Country House

Having retired last summer I have impressed my wife with my skills at hunter-gathering. The freezer is respectably full of pheasants and the odd brace of partridges, plus a large…

I have found some recipes for mead but they seem to vary enormously and are rather complicated. Have you a simple one?

I am trying to find the origin and meaning of the toast "Here's mud in your eye." I have been to a few parties where this toast has been used…

Over the past months we have shot 20 grey squirrels as they have been causing extensive damage to our young sycamores and beeches. Yet other squirrels just come and take…

There are stirrings in the hedgerows as the peak season for first pheasant and then partridge hatching gets under way. With this comes the biggest dilemma in low-ground wild game…

I may be a dyed-in the wool country bumpkin, but sometimes I envy the urban gardener. Life on a town-centre vegetable plot is so pest-free.

There is a widespread myth that to be a successful trapper you need to have inherited generations of skill, learnt at your father’s knee. My father, by whom I was…

I read that Sir John Mortimer has a glass of champagne a day and describes it as “penicillin for the soul”. What a wonderful idea. As I’d only have a…

On a shoot recently I was given a snifter of 1997 orange gin, a great change from sloe gin. I would like to have a go at making this. Have…