Dame Jilly Cooper grew up in the countryside of Yorkshire. Apart from a brief spell in Camberley during the war, where she amused herself feeding “wartime carrots” to the Staff College horses and learning the names of wild flowers with her mother, she grew up around Ilkley, where her family…
“I’m very keen on Portuguese water dogs, Boxers of course. Oh, and I love lurchers and whippets. And the Hungarian pumi is a rather fabulous herding dog but rare in this country.” One senses Clare Balding’s list of favourite dog breeds is long. “Every dog I meet is my favourite,”…
“Around here, we’ve got various trusts looking after nature. Well this is the Vinnie Trust,” grins Vinnie Jones, arms stretched out towards the 150 acres of Sussex he calls home. He may be smiling broadly, but Jones is deadly serious. “All this is for my grandchildren. It is so important…
Farmer Will Young is making the world a better place, one million or so social media followers at a time, with the help of his Tasmanian girlfriend, Jessie Wynter, plus two donkeys, two emus, many sheep, some pigs, goats, alpacas, more sheep and his family. Oh, and sheep – did…
The Rt Hon Sir Malcolm Rifkind needs little introduction as the former Defence then Foreign Secretary who went on to chair the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament that oversees the UK’s security services. Yet any fear I had of feeling intimidated is soon dispelled by that familiar, affable soft…
The GWCT is headquartered just outside the charming Georgian town of Fordingbridge, untouched by Starbucks or Costa. Once this backwater might have been appropriate for the GWCT but today the organisation finds itself deep in the mid-current of conservation and environment politics. In her 21 years as chief executive, Teresa…
A punk rocker is nothing without his anger, and Feargal Sharkey, former lead singer of The Undertones, is furious. Sitting beside the sparkling River Lea at Amwell Magna Fishery, with a cuckoo distantly keeping the beat, it is hard to find anything to be even vaguely irritated about, let alone…
It is not every day that you take a bite from a police dog. But this is exactly what I am doing thanks to the persuasive skills of the Countess Bathurst, the chatelaine of Cirencester Park, Gloucestershire. She’s described by the Duchess of Rutland in her popular podcast Duchess as…
THE Reverend Dr Jamie Hawkey, Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey and a Chaplain to HM The King, goes to put the kettle on. Through the windows of his sitting room I can see a magnolia tree in a walled garden, where a narrow lawn occupies a space where the chapel…
In the welcoming front room of Captain Ian Farquhar’s Gloucestershire home, a lit wood burner casts a mellow patina of light over a lifetime of memorabilia: paintings, silver foxes, photographs, stud books and poems. They have been accumulated over a family century of breeding and hunting hounds, to which Farquhar…
