Country Life

Daphne (née du Maurier; 1907–89) was the daughter of actor and manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel Beaumont. A novelist and playwright, she achieved the most success with Rebecca, which was immediately popular and has never gone out of p

THE Scottish Parliament has voted to make mountain hares a protected species and ban unlicensed cullings of the animals. A late amendment to the Animals and Wildlife Bill last week was passed by 60 votes to 19. The amendment was tabled by Green MSP A

Hurry to your nearest peat bog, damp heath or moor, where these golden spires illuminate their surroundings like little amber traffic lights from now until September. With pyramidal clusters of star-shaped flowers and flattened leaf fans, the county

IF you allow that Yorkshire is God’s own county, then the Howardian Hills must surely constitute the divinity’s chosen estate within it. This is a supremely hospitable landscape of Jurassic limestone—the only Jurassic landscape in the North to be des

Water rushes over the cascade below the Dam Head Bridge on the estate of Bretton Hall, West Yorkshire. The 500-acre grounds near Wakefield are now home to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The COUNTRY LIFE Picture Library contains 120 years' worth of ph

Rebecca Stott is a writer, professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and a broadcaster on BBC Radio 4’s Point of View. Her memoir, In the Days of Rain, won the 2017 Costa Biography Award IT is hard not to see the

EAGLES soar above the rugged peaks of the Benmore estate, on the Isle of Mull, surveying forested glens thick with deer, the graceful expanse of an 18th-century sporting lodge and a sinuous coastline where seals and otters hunt for their prey, keepin

IN the early 1980s, the former Conservative Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath was searching for a country house. His requirement was for something Georgian with a view of the sea, a concession to his passion for sailing. The house had to be small enoug

AN old rhyming riddle went thus: ‘On a summer’s day, in sultry weather, Five brethren were born together. Two had beards and two had none, And the other had but half a one’. The answer: the flower of the dog rose. The earliest attribution is in the 1

THERE’S something alive in my fridge. I’m keeping it in a glass jar. It squats right at the back like Philip Larkin’s toad work, an inch of greyish, aerated goo. I don’t mind admitting that it’s making me nervous. The creature in question is a starte

I HAVE an addiction. I scythe grass. Every year, I scrabble around for a bit of meadow that is, putatively, ‘too steep’ for the tractor-towed mower, where the corners are a ‘bit tight’, and only scything by hand will do. This year, my eyes narrowed o

THE colours in a much-loved painting of Trafalgar Square inspired the scheme for Guy Goodfellow’s living room above his showroom and design studio in Chelsea. ‘Its mix of yellow and mauve colours reminded me that I had a big panel, which I’d bought m

AS with the proverbial bus, you can wait forever for the right country house to come along and then three appear all at once. It bodes well for the market this summer that three exceptional houses— a Georgian masterpiece, a rare 17th-century manor an

THE moment I saw this place I fell in love with it. This was somewhere that I had lived with in my imagination,’ says William Christie. ‘Finally, I had found the place where I would make a home and a garden.’ Looking with him at a photograph that had

TODAY, Horikiri is a district in downtown Tokyo, but it was a hamlet on the fringe of the city in 1857 when Hiroshige made it the subject of one of his ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’ series. Aptly for an artist of the floating world, his print sho

SOMETHING that gets no mention in the arguments about the suitability of statues celebrating Edward Colston, slave trader and philanthropist, and other contentious historical figures, is their artistic merit—or otherwise. Given enough digging, almost

GLADYS HYNES was a committed feminist, suffragist, pacifist and supporter of the Irish Republican movement, whose work engaged with some of the most pressing and controversial issues of her time. She exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Venice Biennal

THE incorrupt corpse of King Edmund of East Anglia is said to have been so holy that its hair and nails needed trimming. The task was undertaken annually by a widow called Oswyn from early medieval Bury St Edmunds. She would place the clippings in a

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