BY ALLISON LEE We have an abundance of birdlife on the smallholding, and I enjoy watching a variety of finches, wrens, blue tits, sparrows, warblers, and woodpeckers feeding regularly at the feeding station. However, it wasn’t until our recent move to North Yorkshire that I was lucky enough to spot woodpeckers on a regular basis—and they are a joy to watch, so entertaining! The great … Continue reading Nature’s Drummers
BY JOHN MUSGRAVE ‘For Frodo,’ the young boy shouted as the three of us pelted down a farm track, hounds baying ahead of us. ‘For Frodo’ – it’s a line from Lord of the Rings. We were out hunting after the ban came in. This Monday, 17th February, marks the 20th anniversary of the infamous Hunting Act cutting in. On this day the Hard Left … Continue reading The Road to Rivendell
BY ALEX STORY Sicily, Goethe once wrote, is the key to everything. Italy, then, is the door which that key opens. The country is peppered with towns and cities filled with historic treasures. Amazingly, given her tumultuous history, much of Italy’s inheritance, artistic, architectural and civic, lives and breathes. In Trieste a two-millennium old theatre sits comfortably next to a Mussolini era municipal building. Turn … Continue reading Travelling in Italy
CSM EDITORIAL Let’s face it, Keir Starmer and his haircut would just about pass muster as transport secretary in Thatcher’s 1987 government. But he’s the only half-competent (whilst dreadfully slippery) player in a side that should have been permanently relegated in 2019. You’ll find more competent characters in the cheap offices in a Slough business park. When Wes ‘Dead-End’ Streeting is Labour’s go-to rescuer, you … Continue reading The Generally Lacklustre Election, 2024
CSM STAFF WRITER Dear Readers, the Editorial Team has decided that there is a lack of long-form, quality monologues out there from writers and experts. So they have come up with CSM Monologues. The CSM Monologues page can be accessed here. The note from the Editors is below: The Editor, Dom Wightman, has kicked off this new element of the Country Squire Magazine website with … Continue reading Country Squire Monologues
CSM EDITORIAL The 2015 ban in Mexico on wild animals in circuses was urged by animal rights activists who declared that circuses were all places of animal exploitation and therefore cruel. Many in Mexico agreed with them without examining the issue in any detail. The Mexican Government enacted a ban, giving the circuses up to a year to find alternative homes for their animals, including … Continue reading The Tragedy of Feelings Over Facts
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, Happy Easter to You and Your nearest and dearest. Easter is the greatest of all Christian feasts, and the happy season of Eastertide lasts 50 days from Easter Day until the Feast of Pentecost. St Gregory of Nazianzus said that Easter was ‘like the sun among the stars’ of the other festivals. It is the heart of the … Continue reading Happy Easter
BY STEWART SLATER “There was never an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?” It is fair to say that the Times was not a fan of George IV, and it is reasonable to assume that, when the day comes, coverage of Her Majesty’s death will … Continue reading Love, Respect or Fear?
CSM EDITORIAL Dear Readers, Happy New Year to you all. So, what can you expect from Team Country Squire this year? Well, we have just soft-launched Country Squire India which some of the UK team are already involved in. With the assistance of our editorial adviser, Dr Kaustav Bhattacharyya in Bangalore, we have put together an impressive list of contributors and shall be holding some … Continue reading The Year Ahead
Madhav Das Nalapat (born 1950) aka M D Nalapat is India’s first Professor of Geopolitics and the UNESCO Peace Chair at Manipal University, where he is Vice-Chair of Manipal Advanced Research Group and Director of the Department of Geopolitics & International Relations. A journalist and a former Editor of The Times of India and of Mathrubhumi, he is currently the Editorial Director of ITV Network … Continue reading The MD Nalapat Interview
BY QUENTIN PIGG Haunting the Prime Minister throughout the corona crisis have been the ghosts of crises past: Blair, Brown and May. Voices one would only risk hearing at after dinner speeches were it not for a media all too ready to resurrect them. We could add Major to this list, but it seems he is watching the cricket more nowadays – his carping from … Continue reading Backseat Drivers
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN The advantage of church closures this year during lockdowns has been the emergence of Masses and other church services online. “How can virtual services be a positive?” I hear you traditionalists and conservatives chuntering. Well, first up, you can be as rude as you like about a priest’s sermon real-time, without having to put up with the death stares from the blue … Continue reading Render Unto Caesar
CSM EDITORIAL After many years of losing popular votes and taking a shellacking in the culture wars, the US election was a great opportunity for the Left in the UK to at last celebrate some kind of a victory. With the erratic Trump in the White House barracked by Covid and its multiple stresses, facing a contrarian media, sounding off about bleach and drowning in … Continue reading Brexit Preceded Trump
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I am hoping that You are well and healthy. As We march through autumn I pray that You have found the time to pray and ponder. I hope that You do not worry too much or get downcast as We see less of the sun. This week I would like to focus on family. Likely You have seen … Continue reading A Prayer for Family
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN DW: Good afternoon. Thanks for reaching out. Anti: You are scum of the earth! How can you sleep at night and be Editor of that hunt-supporting rag? DW: Hold your horses. I look at hunting as a neutral. I’ve never been on a hunt, although I was once dragged out on the Yorkshire moors in winter for beagling as part of a … Continue reading Chat with an Anti
BY QUENTIN PIGG It is one of life’s great mysteries: how much of the BBC’s anti-Britishness is due to Marxist subversion and how much is merely the perfunctory prattishness of liberals? Probably it is more of the latter but with enough of the former to ensure that incidents like the recent Proms controversy will continue to rile the average TV licence payer. Despite their latest … Continue reading The Centrist Provocateur
BY JAMES BARRINGTON Asking what methods of wildlife management anti-hunting or anti-shooting groups actually support, as opposed to the activities they are keen to condemn, should always be part of any debate surrounding field sports. The usual response is either a deafening silence or an idealistic ‘leave it all to nature’. Practical examples of how these alternative models of the countryside might look tend to … Continue reading The Blindness of Zealots
BY JIM WEBSTER It must be admitted that we were ready for this rain. As it was we’d neatly ricocheted from one extreme to another. This winter was ridiculously wet. We never had flooding as such up here in Cumbria, but there was standing water where the water table was now higher than ground level. So if we were ever going to get any spring … Continue reading Glorious Rain
BY THE EDITOR After you’ve mowed the grass, trimmed the hedges, marked your children’s verbal reasoning papers, walked the dogs, weeded the flowerbeds, polished the silver, dusted your books, done some office work, run out of things to put on the bonfire, struggled through the thoughts of Scruton with a claret, and watched all there is worth watching on Netflix and Amazon Prime, what the … Continue reading Lockdown Babies
BY THE GODS Dear World, So sorry that you have been inflicted with the Coronavirus but someone had to do something to alter the way you have been misbehaving of late: You were created in the image of the gods – not to act and judge like us. What right do you have to invent “wokeness”? That false prophet Thunberg, the Watermelon Communist, was getting … Continue reading Letter from The Gods
