VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, we are halfway through October now, and the countryside has settled into the deep, golden hush that only autumn can bring. The mornings are sharp with frost, and the leaves are falling in earnest—not the gentle drift of early October, but a steady cascade of gold and russet and bronze. The hedgerows are stripped of their berries, the … Continue reading A Prayer for Mid-October
BY ALLISON LEE Autumn is a busy time on the smallholding. It’s time to plan ahead for the winter months and complete all essential jobs before the weather turns. Autumn is one of my favourite times of year. Because the weather is unpredictable, it can feel like the end of summer rather than the beginning of winter. With animals and a smallholding to keep, I … Continue reading Autumn on the Smallholding
BY ED ANDERSON With national elections and political drama in Spain it may be easy for rural issues to get pushed to the edges of the national debate but as luck would have it, (what we are christening) the Great Sheep Run from Trashumancia Foundation will be taking place on 25th October in the heart of Madrid. From not existing 33 years ago before naturalist … Continue reading The Great Sheep Run
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Civilised England, what remains of it, makes a sound, and it does not. The sound it makes is weather, the clink of china, the murmur of a nation waiting its turn, and, when pushed past all endurance, the sharp, righteous crack of incivility, delivered once and never unnecessarily repeated. The sound it does not make is the horn. Watch a country road. … Continue reading The Quietest Virtue
BY ANDREW MILNE Holborn and St Pancras is a strange place and not indicative of the wider country. I worked there once and indeed was a student up the road at the polytechnic in Kentish Town. Disconcerted at the bizarre by-election as the dust settles, squires should take heart from several little-reported facts. First: In a constituency with 70,000 registered voters just 12,000 turned out … Continue reading A Walk Along High Holborn
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, October is upon us, and the countryside has begun its slow turn towards winter. The mornings are cool now, and there is a mist in the valley that lingers until the sun burns it away. The hedgerows are heavy with berries—haws and hips and sloes—and the swallows have gone, leaving the skies to the rooks and the redwings. … Continue reading A Prayer for Early October
BY ALLISON LEE The famous annual Masham Sheep Fair takes place in Masham Market Square and around the town on the last weekend of September. In 2026, it was held on 26 and 27 September, and I went along to see what it was all about. The weather was a perfect blend of sunshine and a gentle breeze, with not a drop of rain in … Continue reading Masham Sheep Fair
BY BERT BURNETT The Conservatives’ vow to scrap Natural England and the Environment Agency and bring their powers back under direct ministerial control has set the cat among the pigeons at Defra. Victoria Atkins, the shadow Defra secretary, announced at the NFU breakfast briefing at the party conference that a Tory government would “restructure Defra completely” and abolish both quangos as the first stage of … Continue reading Quangos Out, Accountability In
BY ALLISON LEE Goathland is a picturesque moorland village in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park. It attracts visitors from all over because it is renowned for being a filming location for ITV’s Heartbeat and the Harry Potter films. Goathland is about nine miles from the coastal town of Whitby and roughly an hour’s drive from York. It can be reached by the North Yorkshire … Continue reading Goathland
BY ALEXIA JAMES Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (pictured), Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature no less, awakes at 3am in a cold sweat. The nightmare is always the same: a pub. A pint of Adnams. A black Labrador. A fox hunt in the background. She reaches for her phone and drafts a conference speech. It was a quiet Monday in Liverpool when the Labour Party gathered to … Continue reading Beware the Black Lab
BY PHILIP WALLING ‘I think you should try wearing shoes with stiffer soles so that you don’t have to bend your toes too much’ was the advice from my doctor when I consulted him about my painful big toe joint. I remember the Misses Moffat, ancient sisters (or so they seemed at the time) who lived in Corner House, and whose grandfather had once been … Continue reading The Last of the Cloggers
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There are books that inform, books that provoke, and books that fundamentally rearrange the furniture of one’s mind. Ian Mitchell’s Russia and the Rule of Law, Volume I: Status Unbound (862–1856) belongs emphatically to the third category. It is a monumental, eccentric, often maddening, and utterly indispensable work of historical synthesis that dares to ask the largest possible question, how does law … Continue reading A Magnificent Obsession: Ian Mitchell’s Russia and the Rule of Law
BY LIZ HODGKINSON After the Piddington outcry comes the Diddington debacle. No, not for migrants this time, but for something equally unwelcome to locals: a vast solar farm. Plans have recently been approved to build a solar farm which will spread across 111 acres of farmland, equivalent to 63 football pitches, just outside this tiny Cambridgeshire village. Diddington is a one-street, dead-end hamlet just off … Continue reading After Piddington Comes Diddington
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I trust that you are well. I have been thinking, this week, about the friends who have walked beside us on the road. Not the acquaintances we nod to at the shop, nor the names in our address books that we never call—but the true friends, the ones who know us as we are and love us still. … Continue reading A Prayer for Friends Old and New
BY ALLISON LEE Anyone who owns animals knows the problem of filling drinking troughs and buckets all too well. Time is usually of the essence, so we leave the hose in the container while we move on to the next job, trying not to forget to switch it off when the bucket or trough is full. Inevitably, we get distracted, forget about the hose, and … Continue reading Saving Water, One Bucket at a Time
BY SEAN WALSH The government’s response to the invasion of frustrated young men from sexually regressive and misogynistic cultures—men who are acculturated to casual violence and the cheapening of human life—is to insist that the incoming violence must be distributed “fairly” across the whole country. That is not quite true. The instinctive response is not policy-related at all, but rather to gather some words—fair, share, … Continue reading Leftism’s Abstract Principle Problem
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!
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
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
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
