COMPRISING ancient rocks from Cambrian and Precambrian times that were uplifted to form a mountain chain during the later Caledonian orogeny, the Highlands and Islands of Scotland lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs f

DRIVING around Britain, from top to bottom or side to side, the appearance of our villages changes dramatically. Leaving the moors and flower-studded banks of Devon and Cornwall for the pale-green hills of Dorset, the farmhouses, cottages, barns and

AQUINTESSENTIALLY medieval landscape, the Low Weald lies north of the Wealden greensand (sandstone of a greenish colour). It forms a broad, low-lying clay horseshoe shape—dominated by the Lower Cretaceous Weald Clay formation—around the older rocks o

The gardens at Dalemain, Penrith, CumbriaThe home of Mr and Mrs Robert Hasell-McCosh THERE cannot be many gardens in England where you have a fair chance of seeing red squirrels or a dark-green sleeping dragon—even, perhaps, a wild goose resting in t

IN 1821, John Constable wrote a love letter to his native landscape, the fields and meadows along the River Stour, which forms the boundary between Essex and Suffolk. It is undemonstrative country, low lying and offering little by way of drama, but h

AVAST mass of granite, the Cornubian Batholith, underpins much of the toe of England, manifesting itself in five areas (or plutons) of fierce, jagged outcrops on the bleak expanses of Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor, around the Cornish towns of Redruth and

THE great white carvings—mostly horses, but also rude men, memorial crosses, Edward VII’s ceremonial crown and a kiwi carved by disgruntled New Zealand soldiers awaiting repatriation—startling amid a rolling, pale-green land-scape glimpsed from a tra

WHAT two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?’ asked the Revd Sydney Smith. The Anglican cleric, whose fondness for a jug of ale was almost as strong as his distaste for gravy, was speaking rhetorically, of course. For beer, like beef,

FURTHER to Eleanor Doughty’s excellent article on the 10 most popular house names, may I submit One’s Cottage for consideration for the top of the list (‘My kingdom for The Cottage’, April 10)? Fifteen years ago, we lived in Virginia Water with a mor

HISTORICALLY consumed only in times of famine, local names reflect the British disdain for wild garlic—Devil’s posey, onion stinkers, stinking Jenny, snake’s food and more. Garlic (the cultivated form, at least) gained a little traction in Victorian

STILL life came to Britain on a boat, sailing over the North Sea with the 17th-century artists who left their native Netherlands to make themselves a home and a name on these shores. The explosion of the Dutch merchant economy had turned fruit and fl

THE history of the remote, rugged landscape of north-west Wales is largely bound up with what went on underground more than 500 million years ago, when the slate that formed from mudstones on the ancient sea floor in the Cambrian, Ordovician and Silu

East London Cloth, 7a, Vyner Street, E2 ON weekday mornings after the school run, Gemma Moulton, the founder of East London Cloth, cuts through Victoria Park and over Regent’s Canal to Vyner Street to open her studio for business. East London Cloth w

Big knickers. The opposite of a G-string. Somewhere you could also stash a few pieces of fruit, if the occasion called for it. A certain lingering dampness in the air. The type of weather that tricks you into leaving your coat at home, then soaks you

CRISPIN HOLBOROW of Savills Private Office (07967 555511) has hit the ground running at the start of the spring selling season with the simultaneous launch onto the market of three historic country estates, each of which has survived the upheavals of

‘I grew up in the wider area of Capel-y-ffin, surrounded by a similar landscape of rolling green hills, so this drawing takes me back to my childhood and the summers when everyone would literally roll up their sleeves and the hay would be harvested.

WHERE in Britain can you find Ginnicks, Turks, Caterpillars, Thorns and Bulldogs? The answer, of course, is the Isles of Scilly (never, please, the Scilly Isles). These are the nicknames given to Scillonians who live on the five inhabited islands: St

1 Herdwick sheep are associated with which national park? 2 The Bannau Brycheiniog mountain range is also known as what? 3 Which is the UK’s largest national park? 4 Which designated National Landscape (AONB) did Constable make famous? 5 In which nat

THE soft, yellowy limestone that immediately says ‘Cotswolds’ is, confusingly, only one element of a complex layering of Jurassic rock that developed over a 70 million-year period and stretches in a north-easterly spine from the Dorset coast to Yorks

Olivia Laing (Picador, £20) LIKE some of the best blooms, this is a hybrid: part memoir, part commonplace book. It stems from the author and her poet husband’s acquisition of a house in Suffolk, as covid began to rampage. Acknowledging an air of sick

BRITISH spectators’ first exposure to horse trials—or three-day eventing—was at Aldershot in Hampshire during the 1948 Olympics. The sport, comprising dressage, cross-country and showjumping phases, had previously been dismissed as a niche occupation

ENGLISH monarchs once used portraiture to fashion their public image. Now, an exhibition in The King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace shows how, for the past 100 years, photography has been the preferred tool for shaping perceptions of the Royal Family

I RECENTLY met a property developer who has converted some disused agricultural barns on the Duke of Bedford’s farmland [at Millbrook, Bedfordshire],’ relates Lisa Proffitt of Michael Graham. ‘On day one of the project, they heard noises and thought

Sarah is a barrister and joint head of the business crime team at 5 St Andrew’s Hill, specialising in complex financial crime, asset recovery and the financial elements of divorce. Last year, she fulfilled her lifelong ambition to compete in motorspo

TURNS out the staff of COUNTRY LIFE can be quite interesting when we want to be. Editor Mark Hedges can currently be heard extolling the virtues of the countryside in Winkworth’s latest Property Exchange podcast, presented by Anne Ashworth. ‘It smell