MY history with the Norfolk Broads can be politely accounted as 'uneven'. It commences with Arthur Ransome and the perils of a middle-class childhood. You never escape the reading. If your parents don't direct you, school does. Consequently, I ended up reading Ransome's Coot Club, in which Dick and Dorothea Callum visit the Norfolk Broads and encounter the titular Coot Club, a gang of local children formed to protect birds and their nests from egg collectors and other disturbances. Children protecting birds? I signed. Signed hard.
Only a year or so later, I was invited to go boating on the Broads. Coot Club for real! However, the auguries were never good. The invitation was kind, but from a family on the other side of my parents' divorce and freighted with perturbation. Whereas I expected a wooden yachta red-sailed whenry-we traversed the waters in a synthetic, motorised cabin cruiser. There was no tranquillity on the Broads, only the relentless traffic of plastic boats up and down marked, diesel-iridescent waterways and the speed limit of 5mph noted in breach rather than in observance. At night in my 'bunk', our small cruiser rocked and yawed in the wash of larger cruisers, which I learned to call dismissively 'gin palaces'.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 24, 2024 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 24, 2024 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Put some graphite in your pencil
Once used for daubing sheep, graphite went on to become as valuable as gold and wrote Keswick's place in history. Harry Pearson inhales that freshly sharpened-pencil smell
Dulce et decorum est
Michael Sandle is the Wilfred Owen of art, with his deeply felt sense of the futility of violence. John McEwen traces the career of this extraordinary artist ahead of his 88th birthday
Heaven is a place on earth
For the women of the Bloomsbury group, their country gardens were places of refuge, reflection and inspiration, as well as a means of keeping loved ones close by, discovers Deborah Nicholls-Lee
A haunt of ancient peace - The gardens at Iford Manor, near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire The home of the Cartwright-Hignett family
After recent renovations, this masterpiece of Harold Peto's garden-making must be counted one of the finest gardens in England
It's the plants, stupid
I WON my first prize for gardening when I was nine years old at prep school. My grandmother was delighted-it was she who had sent me the seeds of godetia, eschscholtzia and Virginia stock that secured my victory.
Pretty as a picture
The proliferation of honey-coloured stone cottages is part of what makes the Cotswolds so beguiling. Here, we pick some of our favourites currently on the market
How golden was my valley
These four magnificent Cotswold properties enjoy splendid views of hill and dale
Mere moth or merveille du jour?
Moths might live in the shadows of their more flamboyant butterfly counterparts, but some have equally artistic names, thanks to a 'golden' group, discovers Peter Marren
The magnificent seven
The Mars Badminton Horse Trials, the oldest competition of its kind in the world, celebrates its 75th anniversary this weekend. Kate Green chooses seven heroic winners in its history
Angels in the house
Winged creatures, robed figures and celestial bodies are under threat in a rural church. Jo Caird speaks to the conservators working to save northern Europe's most complete Romanesque wall paintings