VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I trust this Sunday finds you in a reflective mood, perhaps with the rain pattering gently against the windowpane and the scent of damp earth rising from the garden. There is a particular honesty to a rainy Sunday, isn’t there? It asks nothing of us but to be still. No urgent work in the fields, no pressing repairs on … Continue reading A Prayer for Rainy Sundays
BY PAUL T HORGAN Anything connected with Peter Mandelson seems to inevitably send shockwaves around Westminster and beyond. This is what Mandelson does. As Labour spin-doctor in the 1990s, his job was to disrupt the media landscape and reshape it to an approximation of his design. He did this by commoditising news. After Black Wednesday in 1992, simply everyone in the media seems to have … Continue reading The Mandelson Question
BY ALLISON LEE Colne Valley Museum – a Grade II listed building – is housed in four cottages built in the 1840s by the Pearsons, a family of independent cloth manufacturers whose relatives still live in Golcar today. These weavers’ cottages, named ‘Spring Rock’ by James and Sally Pearson, were built into the steep hillside, with the traditional entrance for the lower rooms (like our modern … Continue reading Colne Valley Museum
BY ROGER WATSON There was a time, not so long ago, when crossing the Humber felt like an occasion. You approached the Humber Bridge with a certain ceremony, slowed your pace, fumbled for coins (or later, a card), and exchanged a nod, sometimes a word, with the attendant in the booth. It was not merely a crossing; it was a small, ritualised pause between the … Continue reading A Toll Tale
BY ED ANDERSON “We are facing a crisis.” The words of Victor Manuel Martín López, head of Eurocaja Rural, were blunt on Tuesday at El Español’s ‘Wake Up Spain’ on Spain’s economic future and uncertainty. It was certainly a different note being struck by Julián Conthe (Director General of Commercial and Economic Security in Spain) last week at the Fundación Alternativas event ‘La entrada en … Continue reading Disaster or Opportunity? Spanish Farming´s New Reality
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a particular quality to a Saturday morning in the Surrey villages. It is not peace, exactly. It is the absence of the City. The silence left behind after the 23.42 from Waterloo has taken its last wretched soul back from the big smoke. For the man in question – a commuter, a husband, a prisoner of the screens – that … Continue reading The Flymo
Dear Sirs, I write to offer my warmest congratulations on Alexia James’s splendidly clear-eyed article, “Bison in Blean? A £1.45M Vanity Project in the Woods”. At last, someone has had the courage to say what every sensible countryman has been muttering into his pint: that a fenced wood full of foreign megafauna proves nothing except that a little money and less logic makes for a … Continue reading Blean’s Dodgy Bison Fences
BY ALEXIA JAMES There are moments when the world of conservation seems to have lost all grip on common sense. And then there is the Kent Wildlife Trust’s bison project – a £1,450,000 lesson in stating the bleeding obvious. Let us be clear from the outset. The Trust, armed with a small fortune from the Post Code Lottery, has spent the best part of one … Continue reading Bison in Blean? A £1.45M Vanity Project in the Woods
CSM EDITORIAL Labour’s Inheritance Reforms Are an Act of Rural Cleansing There is a certain kind of politician who views the British countryside not as the nation’s larder or the keeper of its ancient traditions, but as a spreadsheet of undrawn capital gains. For seventeen months, we in the rural community warned Westminster that Labour’s ‘Family Farm Tax’ would drive a dagger through the heart … Continue reading The Ploughshare and the Guillotine
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I trust this Sunday finds you well, perhaps with the last of the Easter chocolate still hidden away in the pantry and the spring sunshine warming the windowsills. There is a particular gentleness to the Sunday after Easter, isn’t there? The grand celebrations have faded, the family have returned to their homes, and the world settles back into its … Continue reading Sunday Prayer
BY ALLISON LEE Coxwold is a picturesque village in North Yorkshire, not far from where I live, and I have visited it on numerous occasions. Although small—there are fewer than 300 inhabitants and around 100 dwellings—it has a lot to offer visitors. Many of the houses in the village still retain their garths: long strips of land behind each property. (A little bird tells me the … Continue reading Coxwold
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN I have never much liked the Elgin Marbles debate. Not because it is unimportant, but because it is the wrong battlefield. It is a quarrel about beauty, about national prestige, about who paid for the boat. Lord Elgin, whatever his faults, did not tear the pediments from the Parthenon while holding a gun to Athena’s head. He took them with a dodgy permit from an … Continue reading Of Gods, Dust, and the Limits of Imperial Curatorship
BY ALEXIA JAMES Jeena Raghavan is a rising force in contemporary art, and her name – which fittingly means “to live” – already says much about her work. In a world where so many artists are shaped by formal education and traditional career paths, Raghavan stands out as a refreshing anomaly. Her story begins unconventionally. Born in London and raised in Bangalore from the age … Continue reading Jeena Raghavan
BY STEPHEN PAX LEONARD Reggie’s uncle, the Earl of Bitchfield, had become a backwoodsman. His days were numbered. The last of the remaining hereditary peers were on the chopping block. Centuries of skilful statecraft, high intrigue, prudence and inter-generational wisdom had been replaced by the get-rich-quick, affluent tom-toms and a motley crew of DEI merchants. Oh, the joys of ‘inclusion’. The doors had been opened … Continue reading Changing of the Guard
BY CALUM CAMPBELL The Scottish Government has made peatland restoration a cornerstone of its climate change strategy. Through the NatureScot Peatland ACTION team, and in close partnership with the Cairngorms National Park and the Loch Lomond & Trossachs National Park, a major programme of landscape-scale intervention is underway. With over 20% of Scotland’s land area covered by peat, the stated goals are ambitious: improve water … Continue reading The Peatland Paradox: When Restoration Becomes Destruction
BY JACK WATSON For less than the price of a couple of cocktails (£7 / 25 East Caribbean dollars), you can step into 44 acres of Caribbean adventure, history, and jaw-dropping beauty at Pigeon Island National Park. During my college trip to St. Lucia, we discovered Pigeon Island—and it ended up being the highlight of our two weeks. This national park packs in 18th-century British fort … Continue reading Pigeon Island: A National Treasure
BY SEAN WALSH The Devil’s science? The philosophers who believe there are no beliefs. Paul Feyerabend did not think consciousness is a thing. “Is our basic conception of human cognition and agency yet another myth, moderately useful in the past perhaps, yet false at edge or core?” – Paul M. Churchland Paul Feyerabend Eliminative materialists are the philosophers who claim that consciousness does not exist. This seems … Continue reading Eliminative Materialism
BY PAUL T HORGAN The ‘Guilty Men’ narrative in the Britain of July 1940 was a necessary myth. The state had given itself such massive powers in the wake of the Dunkirk evacuation as to be a revolution from above, so a superficially credible legend had to be created, as is the case for all revolutions, to justify the legal appropriation of so many traditional liberties. The rapid German … Continue reading Ponzi, Panzer, and Plunder
BY ANDREW MILNE ‘What is Truth?’ Pontius Pilate said at the trial of Christ. Pilate appears in all four gospels. Traditionally, the church has expressed a certain sympathy for the hapless Prefect of Judea. What is Truth, indeed? The question is apposite to our own time when truth is widely regarded as subjective. This means truth can be whatever you want it to be. What is … Continue reading The Way and the Truth
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, I trust this Easter Sunday finds you in reflective spirits, perhaps with the first light of dawn breaking over the fields and the promise of spring stirring in the hedgerows. There is something profoundly hopeful about an Easter morning, isn’t there? The daffodils are nodding their golden heads, the lambs are testing unsteady legs in the meadows, and the … Continue reading A Prayer for Easter Sunday
