Game Zone for Beginners: What New Users Should Know Before Starting
Game Zone continues to bring multiple digital gaming formats into one online platform, giving beginners access to categories that range from Filipino card games and Bingo to casino titles, slots, specialty games, arcade-style formats, and provider-based selections such as Jili. For new users, however, the range of available options also means there are several details to understand before starting. Game categories can have different rules, … Continue reading Game Zone for Beginners: What New Users Should Know Before Starting
Not Another One!
BY BERT BURNETT Scotland’s environmental agency NatureScot has unveiled a new twenty year strategy to restore its native wildcats, with the ambition of seeing populations recover and thrive by 2045. The strategy brings together 26 organisations to coordinate conservation efforts for one of Scotland’s most threatened native species. The plans include restoring and reconnecting habitat, establishing new wildcat populations, reducing hybridisation with domestic cats and … Continue reading Not Another One!
In Service of the Republic
BY THE EDITOR In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah presents itself as a sober, technocratic intervention in India’s policy discourse. The authors, both esteemed former senior civil servants and professional economists, argue that India’s economic trajectory, particularly the marked deceleration after 2011, reflects a failure of institutional capacity rather than intent. Their diagnosis is … Continue reading In Service of the Republic
First Encounter With Reality
BY ALEX STORY Dreams flee as reality makes an entrance. Piddington, a small village, the quintessence of old England, a few miles northeast of Oxford, was unceremoniously yanked out of its idyll by a manager bent on its destruction. Time, it seemed, had left the place alone. No change was needed. Its 358 population, nestled in the middle of nowhere, had no understandable desire to … Continue reading First Encounter With Reality
The Ban on Cool Burning is an Act of Faith, Not Science
CSM EDITORIAL The admission slips out with increasing regularity from those responsible for prohibiting rotational cool burning on England’s uplands. Yes, they concede, it may take years for rewetted land to reach a state where it is naturally protected from wildfire. The honesty is welcome, if somewhat late. What they omit is that any such transition remains entirely speculative. There is no evidence base demonstrating … Continue reading The Ban on Cool Burning is an Act of Faith, Not Science
A Prayer for the Struggling Farmer
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I have been thinking, this week, about the ones who are finding it hard to be patient. The farmers who have sown and waited and watched, and whose harvest has not come. The ones who lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering how they will pay the bills. The ones whose hands are calloused and whose hearts … Continue reading A Prayer for the Struggling Farmer
The Walled Garden
BY ALLISON LEE A walled garden has existed at Duncombe Park in Helmsley since 1758. It was built to supply fruit and vegetables for the Feversham family; however, after World War One, the garden’s role as a source of food for the family ended. After the last leaseholder left the property, it fell into dereliction until a local practice nurse, Alison Ticehurst, recognised its potential … Continue reading The Walled Garden
Ascot: Green Today, Gone Tomorrow?
BY LIZZIE PEAKE When planning policy spirals, what’s left of our green spaces? Labour’s planning reforms are the most radical in a generation. The revised National Planning Policy Framework, which came into force in August 2026, introduces “automatic planning permission” around station hubs and weakens the ability of local authorities to refuse development. The new “grey belt” designation opens up swathes of green belt land … Continue reading Ascot: Green Today, Gone Tomorrow?
Laffer’s Trojan Horse
BY ED ANDERSON Only the deluded could think letting the Chinese into your computer systems and steel industry is a good idea. September 11th obviously has a lot of important anniversaries. For the United States, it’s the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre; for Catalonia, it is the fall of Barcelona in 1714; and for Chile, it was the day their democracy was bombed … Continue reading Laffer’s Trojan Horse
RSPB Greed?
BY NICK PEARCE The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has introduced a ticket-only parking restriction at its Snettisham reserve in Norfolk for the Wader Spectacular days. Visitors must now book a parking space in advance on the RSPB website and pay a fee—including paid-up members. The Wader Spectacular is a natural phenomenon where tens of thousands of waders swirl in the skies … Continue reading RSPB Greed?
Bring Back the Cock
BY PAVITRA SHAH Right. Let us dispense with the pleasantries. Trafalgar Square—Nelson’s column, the lions, the fountains, the National Gallery—has just been graced with what can only be described as a giant, blue, bronze participation trophy. Lady In Blue, by New York artist Tschabalala Self, is the sixteenth artwork to squat on the Fourth Plinth since 1998. It is also, without question, the most tediously, grindingly, … Continue reading Bring Back the Cock
A Kingdom for a Bookshop
BY LIZ HODGKINSON In the early 1960s, two small rural towns 160 miles apart faced similar problems. Their young people were going to university and never returning, leaving the places denuded of their brightest and best. Today, these two towns, Hay-on-Wye (main photograph) on the Welsh border, and St Neots in Cambridgeshire, my own hometown, have very different outcomes. Hay is internationally known as the … Continue reading A Kingdom for a Bookshop
A Prayer for Harvest
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I have been thinking, this week, about the harvest. Not just the harvest of the fields—the wheat and the barley, the oats and the rye—but the harvest of our lives. The seeds we have sown in spring, the labour we have offered through the long days of summer, now coming to fruition in the golden weeks of autumn. There … Continue reading A Prayer for Harvest
Raving in the Nave
BY SEAN WALSH The London nightclub Fabric (which temporarily closed in 2016 after just a handful of drug-related deaths) has agreed a four-year contract with St Paul’s Cathedral (consecrated to the worship of God in 604 AD). Why? This is how the club’s owner sees things: Over the next four years, we’ll present a broad range of artists from across the contemporary music landscape, with … Continue reading Raving in the Nave
Sakura
BY ALLISON LEE When an invitation arrived in my inbox to attend the Sakura Spa Launch at Gisborough Hall, I was happy to accept. It had been many years since I last visited the Hall, and I was intrigued to see how things had changed. Gisborough Hall is a country house retreat set a short distance from the coast and tucked away in the beautiful … Continue reading Sakura
In Equities We Should Trust
CITY GRUMP How many times over the last thirty or so years have you read an interview with some public figure who, when asked what they do with their money, happily replies with, “Well, my best investment has always been in my house”? Not anymore. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, domestic property is Donald Ducked. Indeed, in real terms, … Continue reading In Equities We Should Trust
Digital Magna Carta
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN The British establishment’s resistance to artificial intelligence in governance masquerades, at best, as principled conservatism, a defence of the constituency surgery, the ministerial red box, the human touch. It is, in truth, a defence of administrative fiefdoms. The civil service, the silent colossus of Whitehall, has become the obstacle to the democratic will it was designed to serve. The answer is not … Continue reading Digital Magna Carta
The Bison That Never Was
BY BERT BURNETT We are being told that European bison have been missing from Britain for 6,000 years and that bringing them back is essential for nature recovery. This claim is false. The European bison, also called the wisent, has never been recorded in Britain. The University of York has stated this clearly: “The wisent has never been recorded from Britain. The last bison to … Continue reading The Bison That Never Was
Have Spain´s Wildfire Communities Already Been Forgotten?
BY ED ANDERSON If you were to step off at Manuela Malasaña metro in Móstoles in July, you´d be greeted by a typical Madrid satellite town. A Basic Fit here, a baking Plaza del Sol there and a smattering of bars that thankfully won´t be changing you 5 euros a caña. Mercifully, there is not an instagrammer in sight. However, hidden away here and in … Continue reading Have Spain´s Wildfire Communities Already Been Forgotten?
The Tattoo
BY ALEX STORY In Tarzo, a small village a few miles from Vittorio Veneto, nestled in the Prosecco hills of Northern Italy, there is a lake. Laghi di Revine is its name. Its waters, resting helplessly under the sun, are hot. The birds, at night so vocal, rest in stunned silence during the day. All is slow and still. Those who know seek shade or, better, … Continue reading The Tattoo