spain, he first came to Britain 25 years ago and launched the Tinned Fish Market as a market stall in Liverpool in 2018. Tinned tuna, especially, is enjoying a moment due to a glut of bluefin in English waters. ‘There are 30 boats fishing for tuna around the UK,’ says Chris Ranger, founder of The Cornish Canning Co and allegedly the first Brit to ever tin the beast. ‘There are thousands of fish off Cornwall alone.’

A tuna, once gutted, can weigh 80kg, nearly half of which is pure meat. ‘A single fish yields about 400 cans,’ Ranger explains. He now makes about 80 a day, sold via his website, at market or at Falmouth Brewery in Cornwall, which has a pop-up shop at Upton Slip.

Another distinction of the age is encasing fish not in oil, but butter. ‘That’s how I really took off,’ Ranger admits. Don’t shy away from bolder flavours: Martinez’s shop, for one, sells everything from £4.50 mussel spreads to £45.95 tinned sea urchins. Does he have a favourite brand? ‘Rockfish is the best,’ he replies.

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Laid in the chancel floor of St James’ Church, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, are the brass portraits of a husband and wife. Each full-length figure is framed beneath an arch and is shown with their hands pressed together in prayer. The former has a neatly forked beard and the latter wears her hair braided and bound in a net. The portraits are not of a knight and his lady, although both are dressed in flowing robes and the former carries a sword. Rather, the Latin inscription reveals them as William Grevel (or Greville) and his wife, Marion, who died respectively in 1401 and 1386. The former is strikingly styled as ‘sometime citizen of London and the flower of wool merchants of the whole of England’.

This was a considerable boast considering that, at the time, wool was the principal product and export of the kingdom. Whether strictly true or not, however, Grevel was a figure who grew wealthy as a wool merchant. The descendant of a family with Flemish or Norman roots that had settled in Chipping Campden by the late 13th century, Grevel became a considerable landowner and is credited with building a large surviving house in Chipping Camden. By the terms of his will, he also gave 100 marks ‘towards making the new works’ of the church (Fig 1). His monument, in fact, is ornamented both with a coat of arms — a mark of gentility — and his merchant’s mark, used to identify his wool.

Grevel was representative of a much larger group of individuals and institutions that grew rich in the late Middle Ages on the proceeds of Cotswold wool. This area of limestone upland that spans parts of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire provided excellent pasture. Too dry for cattle, it was perfectly suited for sheep and its wool became internationally prized. One of the ways in which the profits of the wool trade were invested was in the construction and furnishing of parish churches.

The history of sheep grazing in the Cotswolds can be traced back archaeologically to the Roman period. Little is known, however, of its scale or importance in this remote period. Nor does the Domesday Survey, commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086, shed much light on the subject. What it does record is that wool from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, was reserved for the use of the Queen. Presumably, therefore, it was already recognised as being of high value. The real pioneers of England’s medieval wool production, however, were monasteries.

Caen Abbey in Normandy, for example, had a flock of 467 sheep on Minchinhampton Common, Gloucestershire, in the early 12th century. Coincidentally, this Common is one of the few medieval sheep runs to survive today in the Cotswolds (most have been ploughed up and turned to arable). Nor was farming the only means of profiting from wool. In about 1220, Gloucester Abbey founded a borough at Northleach and established an annual three-day fair there, timed to coincide with the shearing of the sheep flocks in late June. Northleach was well placed on the road network to receive wool from other Cotswold farmers and quickly became prosperous.

This growth in sheep farming was part of a much wider phenomenon across the kingdom in areas such as East Anglia, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Shropshire and Somerset. The climate generally was well suited to fine wool and the Cistercian Order in particular, with its monasteries in remote rural sites, grew wealthy on sheep. So valuable was this commodity to the Cistercians that, in 1193, the Order was compelled to make a gift of the year's clippings towards the ransom of Richard I. By the 13th century, there developed a trade in future wool production, with all the financial risks that involved.

In the Cotswolds, meanwhile, the same period witnessed the first documented attempts at breeding the best sheep for the region. The subject of the pedigree and history of Cotswold sheep remains controversial, so, too, the purposes for which the breed was initially kept, whether for wool or milk. What is clear, however, is that rams were being introduced to the region from elsewhere in the country by the 13th century.

As wool production grew, so did the cottage industry of weaving cloth. The Cotswolds had naturally occurring fuller’s earth to use in the mills where the cloth was washed and cleaned. By 1200, Minchinhampton Common had four such fulling mills alone and, not long afterwards, a cloth called Cotswolds — presumably a local weave — is recorded. That said, the finest woven cloth was produced in Flanders and, during the 13th century, this connection between Flemish traders became firmly established. They were soon joined in the Cotswolds from the 1290s by Italian merchants.

Seeing the profits generated, in 1275 Edward I became the first English king to levy tax on wool exports as a quick means of raising large sums of money. For the remainder of the Middle Ages, the Crown attempted to manage the sale of wool to its own financial advantage and as a tool of economic embargo. It was in symbol of the perceived importance of this national product that at some point in the mid 14th century, during the reign of Edward III, the Lord Chancellor famously took his seat on a woolpack in the House of Lords.

One result of these changes was that the wool trade suddenly became documented in great detail and also that it came under the control of big and vastly wealthy interests, many of them predatory. This shift in the character of the trade was further exaggerated by the impact of the Black Death from 1346. The collapse in population not only emptied the landscape, opening it up to more intensive farming, but it simultaneously left big landowners without the manpower to manage their own estates. A new mercantile class now emerged, of whom Grevel at Chipping Campden is a perfect example.

This change in the structure of the wool trade had an important architectural effect, encouraging investment by wealthy members of the laity in parish churches. It should be said that monasteries, notably Winchcombe, Cirencester and Hailes (Fig 6), continued to build on a lavish scale until the end of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, however, the Reformation has swept away nearly all trace of what they created and the loss is important. These were the institutions that probably set the architectural pace of change and which retained the most important masons.

Patterns of investment in parish churches could be complex and the process of construction prolonged. A wealthy family might simply build a burial chapel and attach it to a church with little regard for the existing fabric. An early example of such a project probably funded by wool is the extraordinary transept of Minchinhampton (Fig 8), which by tradition was constructed by a local landowner, John of Ansley. The design, dated stylistically to the 1330s, evokes the forms of a great church executed in miniature; the transept has a stone roof (rather than a vault), a massive rose window and two richly ornamented tombs of a knight and his lady.

More commonly, however, parishioners contributed to larger collective building works, each contributing as their means allowed. Such projects sometimes focused on the construction of a grand church tower, which might be designed in overt competition with those of neighbouring buildings. Alternatively, they might involve the reconstruction of the nave, which in a parish church was the particular responsibility of the laity. The wool trade created a number of outstanding individual donors, as in the case of John Fortey at Northleach. At his death in 1459, his will included a bequest of £300 towards ‘the new middle aisle… already begun by me’. His brass in the church shows his feet resting on a sheep and a woolpack, clear evidence of the source of his wealth (Fig 7).

The nave of Northleach is a very coherent interior (Fig 5) with restrained detailing and it compares closely in design to the nave of Chipping Campden (although the relative dates of the two are uncertain). Northleach is made imposing by the visual extension of the arcade columns into the clerestory and there are integral stone brackets to support a lost tomb tester. This was almost certainly intended to dignify Fortey’s monument. In technical terms, the design reflects an awareness of early-15th-century buildings in Bristol, Oxford and Coventry. The name of the mason who conceived it, however, is unknown. Might both interiors be based on a lost monastic original?

There were different ways of making money from wool and at different times into the 16th century, taxes and royal policy variously gave advantage to those who produced it; those who acted as intermediaries in its sale; or those who wove it into cloth. In nearly all its forms, however, wool trading involved complex financial transactions of high value over long distances and was intensively regulated both by government bureaucracy and also by specialist guilds.

For example, a local woolman in the late 15th century might contract to assemble a stipulated quantity and quality of wool on behalf of a buyer. The buyer, perhaps a London mercer, then appointed a ‘packer’ to assess the quality of what was supplied. This was weighed and packed into so-called sarplers, bundles of two or three sacks of wool. Each sarpler was then marked with a merchant's mark and taken to the king’s beam for weighing and payment of duty. Only with proof of that payment could wool be legally shipped to the Staple at Calais for sale to foreign merchants.

By 1500, the profits of wool were encouraging the further intensification of sheep farming in the Cotswolds. This in turn encouraged a further burst of building in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Two outstanding church building projects in the Cotswolds deserve individual mention. The new porch and nave (Fig 2) of Cirencester parish church St John the Baptist were collective undertakings of quite exceptional ambition, the former partly funded by a gift of 40 sheep in 1492 by Robert Stone, and the latter begun from 1514. Given how the building commands the market place today, it’s hard to believe that it once stood in the immediate shadow of an even greater abbey church (Fig 3).

No less remarkable is Fairford, Gloucestershire, rebuilt largely through the generosity of John Tame, a wool merchant, who died in 1500, and his son Edmund. In creating this splendid building, Tame was in part seeking to stake Fairford’s claim as a commercial rival to Cirencester. The interior is now famed for its outstanding and coherently planned cycle of stained glass, begun in the first decade of the 16th century and attributed to the King’s Glazier, Bernard Flower (Fig 4).

The magnificent windows of St Mary’s in Fairford are a reminder that architecture was only one aspect of the late-medieval investment in parish churches. Large sums of money could also be paid towards fixtures such as stained glass and rood screens that tend not to survive, as well as for costly vestments or for the stipends of clergy employed to celebrate services. Rich as the architectural legacy of the late Middle Ages remains in the Cotswolds, we only see a shadow of what once existed.

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

Pendennis Headland on Falmouth harbour has spent four centuries as a critical military outpost. A castle was originally built here by Henry VIII to guard against potential invasion by Spain, and it continued that role throughout the 16th century. In the Civil War, the castle — by then significantly expanded — witnessed a sad and gruesome chapter as a bitter, five-month siege saw the Royalists holed up within the walls reduced to grim and desperate measures to avoid starvation, before eventually surrendering to Cromwell's forces. Even as late as the Second World War it was a crucial gun emplacement.

Today, the headland and castle are the site of Falmouth’s coastguard station, a popular tourist attraction, and 70 acres of woods and green spaces that provide a safe haven for all manner of wildlife. It's also the setting for one of the most remarkable homes to be built in Cornwall in recent years: Pendennis House.

Situated on Castle Drive within Pendennis Headland, this 7980sq ft property is a striking mix of modern design and engineering. It's for sale through joint agents Jonathan Cunliffe and Savills, who quote a guide price of £6.95 million.

The house is set just inside the harbour entrance, and enjoys fabulous views of St Anthony lighthouse, St Mawes Castle, the Carrick Roads and Falmouth Bay.

Even getting to the front door is something of an event. The house is entered via a steel bridge walkway, which leads to a double-height reception/dining area.

That in turn opens out onto a large terrace that extends the length of the building.

Behind the hall, a huge, open-plan kitchen/breakfast room is glazed on both sides to make the most of the ever-changing harbour and sea views.

Two good double bedrooms on the ground floor share a large shower room and a study/office or separate sitting room.

An impressive steel staircase leads to the first floor and four further bedrooms, including, at the south end of the house, the principal bedroom suite, which has a dual-aspect bedroom and balcony overlooking Black Rock and the entrance to Falmouth harbour.

There's also private access to a secluded beach below.

Jonathan Cunliffe calls it 'one of the finest properties on the south coast, a spectacular modern masterpiece commanding grandstand views', while Savills note its 'rare combination of immense sense of privacy and unrivalled marine views'.

For sale at £6.95 million — see more details via Savills or Jonathan Cunliffe.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

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Set in stone

British stonemasonry company A. F. Jones specialises in architectural stonework, interiors and heritage conservation. This newly built indoor pool is part of the renovation and extension of a listed property in Surrey, thought to be the first residential house designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, which demanded a carefully considered approach to each intervention.

Heritage windows 


Forming part of an extensive renovation of a Grade I-listed Elizabethan manor, these Heritage System bronze windows were chosen for their fine sightlines and ability to incorporate single-glazed traditional leaded lights secured with saddle bars and copper ties, by Architectural Bronze.

Wonder walls

One of the world’s leading authorities on conserving and re-creating historic wallpapers, Allyson McDermott offers a bespoke wallpaper design and making service, as well as a small range of wallpapers inspired by historic originals. Sudeley Castle Chinese wallpaper can be tailored to fit an entire room or ordered as two sets of four panels, from £2,688 per set.

Stone craft

Known for its British stone expertise, Artorius Faber’s range includes Chedworth English cobbles, made from limestone extracted from its own Dorset quarry. Their natural shape makes them useful for matching original cobbles found in courtyards and rural agricultural areas. They cost from £200 per square metre.

Sculpted decoration

Geoffrey Preston heads a small Devon-based sculpture and design studio known for its fine new decorative plasterwork, including ceilings, wall panels and more. Here, modellers Kate Montagne and Louisa Shorney are seen putting the finishing touches to a clay model before moulding and casting.

Antique inspiration

Marshall Brass operates its own small foundry in Norfolk, hand casting brass fittings using moulds taken from antique patterns. This Lifting handle costs £45.

Foundry find

From its foundry on the South Coast, Beardmore produces fine ironmongery, carrying out engineering, electroplating, traditional casting and hand finishing under one roof. CU1141 cupboard knobs are shown here in the process of being finished in Aged Brass and cost £155 each.

Flagstone flooring

Leading tile and stone specialist Lapicida is renowned for its antique reclaimed flooring. These flagstones cost from £354 per square metre.

Wood works

Traditional joinery specialist Jack Badger is known for crafting wall panelling, interior and exterior doors, flooring, gates, kitchens, staircases and all kinds of period architectural joinery. Here, a craftsman employs a hand-tooling technique called matting to enhance the depth and visual contrast of a carving.

Look up

Stevensons of Norwich offers a full plasterwork design, manufacture, restoration and installation service. Its range of finely detailed plaster mouldings includes the Claydon House, The Saloon small ceiling rose, inspired by the notable 18th-century house in Buckinghamshire. It costs £138.

Traditional paints

Dorset-based Rose of Jericho supplies traditional paints and lime mortars, supporting the conservation of historic buildings with authentic materials and in-depth expertise. It holds an extensive library of samples, collected over 40 years, to assist the identification of suitable products for repair work.

Fine fit

Specialising in bespoke kitchens, cabinetry and furniture, Saint John Architectural Interiors’s portfolio of projects includes this custom-made kitchen in a Grade II*-listed Georgian mansion.

Crafted skill

Johanna Welsh of Traditional Pargetting is admired for her skills in ornamental raised plasterwork, undertaking projects on buildings both old and new from her Suffolk base.

Oak originals

For more than 40 years, Stuart Interiors has specialised in bespoke oak joinery, undertaking detailed interior schemes such as libraries and panelled rooms to staircases and doors, including the Gothic-style tracery door design being carved here.

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

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

Daniel Robbins’s favourite painting
The museum’s curator chooses a beautifully detailed collage

Country-house treasure
John Goodall’s way is barred at Traquair House, Peeblesshire, where the gates were locked when Bonnie Prince Charlie left in 1745

A royal foundation
Aoife Caitríona Lau traces the architectural tale of Oriel College, Oxford, as it marks the 700th anniversary of its foundation

The legacy
Carla Passino delves into the controversy surrounding Elias Ashmole’s great collection, now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum

Stranger things
An emperor’s toothbrush, a lobster telephone and a stuffed cayman — there really were no limits for the eccentric British collectors of yesteryear, finds Claire Jackson

Tender is the light
Blue skies and warm sunshine made the French Riviera a Mecca for artists, reveals Nick Trend

A bear’s necessity
As Winnie-the-Pooh turns 100, Emma Hughes profiles the duo behind the much-loved character

The modern Herbal
Ann Treneman shares remarkable garden remedies from her new book on Nature’s Pharmacy

Luxury
Amie Elizabeth White hails the return of bricks-and-mortar shopping, and her regal picks prove that purple reigns

Interiors
Amelia Thorpe highlights new paints and wallpapers to add a fresh look to any home

London Life
Will Hosie ponders the capital’s standing in the artistic world, seeks out seven of the best properties currently for sale and relives London’s most memorable parties (below), plus our writers have all you need to know this month

Rare charms
The autumn cyclamen is a tiny flower of monumental beauty, suggests Charles Quest-Ritson

Countryside mystery
From knopper to oak-apple and cotton-wool to currant, the gall is a fascinating phenomenon for the consideration of John Wright

Travel
Pamela Goodman marvels at the Feast of the Flying Donkey in the French village of Gonfaron

Arts & antiques
The tentacles of Nicola Turner’s tactile and sustainable sculpture work are reaching across the land, as she tells Carla Passino

Sultans of swing
What did the Ottomans ever do for us? Lucien de Guise explores the many Turkish influences that reached the shores of Britain

And much more

I arranged to join a walk last November with my local University of the Third Age group, an idea that seemed straightforward enough until faced with the real enemy of any day out: the weather. Or rather, its peculiar ability to behave in a way that suggests it resents being forecast.

The Met Office had declared rain at 60% four days earlier, then 70% the day before, then 40% by the morning, only for the sky to appear as blue and smug as a Mediterranean travel brochure. I concluded long ago that the Met Office deserves our sympathy: after Michael Fish reassured the nation in 1987 that no hurricane would arrive, only to have one appear with theatrical force hours later, its confidence has never recovered.

Our walk began at St Katharine Docks, E1, which has nothing to do with St Catherine of Alexandria, St Catherine of Siena. The docks borrowed their name instead from the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, a medieval hospital that originally stood on site, founded by Queen Matilda in 1147. In the early 19th century, the precinct was swept aside to make way for a new commercial site. Thomas Telford designed the basins, Philip Hardwick the warehouses and the result opened in 1828 to mild fanfare and modest success. The narrow entrance prevented the largest ships from entering, a design flaw that feels like the architectural equivalent of buying a wardrobe only to find it won’t fit through the door.

Commercial decline would beset St Katharine as other docks prospered. Bombing in the Second World War accelerated the decay; by 1968, commercial operations ceased. By the 1970s, the area began its second life as a leisure marina, pleasure craft now sitting politely in water once churned by labour. Stepping into the marina today feels like entering a club where membership is implied by proximity to boats with polished teak. Restaurants, offices and apartment buildings line the water with an air of curated ease.

Yet, beneath the refinement lies a scrambled history of demolition, slum clearance and utilitarian warehouses that spoke a more honest architectural language. If authenticity is measured by the scars of survival, St Katharine offers only faint lines. The effect is pleasant enough, although the sense of having entered a well-behaved waterside showroom is hard to ignore. It is an odd moment when one leaves the marina and enters the narrower streets beyond. The shift is immediate. The light changes. The air thickens slightly with the scent of the river rather than the fragrance of artisan coffee. Footsteps echo differently.

For all the talk about respecting heritage, London has a habit of tidying its past until it resembles a postcard. Telford’s warehouses once hummed with labour. Goods were hauled directly from barges through loading doors that now belong to flats with entry systems tucked away from view. One begins to wonder which parts are original and which are the architectural equivalent of cosmetic dentistry; although whether this should be held against modern developers is a matter better left to those who enjoy writing letters to newspapers.

Walking eastward towards Wapping, the landscape contracts. To the naked eye, the river seems to narrow — although not in truth — and the streets begin to show their age. Wapping is a survivor rather than a stage set; a sliver between the Thames and the Highway and a neighbourhood the history of which has not yet been polished into polite silence. Warehouses still stand, converted into flats, but recognisably themselves. The cobbles, uneven in places, tell their stories without fuss.

This was once a world of shipwrights, chandlers and lightermen who did not have the luxury of thinking about heritage. It was also the site of Execution Dock, where pirates were hanged at low tide so the incoming water could wash away their sins. Capt Kidd met his end here in 1701, a detail that the local pub, named after him, displays with cheerful confidence. The sign shows him in a white wig, flanked by illustrations of maritime violence. The river police, the world’s oldest organised force of its kind, began here in 1798 to deal with the endless theft that accompanied the port trade. Smuggling was common, wages were low and temptation immediate. The Thames does not encourage purity of behaviour.

As the dock economy collapsed in the 1960s, Wapping suffered deeply. Jobs vanished, buildings emptied and the district hollowed out. The 1980s brought warehouse conversions and an influx of residents seeking the charm of dockland living. Then came the Murdoch print dispute of 1986, which brought the area to national attention as industrial conflict once more took hold of it. The grit of its heyday remains, lingering among the quiet and contemplative streets.

As in St Katharine Docks, the line between original buildings and their more polished, reconstructed cousins is not always obvious. Yet such is the fate of many cities that outlive their industries: history congeals into atmosphere rather than presence. A walk through these districts reveals a truth about the city. St Katharine Docks presents its best behaviour to visitors. Wapping shows history without apology. One is curated, the other lived. Both are honest in different ways.

At one point during our walk, I thought of J. M. W. Turner — perhaps prompted by the greyness of the Thames or a slant of the autumn light that seemed to struggle with itself. The artist’s ability to paint luminosity from murk is rightly celebrated; poorly acknowledged, however, is his fascination with the body as much as the horizon. He understood that the line between beauty and decay is thin and that both are shaped by tide and time. Wapping, with its mixture of surviving brick, converted warehouses and illicit memory, would likely have amused him.

One suspects he would have found the marina at St Katharine Docks less compelling: too tidy, cautious and determined to behave. Turner enjoyed scenes where the river’s honesty exposed the absurdities of civilisation. He likely would have recognised the beauty in buildings that do not care whether we admire them. Many of Wapping’s structures are blessed with such indifference: they were not designed to please, but to work. Where Italy, my country of origin, builds outward and presents its beauty to the world, London builds inward, hiding it in function.

As we returned to the starting point, I found myself thinking about the river’s effect on time. The tide hides the past twice a day and reveals it again without ceremony. The docks rise, fall, dry and irrigate themselves without care for interpretation. What survives are not the buildings, but the rhythm. Londoners adapt, plan, redevelop and argue. The Thames is a silent witness. Between the marina and the river lies a conversation about memory. One side edits it; the other lets it linger. Somewhere in the middle walks the observer, trying to decide whether the past is best preserved by polish or stubborn endurance.

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

Would you buy a house just because you fell in love with its Aga?

It sounds far-fetched, but then again Aga devotees are numerous, and include the likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver and, of course, Dame Mary Berry, who told Country Life a few years ago that her Aga is 'the heart of the kitchen. I love the warmth and the wonderful welcome. If I had to live without one, I’d loathe it.'

Another superfan is former event rider Lou Swallow, owner of The Moat House, who first set eyes on her dream Aga — a biscuit-cream model — back in 1998.

It was a model that had seen better days and needed some tender loving care, but that was only the start of issues. The Aga sat in a kitchen that periodically flooded when it rained, and was surrounded by a house that was in a semi-derelict state.

Fast forward almost three decades and both the kitchen and the Aga are now immaculate, and for sale at £3 million — but it's taken a lot of work to get to that point. ‘Slowly and gradually Lou renovated the house, but immediately lavished love on the four-oven, coal-fed Aga that is believed to have been in the house since 1940,’ says Lisa Proffitt of the agents Michael Graham.

The Aga has since been converted to gas, thankfully, and despite almost 30 years of living with it, Swallow admits that she has no idea of the temperature and has ‘learned to roll with it... the Aga is very much in charge’.

Just as well, then, that the rest of the house is just as beautiful as its characterful cooker.

Grade II-listed and built on an L-shaped plan, this 18th-century home in Sharnbrook, eight miles from Bedford, has six reception rooms, seven double bedrooms.

There are also glorious gardens, tennis court, three stables and a paddock, as well as various other outbuildings and spaces amid the four acres of land.

The Moat House is for sale through Michael Graham — see more details.

Earlier this year, a single Pokémon card, specifically a Pikachu Illustrator, set a new Guinness World Record when it sold in the USA for $16.5 million, about £12 million.

The buyer was a young venture capitalist, A. J. Scaramucci, who declared that this marked the start of ‘a planetary treasure hunt’, with a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil and a Declaration of Independence manuscript next on his list. He has since bought, for $2 million (about £1.5 million), the Marvel comic in which Iron Man first appeared.

With his Treasure Trove, a venture specialising in ‘alternative assets’, Scaramucci may be more voracious than most, but his approach to collecting is emblematic of our times.

According to reports from Sotheby’s and Christie’s, 21st-century collectors look beyond art (although Impressionist and Modern painters are increasingly on their radar) to Hermès bags, fine wine, jewellery and watches (for the latter, one-third of the bidders at Sotheby’s are under the age of 45).

Some purists may sneer at this magpie penchant, yet is it so different from the past? In the 17th century, John Tradescant the Elder and his son, the Younger, embarked on ‘a planetary treasure hunt’ when they scoured the world looking for the plants, seashells, coins, weapons and stuffed dodo they gathered into their Ark, eventually the basis of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

Victorian translator and businesswoman Lady Charlotte Schreiber was as devoted to collecting fans, board games and playing cards — surely the Pokémon of her time — as to ceramics. Later Victorians were no less eclectic, gathering butterflies and zebras (Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild) or Egyptian antiquities and medical memorabilia (Henry Wellcome).

With a sense of curiosity and wonder, trends and nostalgia remain powerful collecting drivers, even if we’ve traded 1980s vinyls for the relics of a vanished Scotland with which Sir Walter Scott filled Abbotsford. The 17th century had Tulipmania, the Victorians the fern craze; we have trainers and Labubu toys.

Yet collectors now have an additional spur. In an increasingly digital and uniform world, we hunger for the tangible and unique — none more so than the youngest generations. According to a survey this year by insurers NFU Mutual, an extraordinary 71% of Gen Z call themselves collectors. Whether they seek Monets or trading cards, first-edition books or comics, their passion can only be a good thing and, with the curiosities of one age often becoming the treasures of another, it would be a rash curator who wagered against Pikachu joining Lady Charlotte’s cards in the British Museum.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Cool Britannia ruled the airwaves (and the column inches) in the 1990s.

As the last decade of the 20th century dawned, the country, poised between a gritty past and the promise and fears of the new millennium, emerged triumphant to lead the world in art, design, fashion, music and pop culture, as a forthcoming Tate Britain exhibition, ‘The 90s; Art and Fashion’ reveals.

The creative energy that coursed through Britain in those years had many facets and faces. Here are some of my favourite moments that I believe best demonstrate this, from the show and beyond:

1. The supermodels When British Vogue asked Peter Lindbergh to photograph the woman of the 1990s, he couldn’t settle on one and chose five: models Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz and Christy Turlington. That January 1990 cover sanctioned their global fame, crystallising the era of the supermodel. Then, three years later, a waifish British girl appeared on a Calvin Klein advertisement and defined a new beauty ideal, in contrast to the polished glamour of the previous decade. With her undone, ‘heroin chic’ look, Kate Moss became, perhaps more than any other, the face of the 1990s
2. Sir Steve McQueen In his 1993 silent film, Bear, a faceoff between two men that has both erotic and aggressive undertones, the video artist and film director put the spotlight on the left behind, those that were seemingly not part of the Cool Britannia wave, but who in that decade eventually found some visibility through the work of Sir Steve and others such as Chris Ofili and Keith Piper

3. Lee Alexander McQueen: Nothing sent a clearer signal about Britain’s creative eminence than the country’s most rebellious, provocative, avant-garde designer taking the helm at a historic French couture house, Givenchy, in 1996

4. The YBAs When the Royal Academy staged an exhibition of more than 100 pieces from Charles Saatchi’s contemporary-art collection in 1997, it caused a stir. There was blood, graphic nudity, even a portrait of murderer Myra Hindley — and picket lines of vocal protesters outside Burlington House. Yet, the Young British Artists featured in that show, whether Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin or Jenny Saville, would go on to dominate the international art scene

5. Geri Halliwell In the decade of club culture and Britpop, the Spice Girl singer encapsulated the spirit of the times when she turned up at the 1997 Brit Award in a Union Flag mini dress. A year later, the frock — a homemade affair, as Halliwell and her sister had stitched a Union Flag teatowel on a black Gucci garment — would become the most expensive pop-star outfit sold at auction, although the record has since been topped

‘The 90s; Art and Fashion’ is at Tate Britain, London, from October 8–February 14, 2027.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

When Clive Aslet, former Editor of Country Life, wrote a book called The Last Country Houses in 1982, the future of the English country house looked bleak. It had been eight years since the landmark exhibition at the V&A Museum, ‘The Destruction of the Country House’, which had told the stories of many houses lost to fire, neglect and the wrecking ball. It was a time when a resurgence of the English country-house tradition would have been unthinkable.

It was a couple of years later, in 1984, that John Martin Robinson brought out a book called The Latest Country Houses, covering the period since the end of the Second World War. By then, there were enough green shoots to suggest that the English country house was not dead and buried after all, with the latest examples suggesting the start of a new revival. More recent books on the subject, such as Alan Powers’s The Twentieth Century House in Britain (2004) and David Watkin’s The Classical Country House (2010), both illustrated with photographs from the Country Life archive, have concluded with chapters on new country houses, showing that their spirit is now alive and well in the 21st century.

Yet, despite the impressive number built in the past 40 years, there remains a certain nervousness around the building of new country houses. It is something to do with old-fashioned English taste that has always been suspicious of anything that looks too new. I even feel it myself, loving the worn, lived-in look that is so indelibly associated with the English style of decoration. Surely, one of the things that makes country houses so lovely is their patina of age.

Another question that often comes up is why build a new house when there are so many lovely old buildings in need of restoration? Without passionate owners to love and care for these houses, what future do they have? Again, I find myself agreeing with this and, indeed, much of my work as an architect has involved breathing new life into homes through gentle re-ordering and sensitive repair.

All of this may make it surprising that the main focus of my architectural career to date has been in designing new country houses. To some extent, this has been inherited; my grandfather was the architect Raymond Erith (1904–73), who worked on many country houses, both old and new, in the post-war years. His career was unusual in that he had rejected the Modern Movement and practiced traditional architecture at a time when this was very unfashionable. In 1962, he had taken on a pupil, Quinlan Terry, and, in time, they formed the partnership Erith and Terry Architects. After my grandfather’s death, Terry continued the practice and by the mid 1980s had become the foremost country-house architect working in Britain.

After studying architecture in Edinburgh, I joined the Erith and Terry office in the mid 1990s, by which time the practice was working on projects all over Britain and also abroad. Country houses were at the core of everything, employing a language of traditional detail and construction that had been refined over many years since my grandfather’s days. Having spent seven years training in this office, in 2003 I left to join Adam Architecture, becoming a director the following year and gradually starting to build up a portfolio of my own. Since then, over the past 20 years, it has included many country houses.

What, then, has been the motivation of my clients who have chosen to commission new country houses? What has tipped the balance for them away from a restoration project and towards the seemingly daunting prospect of starting from scratch? The reasons are not universal, but, over the years, I have seen that there are definitely a few common trends.

Firstly, the owners might have a connection or fondness for a particular site. We are currently building a house in a valley where one of my clients used to play as a child and realised it was their favourite place on earth and, in another case, we built a new house next door to where the owner’s mother lived so that they could be close at hand. Sites with strong personal connections such as these are irreplaceable and signify a family finding its place in the world and committing to the long-term management of the surrounding land.

Next, I often find that clients have lived at different times in old houses and, as much as they may have loved them, they realise how inflexible they can be. The nicest houses will be listed, at the very least at Grade II, but possibly at Grade II* or Grade I. This means that any alterations need to be approved by a conservation officer and, at the higher designation, also by an inspector from Historic England. Anyone with experience of going through this process will know that it can be incredibly frustrating and inconsistent. Something as apparently straightforward as moving a kitchen from a draughty wing into one of the larger rooms with a higher ceiling and a better view can be a major battle.

Similarly, it can be a tussle to put bathrooms into a house where there are not nearly enough to go around or even remove indifferent Victorian or Edwardian extensions that spoil the outside. ‘These are an important part of the social history of the house,’ says the conservation officer, apparently blind to their ugliness. There are no such problems with a new house, where the layout can be planned around modern living with the kitchen at its heart and as many bathrooms as bedrooms.

Then there is the question of running costs. An old house with single-glazed windows and solid walls is likely to come with an astronomical heating bill. Upgrading insulation, even if desirable, may be resisted by a conservation officer and will involve a significant cost. The same goes for the fuel source: out goes the old oil tank and in comes the new geothermal heating system, all a big step forward, but with a massive price tag attached. Halfway through a restoration project, the realisation begins to sink in: old houses are unpredictable money pits. On the subject of cost, too, everything that forms part of the restoration will be subject to VAT. The costs of building a new house, by contrast, are VAT exempt.

When you put all these factors together, the appetite for restoring an old house can start to dissipate and the benefits of a new one take on a sharper focus. The last piece of the jigsaw puzzle is to find someone to design it: the one thing you definitely don’t want is for a new house to look not quite right when it is finished. This was more difficult in, say, the 1960s, when architects had turned their backs on the past and there was a wilful desire to reject traditional forms, no matter how attractive they might be, but there are now quite a few architects with the training and experience to design country houses to a high standard.

Once the decision to build a new home has been made, a world of possibilities opens up about its design. Some of my clients have brought with them a lifelong interest in architecture and have very definite views about styles, perhaps even down to having a favourite decade of the 18th century. Others are keen to explore a range of options and to be guided along the way, when a key part of the design process is for us to go and look at other houses that might serve as inspiration. Little by little, the design starts to take on a character all of its own, shaped by the site and by the owners’ requirements and taste. When approached with care in every detail, there is no reason why a new house, given a bit of time, should not look every bit as good as the old houses that we all admire.

This is the key thing: the importance of time. I would be the first to admit that a brand-new country house, when first completed, is likely to look much too new. Clients over the years have asked my advice: should we smear manure or yoghurt over the brickwork to accelerate the weathering process or choose a more faded colour palette for the paintwork? My advice is always the same: have patience.

The great thing about new traditional buildings is that, although they might look uncomfortably new at first, it will not be long before the effects of weather start to show. Within a year or two, a stone or brick house will have begun to soften and, as the plants flesh out in the flowerbeds around the house and trees begin to grow, the appearance of newness will start to fade. Within five years, the more exposed parts of the house — the roof, chimneys and hard landscaping — will no longer look new at all and within 10 years the house will be entirely established within its landscape. It continues to improve and, in only 20 years, you would not even know that it was a recently built structure.

About 10 years ago, I made this point in a talk to a group of students and concluded that traditional architects really ought to wait a few years before photographing and publishing their work. A new house will look so much better, I said, if you leave a bit of time for it to bed in. Then, a couple of years ago, I was approached by a commissioning editor, Philip Reeser, about writing a book on country houses and realised that this was the opportunity for which I had been waiting. Happily, the owners all agreed to me doing it and, with the architectural photographer Peter Dixon, I spent a few weeks last year taking new photographs of 12 different houses. Without exception, the owners were extremely welcoming; indeed, it has been wonderful how many of my former clients are now counted as friends. Meanwhile, I wrote down my thoughts on the design of each house, all of which have now made it into the book as a guide to anyone contemplating a similar journey.

Ultimately, the building of new country houses is a statement of confidence: of putting down roots for this and future generations, investing in building well, not needing to follow the latest trends and being safe in the knowledge that time will take care of the rest. It is, of course, also a creative endeavour: since time immemorial, building has been a way to leave one’s mark on the world. For most clients, it is immensely enjoyable to work not only with an architect, but also a landscape designer and an interior decorator, collaborating with the common goal of making something as beautiful as possible. For me, it has been hugely rewarding not only to be so involved in the design and construction of new country houses, but to see over many years how they take their place in a tradition that stretches back deep in time and will, I hope, also have a long future.

‘The Romance of Classicism’ by George Saumarez Smith is published by Rizzoli (£47.95).

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

The Love Language of Flowers jewellery collection by Cece Jewellery transforms the forgotten tradition of floriography into wearable art.

For the uninitiated (and the unromantic among you), floriography is the language of flowers — the act of assigning particular meanings, emotions or messages to different flowers. The word itself comes from 'flori', meaning 'flower', and '-ography', meaning 'writing'.

It became especially fashionable in Victorian Britain, when flowers were used to communicate sentiments that might have been considered too intimate or improper to say out loud. A bouquet could therefore function like a coded letter.

However, the Victorians did not invent the tradition; instead they inherited and enthusiastically expanded it from the French. The pivotal publication was Le langage des fleurs, published in Paris in 1819, under the pseudonym Charlotte de La Tour. The RHS describes it as the first popular book on the subject.

Spanning charms, pendants, necklaces and rings, Cece Jewellery has brought delicate blooms to life with hand-painted champlevé enamel, intricate hand-engraving and diamonds set in 18-carat gold.

Flowers include roses for love, irises representing courage, wild daisies for freedom and wisteria conveying wisdom, each once a declaration of sentiment or celebration of character — although nobody will blame you for gifting or sporting them all.

Jewellery from £2,400. Visit the Cece Jewellery website for more information.

Nicholas Leke, the fourth and last Earl of Scarsdale (c. 1682-1736), led a reasonably blessed life. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Derby, and as an envoy to Vienna. And, in 1707, he inherited some land after his elder brother died without issue.

By 1724, he'd tired of the house sitting on it and, wanting to leave a lasting impression on his ancestral plot, decided to build something better. It was said that he asked for something grander and ever more impressive than Chatsworth.

The 4th Earl commissioned Francis Smith of Warwick — who designed nearby Derby Cathedral — to build this new mansion. Sutton Scarsdale Hall.

The resulting structure was definitely imposing. Standing three stories high and nine bays wide, it loomed large over the land from a lofty ridge. Constructed from biscuit-coloured ashlar from Rang Quarry, a mile away, it featured work by some of the era's most refined craftspeople.

These included master carver Edward Poynton of Nottingham, who dressed the stonework with exquisitely hand-carved pillars and pilasters, topped with fine Corinthian capitals. And artists Albert Artari and Francesco Vassalli from Italy, who laboured over the fine stucco work in many of the rooms, including the grand entrance hall. 

Needless to say, this all came at a cost and the extravagance was said to have inspired William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. When the Earl died in 1736, aged just 53, he left behind no heir and a mountain of unpaid debts. 

The house was sold off and changed hands numerous times in the following centuries, eventually landing in the hands of Richard Arkwright, the son of Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the Spinning Jenny, in 1820. It still belonged to the Arkwright family when Country Life was invited to visit in 1918.

The ensuing article, published a year later, did not mention any problems, but it is clear from the photographs — reproduced here — that something was amiss. Hardly any photographs of the interiors were taken and, in those that were, there are just a few pieces of oddly-placed furniture. In photographs of the outside, the lawn and beds look unkempt. The photographer, out of choice or under instruction, also went to great lengths to conceal the fact that the gardens no longer overlooked peaceful green fields. Sutton Scarsdale Hall was now surrounded by coal fields.

In June of that same year, the preliminary notice of the sale of the whole estate was announced in the press. By October, the 70-house village, the Arkwright Arms pub and more than 340 acres of land (not including mineral rights) had been auctioned off. The hall was sold afterwards to a consortium of local businessmen.

This group wasted no time in calling in the asset strippers. If something could be sold, it was — even the roof, which left Artari and Vassalli’s presumably unsalvageable, exquisite work exposed to the elements.

In 1946, Sir Osbert Sitwell, a local landowner, purchased the decaying remains to stop them from being entirely demolished. They were duly awarded Grade-I listing in 1951. Sir Osbert, realising the enormity of the cost of preservation, then gifted the hall to the Ministry of Public, Building and Works (now English Heritage). 

In 1970, a second article by Country Life helped to publicise the hall's plight and secure some much-needed funding.

It is still possible to visit the bones of Sutton Scarsdale. The once crumbling walls are now safe, but the roof and windows have never been replaced. It's also possible to visit parts of the hall in a less exposed setting. Sections of three of the principle rooms are on permanent display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a fourth, pine-panelled one lives in its entirety in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Originally acquired by notorious newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, it then sold to a Hollywood production company — who used it as a backdrop in Kitty — before making its way into the Huntington’s collection.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.