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 DAVID CAMPBELL Back in the days when secondary school still demanded actual reading and the accompanying book reports, the literary canon was imposed upon us with all the subtlety of a blunt instrument: Steinbeck, Orwell, Melville, Wilde, Miller, Chaucer, Dickens, Brontë, Austen, and — looming over the lot like a Shakespearean ghost — the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare himself. Among these compulsory … Continue reading An American Runs with the Bulls
BY IAN MITCHELL In the course of a long and thoughtful review of my book Russia and the Rule of Law, Dom Wightman wrote in Country Squire Magazine: “This is a monumental, eccentric, often maddening, and utterly indispensable work of historical synthesis that dares to ask the largest possible question: how does law deal with violence?” That question is key. How do peaceable folk deal … Continue reading Law and Violence
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
CSM EDITORIAL Sir Jim Ratcliffe cannot run a football club. Manchester United have been a shambles under his stewardship, and no amount of petrochemical billions has bought him a clue about how to pick a manager or a sporting director. On that, the whole country is agreed. But on Britain, he is not wrong. Ratcliffe says the country is “on the slide.” He says high … Continue reading A Mandate of None
BY SEAN WALSH The discussion about machine intelligence is ramping up in the US as it starts to dawn on people that AI might be planning to destroy the planet. As with all things US, the argument is settling on political lines. Yes, really. President Trump has had it with people treating Artificial Intelligence with less deference than it deserves. He has solved the problem … Continue reading A Trillion Abaci
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I’ve been thinking, this week, about the turning of the year. The mornings are cooler now, and there is a mist in the valley that lingers until noon. The hedgerows are heavy with berries—haws and hips and sloes—and the swallows are gathering on the wires, preparing for their long journey south. The leaves are beginning to turn, not … Continue reading A Prayer for Autumn
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 ALEX STORY Leo the Parisien drew a very large, peaceful crowd in Paris at the weekend. He entered Notre Dame, the first pontiff to do so since the fire engulfed the Cathedral in 2019. 800,000 lined the streets of the French capital to hear his message. Among other things, the Pope reminded Macron, France’s deeply unpopular president, that the right to life was the … Continue reading Crashing Through the Floor
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 ROGER WATSON I have been bingeing on the US comedy series 30 Rock, written by and starring Tina Fey alongside Alec Baldwin (whatever became of him?), and I am loving it. I used to catch the occasional episode on long-haul flights, but the series is currently on Netflix, so I get a few episodes in every night—that is, provided Mrs Watson is not in … Continue reading When I Met JJ Abrams
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!
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
