Country Life 11-Jan-2023

HISTORY should not be forgotten,’ said The Princess Royal in her address to the Oxford Farming Conference last week, her point being that many of the methods of the past —rotational farming; eating seasonally and locally; foraging; the use of native breeds—have value and relevance today and, arguably, have never been needed more. The annual conference was labelled ‘The Future of Farming’, a title that The Princess suggested might be used every year, so often do farming’s goalposts change through inflation, energy and feed costs, animal diseases, trade agreements, war and the commitment to net zero by 2050. ‘The producer cannot always bear the cost,’ she observed. Also at the conference, Tim Smit, co-founder of the Eden Project, advocated a return to ‘legacy planting’ of heritage fruit trees and vegetables. For…

A bridge too far for rare gulls KITTIWAKE nests have been removed from a bridge in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, after concerns that the birds’ excrement was damaging the structure. Birdwatchers have said that the decision to remove the nests from the Grade II-listed Spa Bridge could leave hundreds of the gulls homeless, as they often return to the same place and build their nests on top of previous ones. The council has also added bird-deterrent gel to the bridge, which gives off a UV light that the kittiwakes see as a flame and, therefore, avoid. North Yorkshire County Council has said that it has consulted with Natural England, which agreed that the plan would not harm the birds’ habitat. The black-legged kittiwake—a small type of gull—is on the conservation ‘red list’, meaning…

Quiz of the week 1) What animal is Falco tinnunculus? 2) Who set William Blake’s The Lamb to music? 3) Which is England’s highest chalk sea cliff? 4) Who designed the Albert Memorial in London’s Kensington Gardens? 5) In Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes, what animal is Mrs Hackee? Word of the week Noodledom (noun) Foolishness; a collection of foolish people 100 years ago in January 13, 1923 WITHIN half an hour’s train ride from Charing Cross, I came across the home of ‘the oldest known species of mammal now living on the face of the earth’, to quote an authority on the subject. The spot was within a few hundred yards of White Lodge, in Richmond Park, and the illustrious creature was the badger. If you are not sufficiently impressed by this revelation, let me add…

Letter of the week Learn the lesson JOHN GOODALL’S fine series on England’s country houses concluded with the moving attempt to save Harewood House by taking it into National Trust ownership in 1947 (The English home, 1939–2022, December 28, 2022). At the time, such houses were considered beyond purposeful use, hopelessly expensive and past saving. A few became schools and hotels, but 600 had been demolished in the half century to 1970, rising to a rate of one a week. The conservation movement in earnest was born. The same issue of COUNTRY LIFE recorded sales of English country houses in 2022, those lucky to survive the grim 20th century. The prices fetched by the 15 houses featured varied from £8 million to £17 million, all to private buyers. Clearly, there is no such…

SLOWLY, but increasingly surely, Rishi Sunak is pulling back on the forays of his predecessors as he seeks to re-establish his party as a credible force in British politics. He may not succeed, but he has brought a sense of reality to the Government. It isn’t, of course, a quick fix. The spoilers are still in the wings. As the veteran right-wing MP David Davis warned last week, there remains a tightly knit group of MPs, blinded by their unwavering commitment to Boris Johnson, who can brook no other leader. They overlap with the wider set of Conservatives who see any attempt to improve relationships with the rest of Europe as heresy, even when it is clearly a vital component of Britain’s economic resurgence. Managing this obstructive element will take a…

IN November last year, St Mark’s Basilica in Venice was fenced off with a glass barrier intended to protect it from the waters of the lagoon that periodically inundate the interior. The barrier is a reminder of the existential threat—intensified by global warming—that the sea poses to the extraordinary cultural riches of Venice. Among the many international bodies that strive to protect this inheritance is Venice in Peril, founded in 1971. Its most recent project—documented in a short film (visit www.veniceinperil.org) —has been the £400,000 restoration of the funeral monument to the celebrated sculptor Antonio Canova in the friars’ church of Santa Maria Gloriosa. By happy coincidence, last year was the 200th anniversary of his death. Born in 1757, Canova was the son of a stonecutter and began his professional career…