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 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 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
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
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
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?
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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
