VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, Hallowe’en is upon us, and the countryside has settled into that strange, expectant hush that comes at the very end of October. The clocks have gone back, most of the leaves have fallen, and the evenings draw in early now. This is the night when the year turns from autumn to winter, the night when—as our ancestors believed—the … Continue reading A Halloween Prayer
BY PAUL T HORGAN Looking at the disturbances across the Channel, commentators are worried the same may happen here, and soon. Perhaps they are right, but perhaps not. The weather here is too bad for regular outbreaks of civil disorder. In fact it was a torrential downpour that did it for the Chartists in 1848 while the rest of Europe fell to revolutionaries. There is … Continue reading A Very British Uprising
BY BERT BURNETT The Moral High Ground Is Easy When Your Hare Count Is Zero There is one certainty that will emerge from the new falconry licensing regime for mountain hares in Scotland, and it has nothing to do with principle. No licence will be granted to fly a hawk at a hare on land owned by a conservation NGO or a rewilding estate. Not … Continue reading No Hares, No Licence
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a moment, familiar to any man who has ordered a gin and tonic in a fashionable bar, when the soul recoils. The barman, a young fellow whose moustache suggests he has never done a day’s physical labour and whose tattoo suggests he believes himself oppressed, reaches for a bottle of something pink. He calls it gin. He calls it ‘botanical’. … Continue reading The Last Redoubt of Human Civilisation
BY IAN MITCHELL In praise of unearned income The world owes to Darwin some ground-breaking insights into the history of life on earth. Mankind and its environment, he argued, was not a creation of God’s but the product of many millions of years’ evolution, starting from much simpler life forms. The theme of this book is how Darwin changed our view of history. No longer … Continue reading Darwin, Son of Capitalism
BY ALEX STORY The children looked so young. The pictures were only taken a few years ago. They lived with us then. Chaos and life danced together, naturally, in harmony. They are gone now. Silence rules. When we speak, mostly over devices, and if time allows, their voices are deeper, intimating a gradual discovery of the world as it is. When we see them, time … Continue reading Life
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a strip of concrete in a yard that slopes so sharply that the word ‘pitch’ feels like a courtesy. It runs uphill. It has grooves in it, scars from some forgotten building project, and when the plastic ball with the seam lands on one, it spits up at your throat like it has taken personal offence. The stumps are plastic. … Continue reading The Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian
BY ALEXIA JAMES Take a look at this nonsense from Cwis Packham’s mate, Dale Vince: Dale Vince wants you to believe he is a brave truth-teller standing athwart the water industry, but a line-by-line look at his claims shows a man who has mastered the art of the ideological gobshite: take a real problem, inflate the numbers, conflate categories, and shout it loudly enough that … Continue reading Dale Vince and the 25% Fiction
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 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
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
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 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
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 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
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
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
